Welcome to Digital is not the future

@Colin I think we want to find a way through the issues you raise. Meeting needs isn't enough. It's part of our responsibility to challenge expectations and improve practice as well. This doesn't mean bringing in new tech, I'd be happy if we used the stuff we already have better. As Ford said - "If you ask people what they want they usually say 'a faster horse'".

Personally I'm not shy about having at least some expertise and if our places of work claim to be educational institutions then we have a right to attempt to make that the case.

Hi All. By way of introduction, I’m a creative technologist of sorts, having co-founded a media agency, and I’ve been involved with HE from a 'critical-practice' point of view. Thanks for inviting me. And sorry for the slightly longer post here.

I guess what’s at stake here is how we manage successfully organisational change in order to stay relevant vis-à-vis accelerating technological, political and socio-economic processes.

In the private (start-up) sector, change is all you know. Iterate, pivot or persevere before you run out of money. That is the ‘Lean Start-up’ mantra, which, since Eric Ries’ original work on the subject in 2008, has permeated the creative tech space.

The idea is, rather than executing a pre-set plan with pig-headed determination, in the hope that customers (success) will come eventually, create a culture and climate where it is expected and engrained behaviour that you constantly test assumptions and hypotheses.

And I don’t mean this in an abstract, epistemological sense (that is a given in an HE institution). I’m talking about what it is the organization actually provides, and how it goes about defining and evolving this. In other words: only build services based on what you learn, when you honestly test your assumptions, rather than relying on your engrained suppositions. Rinse and repeat this process until you find what works. And so forth.

So change is a given. But how do successful organisations or institutions manage change, create a climate that welcomes change, makes change an integral part of organizational behaviours and organizational culture?

Digital is not ‘The Future’. ‘Digital’ has become a totemic meme, a placeholder for all and sundry.

I think change management is key here.

Can I suggest that something like "continuous improvement" might be a better way of expressing this than "change"?

After a point, it can be seen as change for change's sake (leading to change fatigue) whereas encouraging a culture that embraces ongoing reflection on practice and openness to improvements (where merited)

I'm enjoying the progress of discussion and think that we all broadly share the same goals and vision. (Funnily enough, I also had the "faster horse" thing in mind as I was writing earlier but it didn't fit organically)

When I talk about identifying and meeting learner and educator needs, I think that it's important to differentiate needs and wants. The want might be the faster horse but the need is to get places more quickly. As the "experts", I agree that it is our job to interpret and synthesise what we are hearing from the lecturers to get to their deeper needs. Ultimately these tend to be things like greater student engagement or more relevant/rigorous assessment or increasing learner autonomy. From here we can offer a suite of options (pedagogical and technological) and the support needed to implement them. These might be minor incremental changes or radical overhauls, depending on what will work best and (pragmatically), what is most likely to succeed. For me, the important thing is being able to say - "you asked for X and this can help".

I have a few personal barrows that I like to push and that I would dearly like to implement in my uni. Game-based learning, gamification, digital badges and ePortfolios. Little by little I am pushing these things but I haven't yet found the hook needed to make people want to use them. So they don't. The greatest success that I've had so far in introducing new tech has been live polling in lectures and that is still only about 10% of lecturers so far. (Only started that this semester though). I guess my point is that even though all of these tools (and related pedagogical approaches) might be great, I'll always have to get people excited about them by linking them directly to their needs. If these people feel that I've asked what they need before I suggest a solution, they'll be more invested in the process.

At Coventry, we may be piloting designing your own degree, which I think will be interesting as I believe that Learning should be about the experience, the design of the experience and less about the destination. Having a non-linear aspect to learner will perhaps help lecturers and students to contextualise a course within a more seamless narrative?

I love that idea. If your institution has modular degrees, you're halfway there. The challenge comes in designing the modules so as to minimise prerequisites, or make them explicit in certain recommended pathways. Then you have to know how to handle the inevitable timetable clashes.

exactly - not sure how it will happen but will see this develop this next year. And one of the schools is going to flip completely in the new term.

drag and drop your way towards a tailored learning experience...underscored by learning analytics data...?

i'm all for intuitive learning experience design :))

And digital may be able to help with time-shifting slots to increase flexibility with more distributed collaboration, flipped teaching, online assessment