Educational Technology: Motivating Students and Enhancing Learning

Educational technology is such a rabbit-hole. There are thousands of blogs, websites, TED talks, and journal articles about ways to integrate tech into your teaching environment. At the same time, there are thousands of teachers- of all grades- who bemoan the short attention span of students, who battle with personal tech in class, and who advocate for simpler teaching.

Librarians are more cutting edge than they typically think they are when it comes to being early adopters of new technology. In spite of our clunky ILSes, or perhaps because of them, libraries have pushed url-link resolvers, proxy server authentication, and web-asset management forward for years and years. The downside to that is that we tend to think students benefit only from our management of the technology instead of teaching them more about how things work and allowing students to really be in control of the tech.


My final project primarily uses "old" technology (in tech years) in a number of ways. The entire library learning module is in an online environment- in our case, Moodle. For most of our current student population in the adult studies program, this will be new technology. As our audience matures over the next ten years, I assume there will not be as much apprehension about online learning for this group.

   

I have a number of reasons and goals for choosing to make this course an online experience:

1. These students will have other courses in their program that use Moodle for course readings and other communications. The library class builds on, or reinforces, the use of that system. 
2. Distance students will not be using library resources in the physical library. The online class introduces them to the library in the way they will access it throughout their program. 
3. It is self-paced, so students can feel like they have mastery over the technology as they move through, and they won't feel like the technology is a barrier to their resource needs. 

For student motivation, I plan on using badges as a way to give immediate, positive feedback for their progress through the module. That will be new technology for me to implement and manage, as an instructor. And unless the students have a badge system at their place of employment, it will be new for them too.

The technology I'm most excited about it the use of EdPuzzle. I have worked on video tutorials for the past six months, but those are still a passive way to instruct students in a skill. I have posted those mostly as follow-ups to a face-to-face library session. EdPuzzle is built for K-12 and allows you to embed questions and reinforcements while the video is playing. Because of it's target audience, it's a little cheesy, but for now I think it will accomplish my goal. Its use is for immediate recall of a concept as students watch the video. Then we move back to Moodle for discussion and more in depth reflection of the process.

I did enjoy reading the Horizon Reports for Higher Education and for Libraries and I'm encouraged that they finally have libraries in their own category. Reading through them affirmed that technology moves at lightening speed, is difficult to predict, but that paying attention and anticipating change can help alleviate a lot of anxiety about  it.