Join your Lesley faculty colleagues for an exciting, immersive professional development opportunity!
The Summer Academic Technology Institute is an opportunity for faculty to participate in a learning community across disciplines and schools engaged in an exploration of the effective uses of technology in teaching, learning, collaboration, and scholarship. This event is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship, and organized by eLearning and Instructional Support. To apply for the Summer Academic Technology Institute, please complete the brief application form here.
All faculty — core or adjunct — are welcome to apply. Faculty who consider themselves basic technology users or who do not currently use technology in their teaching are especially encouraged to apply. Faculty selected through the application process receive a $500 stipend for participation in the institute.
The program features a 4-day institute in June, held at University Hall. Faculty engage in a rich mix of dialogue, hands-on practice, project-based learning, reflection, and application to explore innovative ways technology can be integrated into their teaching.
Examples of workshops from past Summer Tech Institutes include:
Putting Technology in Its Place
Designing Lessons for Engagement
OneDrive: Collaboration Made Easy
The Student Experience in Online Learning (panel)
Designing and Facilitating Online Discussions
Introducing Media Into Your Blackboard Course
Expectations for Summer Academic Technology Institute Participants
Faculty are expected to:
Participate in all four days (~9am to 4 pm) of the institute: June 5-8, 2017
Develop a technology-enhanced learning activity for a 2017-2018 course
Attend or participate in at least one professional development outreach activity during the 2017-18 school year
Important Dates
April 7, 2017
Applications Due
April 21, 2017
Participants Announced
June 5-8, 2017
Summer Institute
Application
To apply for the Summer Technology Institute, please fill out the 2017 application form.
With new technology developments in education constantly increasing and changing, how do you keep up with the latest technology trends for higher education? How do you decide which technologies to implement and how to do this effectively? Where can you find examples of what other universities and faculty are doing? One option is to read the 2014 Higher Education Edition of the Horizon Report, an annual publication of the New Media Consortium (NMC), in collaboration with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This annual publication, released early this year, examines key trends, challenges, and specific emerging technologies or practices that are predicted to have a major impact on higher education over the next five years. An international panel of experts in education, technology, and related fields identify the topics that appear in the report.
The report identifies six key trends grouped by estimated time of impact, six significant challenges grouped by difficulty, and six emerging technologies grouped by estimated time of adoption (1 year or less, 2 to 3 years and 4 to 5 years).
To give some examples, the report identifies key trends such as the “Growing Ubiquity of Social Media” and the “Integration of Online, Hybrid and Collaborative Learning” as likely to drive changes in higher education over the next 1 or 2 years. Significant challenges, according to the report, include “Low Digital Fluency of Faculty” and “Keeping Education Relevant”. Technology identified as having an important impact on higher education for the 1 year or less horizon include the “Flipped Classroom” and “Learning Analytics”. To find out more about these and other trends, challenges, and technologies in the report, you can download a free copy of the report from the New Media Consortium (NMC) here. You can also find out more about the research process behind the report by checking out the Horizon Report’s wiki.
The Horizon Report encourages and inspires discussion and this past May I was able to attend a 2014 Horizon Report Symposium that was presented at NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program) in Norwood, MA. The symposium, organized and led by Bryan Alexander (one of the Horizon Report’s expert panelists), offered the chance to attend a presentation and to discuss the report and it’s implications with other higher education professionals, including educational technologists, instructional designers, IT professionals, librarians, administrators, and faculty.
The presentation was structured around Bryan Alexander’s wiki resource for the 2014 NERCOMP Horizon Report symposium, which includes links to related articles, websites, videos and more, as well as notes generated from the day’s discussion. Throughout the presentation, participants shared concerns, success stories, and even failures around the implementation of various new technologies. As is often the case, in the end more questions were probably raised then answered, but it’s always helpful to hear issues and examples from other professionals who are working with technology in education.
Following are some key takeaways from the event:
It’s important to use new technology effectively to meet learning goals, rather than just for the sake of the new technology (even the most promising technology can be used poorly).
There is a need to devise ways to support faculty in learning new technologies and help them to implement the technologies in effective and beneficial ways.
There is a need to make sure the use of the technology is of benefit to the students and the learning process (especially in the case of technologies such as learning analytics).
It’s also important to consider issues of concern, such as distraction (especially with social media and mobile devices), increased faculty workload, student privacy, and digital citizenship, among others.
If you’d like to explore how some of the key trends and technologies from the Horizon Report can be applied to your own teaching (trends such as “The Growing Ubiquity of Social Media” or “Integration of Online, Hybrid and Collaborative Learning” and technologies such as the “Flipped Classroom”), contact eLIS at elis@lesley.edu.
Source for trends, challenges, and technology examples mentioned from the Horizon Report:
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freemam, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
From integrating engineering projects into K-12 education to new problem-solving processes in business, design thinking is an idea that is finding its way into areas that previously did not include such an approach. Many educators are finding that design projects provide authentic collaborative learning opportunities.
Designing thinking can also guide one’s approach to planning a course. Designing an online or hybrid course for the first time can be extremely challenging. For instructors who someday may teach in these modalities, planning a “blended activity” for a face-to-face course is a useful learning experience that serves as a great preparation for online or blended teaching. This planning process, including thinking around technology integration, benefits from a collaborative problem-solving approach. During last June’s Summer Technology Institute hosted by eLIS, instructional designers worked with small groups of faculty on identifying and working on such design projects. The week-long time period for the Institute was conducive to such work because it allowed the inclusion of both individual reflective time and collaborative discourse. The important interplay between these learning and thinking modes supports the challenging work of transforming face-to-face learning experiences into online or blended ones.
We encourage faculty members to approach this work as experimental and to consider pilot-testing the design and learning from the first iteration. If you would to learn more about how eLIS can support work of this type, please, please contact elis@lesley.edu or email John McCormick or Sarah Krongard.
