Here is my inaugural blog posting for our EPSY556 course. I have been blogging for a while, about ed-tech but also about other random items going on in my life. I don't even think I have an audience. My friends and family use it to check up on me mostly, so I will be separating the CTER posts out at this URL: http://epsy556.withaq.net

An instructor I work with asked me the question "What is the future of eLearning, or learning in general?" This happened to be an instructor who teaches four business management courses online at our school. My role is the eLearning program director and I manage course creation and maintenance, instructional design, and the LMS system our online courses live in. I don't know, I told him. Learning's future depends on so many factors today. I noticed first off that he didn't ask "What is the future of teaching? After all, we maintain a healthy business relationship, he comes to me with Word documents and questions, I try to answer, and between us we build a course together. But does teaching or learning come first? If we argue that learning comes first, that our students are in a "ready state" all the time; then the future of learning will be dictated by how our students live their lives, what they need, how they live, and we must examine how we fit in.

Ubiquitous technology is going to be a reality. You walk outside into the quad and students are on laptops, mobile computing devices, and digital audio players. They have more commitments and are time-poor. We need to meet them half-way since we cannot, in the 21st century, expect them to sit in one place and devote 100% of their attention to us for a three hour stretch.

As part of this realization, we have been using our our eLearning system to set-up web-enabled courses where instructors move to a paperless format and post their lectures in the web site prior to class time. This leaves the class time open for discussion and debate on topics, and there is less time spent on logistics and textbooks. While this was framed as a "time-saver" to our instructors, we were also responding to numerous calls from students frustrated with using email and Facebook to collaborate with their teachers and other classmates. The organization was a plus for our teachers, but the real benefit was extending the learning beyond the walls of the classroom and beyond the usual chore of "homework."

With the societal move to digital, there is no excuse why we cannot continue to leverage this medium to capture our thoughts and experiences and reuse them anywhere we can in order to teach. We have cell phones, most of them have cameras. If you teach a natural science class and are out on a stroll on the weekend, snap some pictures and send them to Flickr. You can ask your students to tag them for homework. Better yet, record some of your lectures and post them to your school's website for download, or even iTunes U. We soon might want to look at teachers as "learning providers." I know, I hate the way that term sounds... But if we consider the idea that students are learning all the time (maybe just not the right things) and expecting more flexibility and relevance in their instruction, then we have to adjust. We need to be willing to make curriculum and teaching available to them on their turf, which means leaning on tools like school web sites, social networking tools, and audio and video capture tools.

Looking outward a few more years, we may also be encountering students that have taken an option to "attend" their course online via video conferencing tools, or they may attend online only part of time and in person for the rest. How do we adjust our instruction to handle a hybrid or blended teaching model where some students may be on the other side of the country, or the world? Are we prepared to teach to a screen and a class of twenty "live" students at the same time? This may not be something we can choose for ourselves, it will most likely be an expectation if we continue to set the bar higher and higher in an effort to keep up with our own students.