JISC Digifest, Designed Digital

At the JISC Digifestival in Birmingham.
Opening keynote from Diana Oblinger , CEO of EDUCAUSE on Designed Digital.

Many things in our institutions that we call digital are bolt-ons, or retrofitted. We're still not designing digital. Our role is to design and implement a true digital experience for our staff and students.
Digital not just about work, but about society, especially civic engagement. We need to capture ideas to crowd source innovation,

Demographic changes drive new consumption patters.

How can we use our expertise as IT Professionals to drive changes in education?

Student Engagement
When you are engaged, you learn more. Use the best technology has to offer, not just text on the screen to produce an immersive, collaborative learning experience. Example of molecule in 3D.

Higher order learning comes from complex challenges. Gamification can assist this, integrating game elements into simulations and scenarios. Transform assignments into challenges.
Practice helps develop expertise. Also, generates data. Develop practice environments, virtual client simulation, artificial intelligence interactive agendas. And collect the data, use to feedback to students and teachers.
You can do many things with data. Feedback to instructor, can track student learning and see where you need to intervene for example.
With large amounts of data, patterns emerge that can be used for personalisation. Creating individual learning pathways for examples which are tailored to student needs and behaviours using adaptive learning engines.

Student empowerment
Not all of our students are the same. Some lack sense of belonging, some don't believe in ROI of investment, some have financial worries. Many are juggling coursework and work.
Some examples of how good IT can assist.
Career coach, a tool that links to local employment trends, income potential, required education.
Students need help with complex lives. Counselling and intervention software can monitor, engage and support students. Case management, dealing with student holistically, bringing together data from different services. Early alert system can make a difference to student completion rate.
Predictive analytics and intervention can advise students on how they are progressing through a course.

Alternative models
Education is a tightly interconnected interdependent system.
We now live in a course rich world, eg MOOCs and private providers. Finding ways of bringing these in to system by giving them credits.
Competency based education big in the US. Demonstrate mastery by completing tasks. Many student systems don't support these different models.
So, instead of IT leading, we're pulling things back.
Delivery systems and support models need to change to support different models, eg work based learning.

There's lots left to do in this digital world. It's about designing for digital, and about people and machines, not one or the other.

Questions to ask ourselves:
What will it take to exceed expectations tin this digital world?
Do we have the capabilities required to deliver value from IT?
How can we optimise education for a digital future?






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Location:Birmingham,United Kingdom