Who knows what the future will hold. If in ten year, educational repositories, learning objective, and LMS/LCMS technologies are readily available, education will change for the better. Educators will have access to teach their students from different perspectives. With open access to all educators, there will be so much potential to expand what is currently only exposure. There will be the opportunity to instantly share ideas and communicate with parents and students instantly. Having equal and free access will increase cross-curricular teaching and development of expanded curricula. Students could download homework or find resources that are not available at the school level. Hopefully the increase of equal and free access to educational materials will not make non-educators feel teachers are not longer needed. Although the technology will expand out possibilities, that human contact is a resource no technology could ever replace!
Learning Objects & Educational Repositories
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May 10, 2009 at 8:52 pm |
Jolandra,
One thought I have about learning resources being more widely available online is that a lot of background learning could go on at home and class time could be spent in higher order thinking–critically discussing, analyzing, and evaluating information that was obtained at home, online. This move alone could help improve student achievement. What do you think?
May 17, 2009 at 3:35 am |
I agree. This would help so much because this would eliminate the wasted learning time. This would help build background so students are knowledgeable when attending face-to-face courses.
-Jolandra
May 11, 2009 at 12:59 am |
“Hopefully the increase of equal and free access to educational materials will not make non-educators feel teachers are not longer needed. Although the technology will expand out possibilities, that human contact is a resource no technology could ever replace!”
Hi, Jolandra,
I don’t think that this will be the likely case. Educators’ roles may change, but they won’t become obsolete. In many subject areas, we may evolve more into a form of mentor or guide, leading students to the resources they need and teaching them how to filter those resources and apply them in new and meaningful ways. Also, many subjects simply will not lend themselves very easily to learning outside of a classroom setting. Chemistry is an example. A lot of other subjects need the leadership of a teacher to facilitate discussions, collaboration, etc. Now, might we be able to work from our homes more, much like the instructors in our degree program? That might be interesting!
May 14, 2009 at 3:31 am |
One of my coworkers has been creating learning objects for his computer tech class. It is stored on the school’s intranet, so it’s not available to everyone, but as he and I were discussing project Merlot, I got the idea that perhaps moving my lectures to podcasts for next year might be a better way to approach that aspect of learning.
As I have thought about it, by putting the lecture on the podcasts, allowing students time in class to download the podcast to their MP3 player during class once and then assigning the lecture as homework, it would free up a lot of time. Then I got to thinking about it, why not create a district wide learning object repository? I know there are a wide variety of repositories already, but perhaps some of the reason that teachers at the elementary and secondary level don’t contribute is that the idea of contributing to a larger one is intimidating. Perhaps one within a district would be less intimidating, then if multiple districts created repositories, they could be linked together and voilla! you have a larger repository.