Are we really expecting technology in education to do all the job for us?

We are witnessing everywhere in the world a rapid diffusion of the use of technology for transforming face-to-face courses into online offers. This is what is happening also among Community colleges, Universities, adult and vocational training institutions and companies.

Everyone is saying that technology is the future of education and it seems like you cannot remain on the market if you will not be able to integrate technology into your traditional face-to-face courses. This will be the way how you will be able to reach more students and increase your enrollments while at the same time decrease your students’ drop out rates.

While these assumptions might be true in some ways since technology is evolving so quickly that it is impacting the educational sector as well, it seems like the use of technology disregards very often if it can add a plus or not on the quality of the training offered and on the students’ learning experience.

In this second blog article of mine I would like indeed to discuss about the reasons of the use of technology in online teaching and learning and most of all about if it owns any kind of added value mainly from a Pedagogical perspective. Being discussing here the online adult teaching and learning sector I would more precisely bring into account the Andragogical perspective rather than the pure pedagogical one, referring to the art of teaching adult people rather than to children.

So why should we embrace the use of new technology for teaching and learning nowadays? Because everyone does it? For surviving or competing into the national and international market? Or because it can actually provide a kind of added value to education? I strongly believe in the latter assumption since if technology is well used, online teaching and learning can actually become, in my view, as effective as, if not more, than traditional face-to-face education,… but technology cannot do it all alone.

Technology if well used in education can provide us for example with the chance to connect with people coming from all over the world, creating multicultural learning communities and environments that cannot actually exist in tradition face-to-face trainings. Inside these communities adult learners learn how to respect different cultures and views, learn how to share their practice and experience and learn from each others.

Indeed under an Andragogical perspective, adults learn when they find something connected with their professional practice, when they share their experience with other significant adults and when they play an active role into the learning process.

Through technology they can learn also how to work in small international teams for example with members connected together on the same platform accomplishing a common project while having different time zone and rhythms. They learn how to collaborate and to cooperate online together for reaching a common goal and they learn that this is not easy at all and that it takes time! Very often the learning journey online is more extended in its duration than the face-to-face one and so online learners spend more time together, and get to know each other a bit more and start building some kind of online relationship.

If the right strategy is used, technology can help in creating that sense of connectedness among learners and between the learners and the teacher, that can be compared with the one felt in face-to-face context. Continuous communication among students and between students and the teacher online can actually make the difference in the online journey that can appear less lonely than expected.

Of course technology helps all this to happen but behind its use, we should have clear aims, goals, principles, values and activities in mind to accomplish. For example if we ask our students to access some multimedia resources to reflect on them alone and to submit a quizz or a test, this becomes a completely different experience from the one planned inside an online community where students discuss together and assess each other using individual and personal feedback rather than via a quizz. I am actually wondering if the former example owns any kind of added value in terms of learning experience for the student even if high quality innovative multimedia learning materials are used? Again I am also wondering if the key of online students’ learning success, engagement and retention is in the ability of the online course designer to create activities and tasks that can help them learn, engage with one another and start building some kind of online relationship or on the use of the most sophisticated and innovative technologies per se?

I think that those who will survive in the Educational market will have the answer to this question and with the right combination of Andragogy and technology will have helped their students to reach a worthwhile and successful online learning journey together!