We provided a ‘Service Partnership’ with a consortium of customers representing many types of learning institutions. We combined a hosted LMS with Concierge 24/7/365 User Experience – on demand, always available, user support.
#1 – A holistic approach to meshing people, process and technology is needed to catalyze higher education’s transition from current teaching methods to leveraging educational technology without losing the ‘Art of Teaching & Learning.’
Colleges and university educational offerings have been built to serve post-Industrial era needs – 21st century requirements are and will continue to be distinct and different.
Teaching and learning’s transformation from analog to digital will be a long journey. In the early years of the digital era, technology functionality was focused on the ease of packaging entire online courses to increase enrollment access.
The next twenty years can be characterized as a need to emphasize Blended Learning, adaptive systems and artificial intelligence to improve student completion and comprehension.
Thought leaders have written about frameworks such as Next Generation Digital Learning (NGDLE), Scalable Advanced Learning Ecosystem (SALE), Continuous Learning Environments (CLE), or just Digital Learning Environments (DLE) but understanding and realization of these future directions is reaching institutional decision makers at varying speeds.
To move theory to practice and create an evidence-based “framework” to work within, it is necessary to experiment with combinations of technologies that will measurably impact learning.
A large percentage of colleges and universities are still focused on their next RFP in the hopes of procuring the ‘perfect LMS’ – only to learn that the LMS alone is too costly to scale and optimize to achieve a measurable return on learning campus-wide.
To simplify a complex system, more work is needed to iterate from distance learning to impactful learning outcomes – leading to “A New Digital Learning Path Forward.”
With more open-source tools in adaptive learning available, the industry can finally construct the needed evidence-based framework. Business intelligence will assist instructors and students to make reliable real-time decisions affecting the probability of course completion.
Once colleges and universities are making evidence-based choices intelligently then an inter-operable technology stack of LMS tools can be mixed-n-matched with the right third party tools.
Experimentation precedes implementation, department by department each academic year, to achieve an online offering consistent with one’s mission.
Unprecedented flexibility, affordability, and scalability is required for any solution to be sustainable.
