As the end of the year approaches, I typically reflect on what I did not get a chance to write about in Educational Pathways. Each year - now going on five years of writing and publishing EdPath - I inevitably miss reporting on a good number of very big issues that can be considered transformative in the world of online teaching and learning in higher education.

Ed Tech and Digital Natives

One important issue that I did not report on this year is how our new generation of incoming “digital natives” is influencing the growth of a variety of technologies in education. The “natives” term comes out of Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” article that was published back in October 2001 in On the Horizon. Prensky wrote that “the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”

This topic is also close to my heart since I have two young children -age 11 and 14 - each of whom now has a personal computer with broadband access. The reason why I purchased these computers was because their public school system, while seemingly a good one that is at the top of its regional ratings, was, in my estimation, woefully behind the curve of today’s Digital Age.
 
Anyway, as Prensky notes, “digital natives are used to receiving information really fast,” which has played itself out with my 14 year-old who has never taken a typing class, yet types about 100 words per minute in a curt language that I cannot decipher. The 14-year-old prefers instant messaging over phone conversations and is very much into burning music onto CD-ROMs. Woe is me - the digital immigrant who learned proper typing technique on an antique, non-electric typewriter in a sophomore high school class; the teenager who talked on the telephone from inside a closet so his parents could not listen in (thanks to the newly invented elongated telephone cord); and the young adult who collected vinyl records and ultimately graduated to 8-track tapes.
Sorry for the digression.

EDUCAUSE Resources Help Define Digital Natives

If you want to delve into this topic, start with the New Learners section of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, where there are many insightful pieces worth reading, beginning with “Educating the Net Generation,” a free e-book edited by Diana and James Oblinger, two educators, who, in their introduction, describe how their children had a digital literacy that eluded them.

Also see the September/October 2005 issue of the EDUCAUSE Review, titled “Back to School: It’s All About the Students,” for a good number of articles, some of which are based on the aforementioned Net Generation e-book, that reveal student perspectives on a number of issues related to technology in education. One of my favorites is “Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner,” by Carie Windham, a recent graduate of North Carolina State University. Windham explains how digital natives are used to having information at their fingertips and how multi-tasking is part of their everyday digital environment and lifestyle. She laments about digital immigrant faculty members not being able to grab her attention as they hold on to “the dying notion that a lecture and a subsequent reading assignment are enough to teach the lesson.” In a surprising conclusion to her informative piece, Windham also talks about meeting up with her younger teenage brother who inhabits an even more digital environment than she does. Windham then wonders how her brother’s newer digital-oriented needs will be met by higher education.
 
More on this topic of what digital natives want can also be found in an EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) report, published in October 2005, titled the “ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control, and Learning,” by Robert Kvavik and Judith Caruso. The report is based on a study conducted with 63 colleges in which more than 18,000 students participated, resulting in “a rich source of data and insight into the behaviors and expectations of a critical cohort - our future leaders.” One of the findings, among many in this report, worth noting here is that despite freshman-level digital natives having all kinds of “electronic core skills,” they “express a lower interest in technology in their course activity and report lower skill levels in course-related technologies.”

Merger Mania

I also skipped writing about the implications of the merger announcement of WebCT and Blackboard, which was pretty big news in mid October. I have very mixed feelings about this, and apparently the Justice Department does too as noted in a Washington Post article by Terence O’Hara titled “Blackboard’s WebCT Deal Spurs Antitrust Questioning” . O’Hara noted that the combined company, as estimated by Eduventures, Inc., would own 80-90% of the course management system software market. At press time it remained to be seen if the expected “BlackCT” merger closing date of late 2005 or early 2006 would actually happen. For an interesting and varied take on this, see a Stephen Downes compendium of reactions to the possible merger at www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=31687.

Hurricane Aid in the Form of Online Learning

Another important story that I did not report on was the great amount of relief aid educators provided to higher education students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In particular, the story about Sloan-C’s creation of the Sloan Semester is one that needs to be told.

Fortunately, I am currently in the middle of an assignment under the auspices of Sloan-C to write a thorough case study of what happened, slated to be published sometime in the Spring of 2006. What Sloan-C did for hurricane-affected students and National Guard students who were deployed to Louisiana and Mississippi is nothing less than a phenomenal, history-making accomplishment that helped well over 1,000 students keep their higher education pursuits alive through online learning. The short version of this great story is that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation came up with $1.1 million dollars of relief aid in unprecedented speed over Labor Day weekend. The Foundation dollars catalyzed a group of dedicated volunteers from Sloan-C, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), institutions from across the country, and education-related corporations and organizations to come together in record time to create a national online university comprised of more than 1,300 wide-ranging, tuition-free, 8-week accelerated online courses from more than 150 institutions that served the learning needs of students in numerous disciplines. Through the rapid creation of a sophisticated online catalogue, registration and reporting system, and a cadre of more than 40 volunteer academic advisors, the Sloan Semester was off and running.
 
So far this monumental volunteer-based undertaking reveals some startling results. There are a good number of students, who, due to their hardship, as well as due to some bureaucratic snafus, were forced to drop out of the Sloan Semester courses they registered to take. However, there are many more who have successfully completed Sloan Semester online courses and are eternally grateful to have been tossed this valuable educational lifeline during a trying time.
 
The Sloan Semester courses were offered as a bridge semester for students before returning to their home institutions come Spring 2006; that is, of course, if their home institutions can be operating successfully by then.
 
In the meantime, Sloan-C and others in the field of online education have started to talk about the development of an emergency online learning network that could go into effect when the next disaster hits, be it large or small. In particular, all the talk these days about a possible avian flu pandemic has educators thinking that building such an emergency online education service, based on lessons learned from the Sloan Semester, could be a worthy, must-do endeavor. You’ll see a lot more on this topic at the Sloan-C website next year, as well as in future issues of Educational Pathways.

What Else?

There is much more that I missed, including the growing use of iPods, social software, such as blogs and wikis, etc., and web conferencing in online education. Plus, the seemingly non-ending issues about lack of faculty adoption and administrators not accepting online learning still exist. Cost and return-on-investment issues always abound, and I still see discussions about whether or not online learning really is entering the “mainstream.” And the growth of more international interactions, aided by online teaching and learning modalities, along with the rising educational tides in China and India, are always interesting to write about.

What else? Electronic textbooks, tablet PCs, PDAs, avatars, 3D virtual environments, virtual gaming, open source technologies, interoperability issues, electronic portfolios, virtual academic advising, marketing online learning, new modes of delivery and opportunities for the development of online professional development courses and programs, new accreditation policies and processes, and much more - there’s surely never a lack of things to write about in this online world.

Happy Holidays,
George Lorenzo
Writer, Editor and Publisher