Trends and Challenges

The NMC Horizon Report on emerging technological trends and challenges in higher education offered a great snapshot of recent trends and the issues educators face in making the most of new technologies. While almost all of the topics were relevant to my interests in some way, the two technological trends that stood out to me from our readings were the move toward “deeper learning approaches” and the growing emphasis on collaboration.

Deeper Learning Approaches

The NMC report describes a recognition on the part of colleges and universities to foster

“deeper learning” in students, specifically designing opportunities for them to collaborate in addressing problems with no clear solution. This section also emphasizes the potential for project-based learning to foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

One quote that resonated with me actually came from a prior section of the report where it discussed innovation; however, it paralleled the ideas in the deeper learning section. It stated that in order to promote innovation on the part of students, “a significant element for progressing this movement is the call for higher education to alter its status quo to accept failure as an important part of the learning process” (2017, p. 10).

While this was in a different section of the reading, I found it related somewhat to the idea of students immersing themselves in a topic and learning by thinking through potential solutions, counterpoints, making concessions, etc. Essentially, it acknowledges that learning that is somewhat arduous is the learning that sticks with us, and usually that involves trial and error, problem-solving, and critical thinking.  The Maddox and Campbell (2017) article backs this up when it describes how by “doing and failing” we receive automatic, corrective feedback. The reading on VR, as well as gamification (Wharton, 2017), made me think that using these technologies to push critical thinking and problem-solving might be effective because students might be more inclined to take the intellectual risks in lower stakes setting like game where they don’t feel the ‘wrong’ answer will haunt them on their permanent record forever. At the same time, the sense of engagement students get from games or VR might provide the necessary motivation for students to push themselves toward conceptual change.

  

Collaborative Learning

I am personally interested in the potential for collaborative learning in my own classrooms, so this section was particularly relevant to me. Interestingly, it also overlapped in some ways with the previous section and its emphasis on collaborative problem-solving. The NMC report describes collaborative learning as “students or educators working together in peer-to-peer or group activities (NMC, 2017, p. 20) and offered some tools, such as Slack and cloud-based services, to enable such activities. One point the authors make is that collaborative learning not only bolsters engagement, it also promotes an “openness to diversity, exposing students to people from different demographics” (NMC, p. 9). This last point seems significant in the context of educational technology because collaborative apps/software could allow students in isolated, ethnically homogenous populations interact and work with peers whom they might never encounter otherwise. This would not only help engage students with whatever content matter they’re studying, but also with their social and cultural development. I could see this as helping high school students from less advantaged backgrounds gain the cultural competency that is part of adjusting and succeeding in higher ed.

Challenges

In the realm of higher education writing instruction, two particularly significant challenges for adopting or implementing new technologies include increasing digital literacy and addressing the achievement gap.

Improving Digital Literacy

This challenge addresses the need for students to not only become proficient in isolated technological skills, but to obtain a “deeper understanding of the digital environment,

enabling intuitive adaptation to new contexts and cocreation of content with others” (NMC, 2017, p. 24). The idea of “new contexts” seems especially compelling because we can’t predict what technologies students will encounter when they leave our classrooms or enter the workforce, but we can teach them to be self-directed and confident in their abilities to adapt and acquire new skills.

The report also alluded to the timley issue of the difficulty college students have in evaluating the credibility or bias of information shared on social media. Of course this issue has been in the news following the 2016 election, and it’s a particular focus on English Composition classrooms as students compile research from various online sources. Classroom exercises that require students to carefully evaluate the argument, evidence, and sources of online information can help students learn to practice critical thinking as the encounter dubious information.

Finally, the section on digital literacy referenced the need for college educators to continually stay up-to-date on emerging technologies in order to foster students’ learning. It offered an interesting suggestion that students and instructors can work together to learn new technologies from each other—I realize that this has often been the case in my classrooms. If I allow students the freedom to explore a variety of technologies, they often end up opening my eyes to new tools that I probably would not have encountered on my own.

The Achievement Gap

This section of the report provides compelling statistics from all over the world to illustrate the need for greater college retention and completion rates, particularly among male students from low-income backgrounds.

This issue is often painfully clear in my freshman English Composition classes where I have students from private schools, high achieving suburban schools, rural districts, and urban schools all in the same class. Many of the students from wealthier districts have already completed assignments in high school that are similar to the work we do in Comp 1, so it ends up being a fairly pleasant class for them. On the other hand, students from the disadvantaged schools often struggle not only with the mechanics of writing, but also with using word processing software, managing files, navigating research, and so on. For them, Comp 1 is an incredible challenge. Additionally, in face-to-face classrooms, some students can bring new laptops with them to class every day to work on assignments while others cannot. Offering writing classes in computer labs would help to at least give students equal access to the equipment required to practice writing in-class.

Finally, this section mentions that online or blended learning is often seen as a solution for evening out access to education for these populations. While the flexibility of online education may meet the needs of students who need to work full-time jobs, if these students have limited digital literacy to begin with, then the technological hurdles of online learning (not to mention reliable, fast wifi) compound the already significant difficulties of succeeding in college while working full-time.

References 

Maddox, W.T. & Campbell, P. (2017). Muscle Memory and the Brain Science Behind VR. Training Industry. Retrieved from https://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/muscle-memory-and-the-brain-science-behind-vr/

News Media Consortium. (2017). Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition.

Wharton, E. (2017). The First Steps Toward Gamification. Training Industry. Retrieved from https://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/content-development/the-first-steps-toward-gamification/