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ICTO Social Sciences – UvA

Tag Archives: UvA

How students use ICTs in Higher Education

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I will not quickly forget when Nynke Bos* declared in 2009: “Smart phone ownership has grown to 50% in one year amongst our students.” A mouthwatering statistic for an ICT in education policy maker! Something you can bite into and use to anticipate future service and teaching/learning opportunities. When she started working at the Faculty of Humanities, and planned to hold the same survey amongst her ‘new’ students, I jumped on that band wagon and suggested we hold it amongst the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences as well. And as a good idea often does, it ballooned into a survey amongst all students of the University of Amsterdam.

Behold, the result of our toils (with a huge thanks to everyone who helped us on this endeavor!): “How do students use ICTs  in Higher Education?“.

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Learning analytics, the (social) student feedback loop

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I think the increased attention for learning analytics is valid. A lot of learning and teaching taking place today takes place in digital environments. It is implemented more structurally, which means patterns of behavior may have more meaning as they have increased context. Yes we should be leveraging the vast amount of data to better tailor education. But unless I missed something, I am afraid this year’s Horizon Report focusses heavily on what the educational institute can do with the data, and what the teachers can do with the data, and less so (or not at all) on what the students can do with the data.

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The Next Big Thing: changing delivery models in education

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Southern New Hampshire’s president, Paul J. LeBlanc, writes in his thinking paper “The Next Big Thing”:

“The vision is that students could sign up for self-paced online programs with no conventional instructors. They could work at their own speeds through engaging online content that offers built-in assessments, allowing them to determine when they are ready to move on. They could get help through networks of peers who are working on the same courses; online discussions could be monitored by subject experts. When they’re ready, students could complete a proctored assessment, perhaps at a local high school, or perhaps online. The university’s staff could then grade the assessment and assign credit.”

The team at the Network University had pretty much the same delivery model in mind, back when I worked there in the 1990’s. There is a lot of appeal to this model, from the institutions side as well as from the learners perspective. It cuts out a lot of costs and you reap the benefits without having to invest too much in the process. And as a slow or fast learner, or in between jobs or juggling three kids, you no longer have to adapt to the rest but can determine your own pace. But when I think of the online initiatives which have worked and been extremely successful, and what their success factors were, I think we might be missing the point if we choose for this delivery model.

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Lets take the best of both worlds, the old and the new

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Forgive me but, hogwash! The article title reads “School courses dissapear into the tablet”. (“Schoolcursussen verdwijnen in de tablet”)

I happen to be a firm believer that mobile internet does bring the whole information cycle full circle, away from the stationary desks, into “real life”, and therefore will be adopted by many more users than limited to the computer-savy fanatical few (yours truely being a card carrying member). And my expectation is also that tablets will be sighted more often in the lecture halls and their use will grow amongst students.

Mobile in education is the next big step. But to state it in this Draconian manner, scaring all tentative users, arming skeptics and nay-sayers to new technologies. It might be my age but I have seen this response too often. I prefer to focus on the possible advantages and lets put energy into taking the best of both worlds, the old and the new, and make learning an even more richer and tantalizing experience than it already is.

Open Street Maps

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Open principles. A personal favorite of mine. Why? Because they make it possible for you and me, and people like Isaac Newton to excel:  “If I have seen farther than most men it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants”.

Sharing data, source code, architecture, background, makes it possible for others to pick up where you left off, to take your info and make it more. It speeds up learning, and increases the expanse of its positive impact. Adhering to open principles is recognizing that together we are more than the sum of the individual parts.

This is why I am especially excited that one of my team members is leading a project together with Social Geography staff and students in Open Street Maps. It’s mirrored on this initiative which displays how a street has changed over time.

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