{"id":601,"date":"2014-09-22T12:48:02","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T19:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/teachinginadigitalage\/?post_type=chapter&p=601"},"modified":"2015-09-15T17:28:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T00:28:44","slug":"section-1-7-from-the-periphery-to-the-center-how-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-teach-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/teachinginadigitalage\/chapter\/section-1-7-from-the-periphery-to-the-center-how-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-teach-2\/","title":{"raw":"1.7 From the periphery to the center: how technology is changing the way we teach","rendered":"1.7 From the periphery to the center: how technology is changing the way we teach"},"content":{"raw":"We shall see in Chapter 6, Section 2<\/a>\u00a0that technology has always played an important role in teaching from time immemorial, but until recently, it has remained more on the periphery of education. Technology has been used mainly to support regular classroom teaching, or operated in the form of distance education, for a minority of students or in specialized departments (often in continuing education or extension).\u00a0However, in the last ten to fifteen years, technology has been increasingly influencing the core teaching activities of even\u00a0universities. Some of the ways technology is moving from the periphery to the centre can be seen from the following trends.\r\n

1.7.1. Fully online learning<\/h2>\r\nCredit-based online learning is now becoming a major and central activity of most academic departments in universities, colleges and to some extent even in school\/k-12 education. Enrolments in fully online courses (i.e. distance education courses) now constitute between a quarter and a third of all post-secondary enrolments in the USA (Allen and Seaman, 2014<\/a>). Online learning enrolments have been increasing by between 10-20 per cent per annum for the last 15 years or so in North America, compared with an increase in campus-based enrolments of around 2-3 per cent per annum. There are now at least seven million students in the USA taking at least one fully online course, with almost one million online course enrolments in just the California Community College System (Johnson and<\/a>\u00a0Mejia, 2014<\/a>). Fully online learning then is now a key component of many school and post-secondary education systems.<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"Print\"<\/a>\r\n\r\n
\r\n\"Figure<\/a><\/span><\/dt>
Figure 1.7.1 The growth of online learning in the USA\"Print\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/dd><\/dl>\r\n

1.7.2. Blended and hybrid learning<\/h2>\r\nAs more instructors have become involved in online learning, they have realised that much that has traditionally been done in class can be done equally well or better online (a theme that will be explored more in Chapter 9). As a result, instructors have been gradually introducing more online study elements into their classroom teaching. So learning management systems may be used to store lecture notes in the form of slides or PDFs, links to online readings may be provided, or online forums for discussion may be established. Thus online learning is gradually blended with face-to-face teaching, but without changing the basic classroom teaching model.\u00a0Here online learning is being used as a supplement to traditional teaching. Although there is no standard or commonly agreed definitions in this area, I will use the term 'blended learning' for this use of technology.\r\n\r\nMore recently, though, lecture capture has resulted in instructors realising that if the lecture is recorded, students could view this in their own time, and then the classroom time could be used for more interactive sessions. This model has become known as the 'flipped classroom'.\r\n\r\nSome institutions are now developing plans to move a substantial part of their teaching into more blended\u00a0or flexible modes. For instance the University of Ottawa is planning to have at least 25 per cent of its courses blended or hybrid within five years (University of Ottawa, 2013<\/a>). The University of British Columbia is planning to redesign most of its first and second year large lecture classes into hybrid classes (Farrar, 2014).\r\n\r\nThe implications of both fully online and blended learning will be discussed more fully in Chapter 9.<\/a>\r\n

1.7.3. Open learning<\/h2>\r\nAnother increasingly important development linked to online learning is the move to more open education.\u00a0Over the last 10 years there have been developments in open learning that are beginning to impact directly on conventional institutions. The most immediate is open textbooks - such as what you are reading now. Open textbooks are digital textbooks that can be downloaded in a digital format by students (or instructors) for free, thus saving students considerable money on textbooks. For instance, in Canada, the three provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan have agreed to collaborate on\u00a0the production and distribution of peer-reviewed open textbooks<\/a>\u00a0for the 40 high-enrolment subject areas in their university and community college programs.\r\n\r\nOpen educational resources (OER) are another recent development in open education. These are digital educational materials freely available over the Internet that can be downloaded by instructors (or students) without charge, and if necessary adapted or amended, under a\u00a0Creative Commons license<\/a>\u00a0that provides protections for the creators of the material. Probably the best known source of OER is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u00a0OpenCourseWare project<\/a>. With individual professors' permission, MIT has made available for free downloading over the Internet video\u00a0lectures recorded with lecture capture as well as supporting materials such as slides.\r\n\r\nThe implications of developments in open learning will also be discussed in Chapter 10<\/a>.\r\n

1.7.4. MOOCs<\/h2>\r\nOne of the main developments in online learning has been the rapid growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In\u00a02008, \u00a0the University of Manitoba in Canada offered the first MOOC with just over 2,000 enrolments, which linked webinar presentations and\/or blog posts by experts to participants' blogs and tweets. The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment. In 2012, two Stanford University professors launched a lecture-capture based MOOC on artificial intelligence, attracting more than 100,000 students, and since then MOOCs have expanded rapidly around the world.\r\n\r\nAlthough the format of MOOCs can vary, in general they have the following characteristics:\r\n