policy & reform campusreview. com. au
Virtual & individual
Technology is moving education towards lessons and experiences tailored to each student.
Paul Wappett interviewed by Antonia Maiolo
Virtual reality classrooms, wearable technologies and the use of metadata to identify struggling students will revolutionise the way Australia’ s university students learn, new research forecasting future technology trends shows.
The research, by Open Universities Australia( OUA) and global not-for-profit group New Media Consortium, predicts trends that should be fast-tracked and obstacles blocking the adoption of certain technologies.
“ The trends emerging in education at the moment relate to how we can use data and analytics to get an understanding of how [ learners learn, individual and collectively ], so we can create online and blended learning experiences tailored to an individual,” Paul Wappett, chief executive of OUA, said. Here, Wappett outlines the key trends arising from the report.
CR: Paul, what types of technologies will we see make their way into universities within the next 12 months?
PW: This is an exciting time for education. We’ re seeing that the use of data to personalise the experience a student has at a higher education institution is greater than it’ s ever been.
The trends emerging at the moment relate to how we can use that data and analytics to get an understanding of how [ learners learn individually and collectively ], so we can create online and blended learning experiences tailored to an individual.
[ Emerging advances ] include wearable technology. For example, technology like the Oculus Rift – which uses a wearable device to immerse you in a virtual world. The opportunity to study something like ancient civilisations and walk down the streets of Pompeii rather than just read about it, is quite an immersive experience.
Things like Google Glass and the Apple Watch are already being used to see how students are interacting with different types of material. It’ s an extraordinarily exciting time for education.
In terms of technology, what will an Australian university education experience look like by 2020? By 2020 we’ re expecting that we’ ll move away from what is the current norm of each student getting the same material, at the same pace and in the same sequence as their peers.
Instead, [ we will ] move to a future where students have an individualised path throughout the [ course ] material. Imagine, if you will, that each student starts in the same module of content, which instead of being a 60-minute lecture is an 8- to 12-minute piece of content. Then there will be more assessment that will determine whether or not the students understood that.
Depending on how they answer that assessment, they may go three steps forward or one step forward, or repeat the same module, or even go two steps backwards and get some foundational level knowledge.
From that point on, the student will follow a completely individualised path through that material until they get to the end. The [ result will be ] that one student may take 25 hours to get through the entire subject’ s material, but somebody else might take 150 and that will be OK.
What role will online education providers play in the future? For us, we don’ t make a huge distinction between online and on-campus anymore because even an on-campus student will be undertaking a fair bit of their work and their studies in an online format.
Increasingly, I think, we will see – even in a campus environment – students doing a lot of their work outside in a learning management system environment where they’ re interacting with a great deal of content. Then they’ ll come in together in human interactions where it’ s about applying the learning they’ ve had and having authentic experiences of how that learning lives in the real world. That’ s quite different to what the traditional campus-based model has looked like.
For online, though, the important thing to recognise is that it’ s different to on campus. Students have much smaller attention spans when they’ re working on an iPad, laptop or smartphone, so the content has to be compelling, engaging, and grab the learner.
Finally, are there any challenges impeding technology adoption, and how do we get around them? There are many challenges. At an institutional level, I know from speaking to lots of vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors at Australian universities, that they have enormous calls on their resources. [ They have to answer many funding questions.] Do I invest money into new learning spaces in terms of physical spaces and buildings? Do I spend it on technology that’ s required to provide the infrastructure? Do I spend it on building the capability and the professional development of my academic staff to be able to operate in this sort of environment? Of course, all of that comes against a backdrop of great regulatory and funding uncertainty as the government struggles to get its reform package through the senate. All of those things are challenges.
Probably at a more basic level, there is just this challenge about the fact that academics seem to be pulled in a lot of different directions, being required to increase their publishing of research and undertaking of research. They’ re being asked to do a lot more in relation to teaching, both on campus and online. The prospect of having to rip up the playbook and start again in terms of designing a course for online delivery is pretty daunting for many academics. That’ s where companies such as Open Universities Australia can help them, with additional resources and expertise they can call on. n
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