Technology in Education
Essay 6. Using Educational Technology to Enhance Learning and Teaching
Introduction Information technology (IT) offers tremendous promise for enhancing the academic experience. Educational technologies include not only the Internet, which provides access to university websites directly tied to courses as well as to resources around the world, but also innovations in recording, collaborating, and responding technologies that offer enhanced environments for scholarly interaction and intellectual pursuit. These technologies are valuable when they serve the larger educational goals of the university: to create active learners who not only master the content of their chosen fields, but also develop techniques and modes of critical thought that will enable them to be informed and discerning citizens and contributors to their professions. Most UCLA students are immersed in information technology in their daily lives. They expect that their academic lives will be similarly rich in technology, and that they will leave UCLA as technology-savvy graduates. Both faculty and students are end users of educational technology, and from it they gain vastly improved access to course materials and to one another. But crucially, the technology landscape now includes a rich mixture of new kinds of course materials: discipline-specific multi-media content, simulations, and applications, as well as tools for communication, collaboration, writing, and research. Educational technology holds the promise of creating more interactive classes, engaging students more deeply and more actively in the course content, and contributing to a student’s learning of complex concepts by adapting to the student’s level and progression of understanding. To improve the learning experience significantly and consistently across the undergraduate and graduate curricula, however, UCLA, like comparable institutions, faces many challenges in developing practices, policies, and resources to adapt to ever-changing
Introduction Information technology (IT) offers tremendous promise for enhancing the academic experience. Educational technologies include not only the Internet, which provides access to university websites directly tied to courses as well as to resources around the world, but also innovations in recording, collaborating, and responding technologies that offer enhanced environments for scholarly interaction and intellectual pursuit. These technologies are valuable when they serve the larger educational goals of the university: to create active learners who not only master the content of their chosen fields, but also develop techniques and modes of critical thought that will enable them to be informed and discerning citizens and contributors to their professions. Most UCLA students are immersed in information technology in their daily lives. They expect that their academic lives will be similarly rich in technology, and that they will leave UCLA as technology-savvy graduates. Both faculty and students are end users of educational technology, and from it they gain vastly improved access to course materials and to one another. But crucially, the technology landscape now includes a rich mixture of new kinds of course materials: discipline-specific multi-media content, simulations, and applications, as well as tools for communication, collaboration, writing, and research. Educational technology holds the promise of creating more interactive classes, engaging students more deeply and more actively in the course content, and contributing to a student’s learning of complex concepts by adapting to the student’s level and progression of understanding. To improve the learning experience significantly and consistently across the undergraduate and graduate curricula, however, UCLA, like comparable institutions, faces many challenges in developing practices, policies, and resources to adapt to ever-changing