Technology Adoption – Tips and Ideas to Make it Happen #FutureEdTech

Guest Blog with Blackboard

Institutions recognise how new technology can enhance the learning and teaching experience for staff and students. Increasingly they are looking to technology to support them in achieving their strategic goals such as:

• Improving the quality of the student experience and positively impacting student performance, satisfaction and retention
• Responding to the rising expectations and the increasingly diverse support needs of the student population
• Extending institutional reach and developing new markets through flexible delivery
• Reducing administration burden on academic staff by improving efficiency and effectiveness of academic administrative processes
• Enhancing student employability and digital literacy skills through exposure to discipline- specific software, resources and online practice

However, at Blackboard we know that there are obstacles to the adoption of technology that institutions must overcome. Change of any kind is daunting, particularly when dealing with long-established methods and systems.

That’s why we have prepared a small book that shows how to make it happen, suggesting practical tips, ideas, resources and real-life examples. We’ve built the story around six key characteristics required of a successful adoption project: 


1. Leadership from the top
2. Institutional commitment and investment
3. Robust and reliable infrastructure
4. Effective and available support for academic staff
5. Ability to demonstrate the benefits to the student and staff experience
6. Evidence-based decision-making and a continuous cycle of improvement

Come visit us at Future Edtech 2015 to sign up for your free copy!

Or visit www.blackboard.com for more information.

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Want to find out more about our views on the future of Edtech? Blackboard International’s Senior Director of Industry Management, Dr Demetra Katsifli will be taking part in the Industry Leaders Panel Discussion: ‘Supporting Student Experience and Success in the 21^st Century’ live at Future Edtech at 10am on 2^nd June.

REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE PASS HERE.

Technology – The Key to Transformational Change in HE? #FutureEdTech

Guest Blog with Tribal Group

Technology has dramatically changed our lives over the last decade. Mobile technologies are more common than ever, and interwoven into every aspect of our daily lives. They guide our decisions and instantly connect us to our social circles. Technology has clearly transformed the way we communicate and do business at a fundamental level.

A recent survey The Digital Transformation of Business conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, polled 537 executives and delivered surprising insights into the transformative effects of technology on business operations, These included how:

• Mobile is enabling new business scenarios
• Cloud computing is driving business agility
• Big data is helping companies innovate
• Social channels are transforming core business processes

The survey found that business leaders are not simply deploying the four technologies to boost efficiency or reduce costs. They are embracing these technologies to develop new business models, develop new revenue streams and to drive better customer engagement.

As technologies such as social media and mobility drive engagement across education institutions, executives are looking at ways to take advantage of the deluge of information generated by these interactions to drive better student engagement and increase operational efficiencies.

“Today, we are faced with the most radical change in distance learning, technology, and logistics since the invention of the printed book.”

Institutions embracing the change

Gartner reports 25% of CEOs expected to appoint a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) by 2017 to help drive their growth objectives and drive digital strategies. What’s more, 20% of large enterprises had already appointed a data officer to lead their digital strategies by 2014. Deakin University’s new Chief Digital Officer William Confalonieri is working closely with Tribal to optimise its Student Management Systems, including SITS and Enterprise Service Desk, to drive new innovations in student service, student engagement and operational efficiency. Williams’ role is to help the university capitalise on the risks and rewards of the digital economy using a blend of business strategies and technologies to achieve this goal.

Working with the University of Wolverhampton, Tribal has delivered a proven analytics model capable of predicting student success to within 70%. This new product, Student Insight ,is self-learning and has enabled the University of Wolverhampton to reduce student attrition, while driving improved student engagement and will ultimately lead to increased student satisfaction.

These are just two examples of how Tribal is working proactively with our customers to deliver new technologies and innovations to support their digital initiatives and drive greater efficiencies.

Delivering new technologies and innovations to support our customers’ digital initiatives

As a company responsible for delivering systems to support the future needs of our education customers, we see our research and development investment as critical to enable our customers to differentiate their services and lead in what has become a very complex and challenging environment. Whether it’s developing new technologies that deliver predicative analytics to identify students at risk and understand the interactions between an institution and its customers (the student), or investing in existing products to enable anytime, anywhere access via our mobility strategy, we work hard to add tremendous value to our customers.

