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Understanding Student-Centered Design

Today’s digital students are demanding a higher quality of education and customized learning experiences. Accessibility and success depends on personal factors that extend beyond the campus. Students are looking for learning that relates directly to them. Online learning has allowed students with busy work schedules, hectic personal lives, and a lengthy list of responsibilities to continue their education. However, traditional online programs may fail to meet student needs, because they are mainly a one-size-fits-all solution. As adult learners are looking to explore career opportunities, new skills, or personal interests, their learning experience is significant. Universities that offer a student-centered design approach will engage and elevate their learners, and above all, retain those learners for the duration of the program.

As a college or university curriculum leader, you can propose tailoring the design thinking process or human-centered design process to student-centered design.

Continue reading “Understanding Student-Centered Design”

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Personalized Learning through Adaptive Technology

Personalized

Over the past few months, you may have heard some chatter about personalized learning through adaptive technology. Not surprising.

The Brookings Institution referred to personalized learning as a major movement in education. Murray (2017) stated that colleges and universities are increasingly seeking ways to customize curriculum and learner outcomes via adaptive technology to match student-needs based on unique learning profiles.

And as with any new development in higher education, faculty is chiming in with, “Can I use this for my courses?” “…and, how?” The short answer? Absolutely. The longer answer? Read on to find out how. Continue reading “Personalized Learning through Adaptive Technology”

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Exploring Virtual and Augmented Technologies

In this blog post, we will explore how virtual and augmented technologies have found their way into classroom enhancing traditional learning by blurring the physical and digital world. Reducing the gap between the real and digital world makes the learning environment more flexible and adaptive.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have the potential to transform the way educators, communicate with students. But where do we start? With so many VR and AR devices, information, and experiences available on the internet, virtual and augmented technologies can be overwhelming.  The brief descriptions (1) and accompanying videos will provide you with the basic ideas and concepts for each technology. Continue reading “Exploring Virtual and Augmented Technologies”

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The shift from traditional paper and pencil to next generation digital assessment

Assessment is a general term for a broad range of processes for testing, measuring, and evaluating performance. Standardized, alternative, and self-assessment methods are used for the purposes of replacement, diagnosis of performance, and provision of formative and summative evaluation.

The National Educational Technology Plan (2017) states: “As technology gives us the capability to improve on long-standing assessment approaches, our public education system has a responsibility to use the information we collect during assessment in ways that can have the greatest impact on learning. This means using assessments that ask students to demonstrate what they have learned in meaningful ways. And students and parents know there is more to a sound education than picking the right answer on a multiple-choice question or answering an extended-response question outside of the context of students’ daily lives. All learners deserve assessments that better reflect what they know and are able to do with that knowledge.” Continue reading “The shift from traditional paper and pencil to next generation digital assessment”