Pushing through technological limitations to transform higher education and increase student success

Marcio A. Oliveira, Assistant Vice President, Academic Technology & Innovation, University of Maryland

Marcio A. Oliveira, Assistant Vice President, Academic Technology & Innovation, University of Maryland

We are living through a period in higher education with unparalleled opportunities to reimagine learning and embrace innovative ways to expand access to education, advance the common good, and build a more inclusive global society beyond the digital transformation. The global pandemic has brought disruptions and underscored the importance of effectively integrating technology into learning practices. The classroom seems to have remained a solid nucleus of the learning experience but during the last two years, educators were forced to swiftly adjust their conventional, in-person teaching practices to incorporate more sophisticated digital strategies to support and diversify learning experiences. While we are making significant strides toward the future, there are still very basic challenges that need to be overcome to ensure that technology is purposefully designed and used to advance students’ ability to learn. The fast-tracked digitization of teaching presented unique growth opportunities, but also exposed significant gaps and vulnerabilities.

Technological Limitations

Let’s consider the recent growth in the usage of Learning Management Systems. While these platforms typically have robust collections of tools that enable content sharing, communication, and assessment, they have been primarily designed to support traditional ways of teaching. Most of them lack options that enable instructors to design courses in a way that easily reveals what is being learned. For example, to design courses that include a broad range of experiential learning opportunities, instructors have to find workarounds and adapt to the limited options currently available. It is very difficult to design courses where assessment, grading, and academic reporting are based on skills that students are expected to develop as they progress through their educational path. As a consequence, students are left unsure about their academic progress, with minimum confidence as to whether they have acquired the projected knowledge and skills needed to succeed in their courses and programs.

“The design of learning environments should embrace their full potential to proactively help universities to make high-quality and personalized education more accessible and affordable to all student populations”

Another critical vulnerability in existing learning platforms is their limited reporting capabilities, making it nearly impossible to monitor assurance of learning and students’ progress towards curricular goals. Analytics and dynamic reporting are becoming more crucial than ever to strategically innovate teaching, expand educational reach, and deliver exceptional learning experiences. If well designed, advanced digital educational platforms should help inform about learner variability, shape personalized educational experiences, and enable instructors to tailor their pedagogical strategies to best suit their students’ individual needs. This may also be a unique opportunity to take into account the complexity and interconnectedness of learning outcomes, academic success, and the individual student’s college life. The use of predictive analytics may help us to identify longitudinal patterns and trends and make projections about how learners are likely to plan their college routine and their learning strategies to succeed in a course and/or program. The tech industry and institutions of higher education have a lot of work ahead to fully embrace a data-informed culture in which dynamic data insights drive curriculum innovation and further student success.

Opportunities to Expand Learning

New cohorts of students will likely seek opportunities that place solving humankind’s problems at the center. Universities will need to make bold decisions to unlock growth and innovation, as such priority will drive students’ choices and where they invest their time and money. The design of learning environments should embrace their full potential to proactively help universities to make high-quality and personalized education more accessible and affordable to all student populations. This will enable us to expand access to academic offerings while ensuring that a global body of faculty, staff, and students collectively learns and thrives in a society that allows for full participation. To this end, we may need to shift our traditional conceptualization of teaching environments and make the students and their learning the solid nucleus. Soon we will be able to effectively leverage the use of virtual, augmented, and mixed realities to diversify and expand education. These groundbreaking projects must prioritize solutions that focus on new ways of learning, instead of trying to rebuild traditional classroom settings, or simply figuring out ways to create more elegant transitions between virtual and face-to-face experiences. Overall, computer-generated environments deployed in education should consider the lessons already learned and start offering tools that galvanize new instructional practices and easily afford active, collaborative, cooperative, and problem-based learning approaches.

I acknowledge that this editorial only captures a glimpse of challenges that could be collectively addressed. I invite others to take up the task of highlighting additional potential areas that can drive future priorities and help us transform higher education. This unique period requires strong, insightful, collaborative, and future-oriented leadership one that will not only broaden students’ access to high-quality education and yield significant enrollments but also serve humanity in an impactful and meaningful way. These deliberate efforts will directly impact inclusivity and access and unbind educational transformation.

Predictive Analytics

Learning Management

Digital Transformation