In addition to our technologies, we have also evolved our service offer to deliver new possibilities such as our Business Transformation Service. This innovative programme leverages our experience of over 150 implementations worldwide and the thought leadership gained from working with these customers to deliver change management and consulting in the delivery of new business models that take advantage of the new digital economy, enabling customers to realise their optimal operating models.

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Want to find out more about our views on the future of Edtech? Managing Director, Market Development Jon Baldwin will be taking part in the Industry Leaders Panel Discussion: ‘Supporting Student Experience and Success in the 21^st Century’ live at Future Edtech at 10am on 2^nd June.

REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE PASS HERE.

 

What is Adaptive Learning? #FutureEdTech

Guest Blog with Brightspace by D2L

Adaptive learning has become one of the most talked about technologies in education. Gartner Canada Inc. recently named adaptive learning as the number one strategic technology to impact education in 2015. With this anticipation brings different perceptions—and even some confusion—about what adaptive learning is and its role in shaping teaching and learning.

This post is the first in a series dedicated to adaptive learning. First up, let’s establish exactly what it means.

Definition

”Adaptivity” is the “adjustment of one or more characteristics of the learning environment.” These adaptive actions take place in three different areas:

1. Appearance/Form: How the learning actions—such as content, the addition of text, graphics, and/or video, etc.—are displayed to the learner. Most of today’s adaptive platforms call this “content consumption” and expect knowledge to be obtained by simply reading the content.
2. Order/Sequence: How the learning actions are ordered and branched depending on the learning progress, such as pathways.
3. Guidance towards Goal/Mastery: Actions of the system that lead a learner towards success. This allows for changes according to the most optimal learning outcomes, level of difficulty, and the learner’s increasing knowledge or skill level.

The value is different for everyone

The whole idea of “personalized learning”—and by extension, adaptive learning—is to help meet the needs of each student’s learning process. However, students still rely heavily on their instructor’s feedback and guidance to confirm that they’ve met the requirements.

With growing classroom sizes, this can be difficult to scale. That’s where technology can help.

The adaptive technology landscape today

In our survey of the adaptive technology landscape, we found that there are many solutions focused on adjusting learner pathways. These may be different pathways students can take within a learning environment. They are typically organized as pre-set categories and applied in a rules-based method with a decision tree. Students might take a test on the first day that will be used to create their individual path and content.

Adapting to a learner’s style and pace is another frequently applied model. While its value remains largely unproven, many adaptive platforms highlight its benefits. Most recent adaptive technology is data-driven and captures ongoing data from students’ actions. These systems use their results, creating learning actions and pathways that change and improve over time for each student.

The real opportunity can be found in taking the results of students who have completed adapted online courses and feeding those back into the system. This makes pathway learning transferable. What helped a student on the far side of the world can become valuable to a student next door.

Our view: it’s about exploration

At its core, adaptive learning allows students to select the steps or pathways they want to pursue rather than having it dictated to them. Effective technology can assemble and adapt the whole learning management system, not just a single piece of content at a time.

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Join Brightspace by D2L at Future EdTech 2015. They’ll be speaking on ‘Leveraging technology to support student retention‘ at 14.00-14.30 on the 2nd June.

REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE PASS HERE.

How do we change the culture of higher education to support and enable true transformation? #FutureEdTech

Guest Blog with Oracle

It’s certainly no secret that higher education globally is under going significant change. While it’s always difficult to have clear perspective when one is in the middle of a shift or period of dynamism, I believe this change is more profound than any we’ve seen in our lifetimes as higher education professionals, but I will also say that the change yet to come in the next 5-10 years is likely to be even more significant. Technology is underpinning a lot of these changes, but questions of culture, tradition, and historical precedent are being considered alongside discussions of the overall cost of education, the “return on investment,” student experience, and what truly defines “institutional excellence,” all questions that we hope to address at some stage during our upcoming participation in the Ovum Future EdTech conference in London.

All of us have been exposed to extremist predictions of massive reductions in the number of higher education institutions as a result of financial pressures and declining enrollment; the advent of MOOC’s (massive open online courses) and their purported ability to essentially replace the traditional model of delivering education content; the rapid ascent (and subsequent decline) of certain for-profit models of education; and in technology circles how everything “cloud” will allegedly solve all of our problems, financial as well as technical, and “solve world hunger” at the same time.

