Influence of Technology over Education

Students can work from anywhere and there are tools and sources of information readily available to them. Mobile learning is a reality – the technology is here and the information is right there! Search engines are powerful and ever present.

Information can be delivered anywhere, anytime on any device.

Flipped classrooms, interactive learning, new classroom designs, massive online open courses (MOOCS), virtual classrooms and virtual computer laboratories are all happening. Teachers, learners and researchers are exploring the new dimensions of learning and teaching technologies and there is so much to learn.

Learning analytics (Big Data in education) is trying to understand how students learn and where they are having difficulties learning. The relationship between student behavior and student learning success and student failure are being explored using the micro transactional data flowing from the information systems supporting online learning and teaching. As the algorithms are developed that reveal the relationships between learning, teaching and the behaviors of teachers and students, it becomes possible to gain a better understanding of how to improve teaching and identify students that need help in learning. There is a real sense of progress in trying to understand the fundamental questions about why and how people learn.

Sounds amazing right! The harsh reality is that while the technology is more than ready, the students and teachers are a bit overwhelmed by it all. The paradigm shift in education is not so much of a revolution as an evolution – it is taking time.

Old approaches to teaching and learning impede the evolution of learning and teaching. Take assessment for example. It is now possible to assess students online and to allow students to use their electronic devices as part of that assessment but we still revert to ‘written examinations’ with all the constraints that go with that – no electronic devices – unable to use any of the tools that are part of the daily work lives of all of us. The assessment environment is antiquated and reflects practices that are no longer relevant. Moving to new ways of assessing students’ progress is risky with unknown consequences. It requires deep consideration and it requires a willingness to experiment and take risks. Taking risks with the credibility of examination results is worthy of caution.

Having access to everything online doesn’t make it any easier to learn or to find the right information at the right time. Students have to develop new ways of organizing what they know. Forget ‘lecture notes’ – how do you organize multimedia. How do you synthesis, condense and summarize when there is so much source material? Conventional approaches to learning have to change – students have to face the overwhelming challenge of too much information.

The structuring of understanding and learning the difference between truth and falsity, become even more challenging as the sources of information become more diverse. The question of ‘what should people learn’ is changing as technology is changing. We now need to build up new skills and capabilities. We have to expect information to be false and build up student’s critical faculties in order to distinguish between true and false information. We have to develop personal information management skills just to handle the vastness of the information resources and we have to build up a new sense of information integrity – the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘false news’.

The fundamental questions of what motivates a person to learn and how they actually learn may never be completely solved by technology alone but the impact of technology and the integration of technology in the learning and teaching process has sharply determined the answer to the question ‘what should people learn’.