Change and Innovation in Higher
Education:
A glimpse to what’s been happening
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Post 236
On
the verge of common affairs in education today, many great minds of the end of
20th Century and the emerging ones of the 21st Century
conceptualize higher education quite differently if compared to what renowned
educational champions and professional -50 years ago- could envision of what
education entails today on the second decade of the 21st Century. The
new gurus on education now predict and anticipate substantial changes,
novelties, permutations, trends, and tendencies in what we understand as higher
education and what is to come in our near and far future. Would we meet those
challenges with the actual models of education that we hold on and whose
rationale we take for granted?
As a higher education professional,
who started taking part in significative changes in how learning can be
fostered, I have come to witness, participate in, or facilitate some of those
changes among my students. One of those meaningful changes I came to be part of
was linked to hybrid and blended education. The Internet has come to exercise a
powerful influence on how learners access information; thus, learning can be
mediated by means of data bases accessed via computer, web pages with
educational content, documents available to be downloaded, and so on enriching
the experience all learners have. The construction of student knowledge is no
longer just happening in F2F classroom sessions but in virtual spaces where
instructors and learners can interact with one another synchronously or
asynchronously. We faculty members cannot shrug our shoulders showing
indifference towards these major and dramatic changes in the way our students
are learning nowadays.
Another dramatic innovation in higher
education I have been witnessing and am willing to facilitate more is learning
through flipped classrooms. “The flipped classroom refers to a model of
learning that rearranges how time is spent both in and out of class to shift
the ownership of learning from the educators to the students” (NMC Horizon Project, 2013) . Personally, I have
implemented this sort of approach with literature students at Universidad
Latina in Costa Rica allowing them to manage the content of the course to suit
their studying needs and available time to work on their projects. “Rather than
the teacher using class time to lecture to students and dispense information,
that work is done by each student after class, and could take the form of
watching video lectures, listening to podcasts, perusing enhanced e-book content,
collaborating with their peers in online communities, and more” (NMC Horizon Project, 2013) . My literature
students are provided with projects (literary analyses) to be developed after
class time and that are enhanced with online content to explore, videos, multimedia,
and so on. Though it took me around a year to fully implement it and modify
course content to become flipped and though I do not want to seem boisterous at
my students’ achievements, their results (grades obtained by pupils and
learning gained by them) has been more than rewarding.
Back in 2008 I came to witness the
introduction of MOOCs for those people who were interested in furthering their learning
and education but lacked the resources to pay for tuitions. Udacity.Com was the
very first webpage I heard of that offered Massive Open Online Courses for any
learner willing to continue working on his/her education. When Sebastian Thrun
started Udacity at Stanford University, he wanted to “democratize” education
since he believed that “education should be free, accessible for all,
everywhere and any time” (VOA Voice of America, 2012) . Bearing in mind the
my lumpy understanding of MOOCs at that time, I tried to take part of these
courses, which originally “were conceptualized as the next evolution of
networked learning” (NMC Horizon Project, 2013) . MOOCs are now
courses that I encourage my students to enroll, especially the ones in ELT, my
field of work. Having participated in the Shaping
the Way we Teach MOOCs by the University of Oregon, the adoption of this
way for higher education may take less than a year, and a year to start seeing
real results. It gives me the creeps just to think of the fact that there are
faculty members who cannot still see the value of this change in education and
networking.
Sir Ken Robinson, while participating
in a series of presentations hosted by Ted Talks (Robinson, 2010) , addressed the
audience on the need for a revolution in education. Among his most interesting
considerations regarding learning, he pointed out that though education systems
are being worked on in spite of the fact they are now broken models (Robinson, 2010) . If life is no linear
but rather organic, education should be thought in the very same way, and that
is why a revolution is needed to meet the needs of 21st Century
learners. If we do not want these obsolete broken models to mutiny on us and
our students, innovation is necessary; “challenging what we take for granted” (Robinson, 2010) nowadays is also a
must because our ideas of education “need to meet the circumstances” (Robinson, 2010) of what we are
currently facing in higher education.
References
NMC Horizon Project. (2013). NMC Horizon Project Short List
2013 Higher Education Edition.
Robinson,
K. (2010). Bring on the Learning Revolution. Retrieved from
http://www.tedx.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution
VOA
Voice of America. (2012, March 21). Getting a Free Education, in Huge Online
Classes. Retrieved from SlideShare.Com:
http://www.slideshare.net/jonacuso/se-edmassiveopenonlinecourses
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Post a Comment