But lost in a lot of this hyperbole are a number of nuggets of positive change that have come from some of the forces I’ve just outlined. We’ve seen significant improvements in the delivery of education content through flipped classrooms and blended learning environments. MOOC’s haven’t replaced the traditional models of delivering education but they have had a positive influence on how students can be more effectively engaged and can learn at their own pace, while advances in technology have made on-line learning very interactive and engaging versus the passive models of the past.

In the “back office” of higher education, there has been significant pressure to drive operational efficiencies because of the draw-down over the past decade in public funding support for education, and as a result, albeit slowly, higher education has begun to adopt modern and more standard business processes in areas where bespoke process does not contribute significantly to the overall mission of teaching, learning and research. Furthermore because of the increased expectations around the “return on investment” in education, since more and more of the cost is being shouldered by the student and parent, more focus and emphasis is being placed on the overall student experience.

Underpinning all of this is a statistic I’d like to cite that comes from a survey conducted in the US annually by Casey Green of the Campus Computing Project that points to executive leadership (Vice Chancellors, Presidents, Provosts, etc.) of most institutions being significantly less sanguine about the effectiveness of IT investments in advancing the overall mission of the institutions versus their IT staff. In some cases this gap is as large as 20% in terms of those that rate these investments as “very effective” versus those that do not. This either speaks to unrealistic expectations, a failure to effectively communicate, or some other issue that perhaps we can explore during the upcoming Ovum Future EdTech conference.

One topic that I hope to address when I speak to the conference attendees during our session “Cloud Forecast: For Once A Very Promising Outlook” surrounds the larger general conversation in the higher education (and indeed across the entire education) sector that is quite prevalent: the general recognition that higher education is in need of significant change (transformation) – such as how education is delivered, how classrooms are organised, how information technology is leveraged, delivered, consumed, etc.  but it always comes back to how do we change the culture of higher education to support or enable true transformation – new ways of thinking, new business models and revenue sources, non-traditional programmes, competency based education models, mostly on-line programmes, etc.  – I hope to offer some ideas on the aforementioned points, and of course discuss how this cultural change is needed in order to extract maximum value from technology investments in the coming years.

For more information, please visit:
Oracle in Higher Education
Oracle Higher Education Cloud – Modern Campus. Modern Platform. 

The Author:

Cole Clark
Global Vice President, Education and Research, Oracle

Oracle

Oracle is our Mission Critical Sponsor at Future EdTech, taking place on the 2nd – 3rd June 2015 at Millenium Gloucester Hotel in London – the first and only event in Europe enabling transformational change and innovation in higher education via technology.

Join Cole Clark, Global Vice President, Education & Research at Oracle, for his session Cloud Forecast: For Once A Very Promising Outlook at 9:40am, Wednesday, 3^rd June. Please also visit the exhibition stand to find out more.

REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE PASS HERE.

Cloud solutions for the modern campus #futureedtech

Seize the initiative – transform your campus

Supporting new business models, recruiting top talent, architecting more efficient business processes, and delivering personalised student experiences are top-of-mind-issues for campus leaders everywhere. And with competition heating up, colleges and universities are under tremendous pressure to transform their campuses to meet the demands of modern students, faculty, and staff.

To address these challenges, campus leaders are looking to innovate with cloud technologies that help them modernise their systems and processes and transform to a Modern Campus.

The Oracle Higher Education Cloud for the Modern Campus

Provides a solution, enabling institutions to:

• Target Omni-channel outreach and engagement to personalise every student’s journey
• Find, recruit, develop, and retain top faculty and staff
• Simplify processes, standardise systems, and prudently steward resources
• Identify at-risk students and intervene in time to keep them on track
• Promote a data-driven culture
• Increase transparency and improve traceability

DOWNLOAD THE WHITE PAPER HERE.

About Oracle

Oracle are proud to be the Mission Critical Sponsor of the Future Edtech Conference and Exhibition taking place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London, 2 – 3 June 2015 – the first and only event in Europe enabling transformational change and innovation in higher education via technology.

Join Cole Clark, Global Vice President, Education & Research at Oracle, for his session Cloud Forecast: For Once A Very Promising Outlook at 9:40am, Wednesday, 3^rd June. Please also visit the exhibition stand to find out more.

REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE PASS HERE.