One of the subjects that I am currently developing for the Graduate Certificate in Leanring Design is called Predict: Current and Future Trends in Learning Design. Originally, I had wanted this subject to be an exploration of the directions that Leanring design might be heading in; I felt that there was sufficient interest and scholarship to make that a worthwhile endeavour. While there have been a lot of technologies developed and proposed for use in education over the last decade or so, I think there is value in exploring the extent and nature of their deployment. However, as I considered the subject a little more deeply and considered how best it might fit with the other subjects in the course, I realised that I wanted to make it a little more critical than I had originally envisioned. Instead of a survey of current and future technological trends, such as 3D printing or Virtual Reality, I also wanted to encourage students to think more critically about the application and validity of these technologies and their use in education.
This would fit in well with one of the professional identity ‘C’s of learning design that I have considered: that of critic. This is something that I had noticed through the market research and also my own interviews and also the job advertisements I had seen: there is an interest in learning designers having the skill to assess and evaluate different softwares and platforms to determine which is a best fit in a corporate or educational sense. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that this was a particularly valuable point: I know some technology using educators look at everything through the lens of one particular platform – e.g. every problem has a Google Apps solution – which just goes to prove the old adage that everything looks like a nail when all you’ve got is a hammer. However, this often doesn’t fit well with the realities of educational technology and the needs of schools or companies doing the training and making use of the software. This is perhaps part of the reason that so many technologies fail, and fail especially when applied in an educational sense. For example, there are MOOCs, which still linger on in some sense, but have had nowhere near the impact that they were expected to have in the early 2010s. Another example might be 3D printing and maker spaces, which were going to revolutionise enterprise and problem based learning: I’m yet to see that happen.
Of course, the reasons for that failure are more than just the technology in and of itself; there are issues of teacher applications and professional development, support and infrastructure and much more. Indeed, all of these ideas need to be canvassed as part of this Predict subject. I was partially inspired by Audrey Watters excellent article about the failures of EdTech, and so now I want the subject to focus more tightly on the critical aspect of future and current ed tech trends.