Final Synthesis Reflection
Me
My name is Nidal Khalifeh. I am a proud father of two with a passion for edtech. Born in 1982 I went to eight different schools throughout my K-12 life. I did not do well in school. I am not sure what the reason was but this was in the past and now we are in the present. I started enjoying education when I choose my topics “University years” and even more when I was able to also choose the time and place “Distance learning”. I believe this is how I fell in love with edtech and the flexibility it can offer to learners. This is why I am here in the MET program
My career started in 2004 when I enrolled as a sales employee at my father’s factory. In 2005 my father started focusing more on the factory and less on the trading business we had since 1982. I decided to takeover the trading business and improve it. The trading business used to sell stationery & office machinery. Today it is one of the top companies in smart-buildings, home-automation, video conferencing, edtech, audio & video solutions, IT solutions, and security solutions. I did not quit on the factory. In 2008 I decided to add an interactive whiteboard to the product line and it is now doing great. Moreover, in 2012 I started working on building a learning management software. Today “2016” we launched a pivot of what we started in 2012 to become EDaura “The Teachers’ app”, which is a simply and easy to use free LMS for teachers and students.
ETEC565A
Throughout my ETEC 565A course I learned a great deal. The course took place in two virtual environments as a delivery mechanize. First the course started on Blackboard, the official university portal that we are as learners familiar with. Second the course moved to a WordPress environment that gave both the educator and the learner more flexibility, less limitations and better design or UX. ETEC 565A assignments are designed to build knowledge and experience on top of each other, resulting with a usable/real product. Furthermore, such design scaffolds and connects different skills acquired by learners throughout the course in a one complete product. ETEC 565A included Twitter as a social networking aspect of the course. Social media is considered an essential space in todays educational environments (Bates, 2014). I noticed how my peers twitted about the course and how their tweets showed in the course page side-menu.
The ETEC 565A allowed us to use different edtech tools such as; web publication, LMS, Online communication, multimedia, and social media. I did not engage as expected with my peers due to a stress of managing the launch of my new product EDaura. Yet I learned a great deal from the posts my peers shared throughout the different discussions. Participation in a digital learning environment is essential for learning (Jenkins, 2004) and I wish I had more time to engage with my peers.
The ETEC 565A course focused on creating an understanding for the need to have a framework when selecting different types of technologies for education. I used SECTION framework (Bates & Poole 2003) to assess my edtech tools. I consider it to be comprehensive and takes into account different variables effecting the learner, the content, the educator and the environment. One of the most important variables that SECTION framework covers is the organizational issues “the environment”. I strongly believe that the environment is what we learn from and it must be rich and informative for learners (Vygotsky, 1929).
I found the International Society for Technology in Education ISTE website a useful and rich resource for educators seeking to deploy technology inside their classrooms. The “National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers” (or NETS) is an excellent resource to set the expectations for education technology & teachers (ISTE, 2008). Educators must facilitate & inspire learners, use digital age tools and assessments, model for their learners how to use technology, model good-digital citizen behaviors, and nurture entrepreneurship and leadership skills for their learners.
I worked with my peers on a group assignment to build a rubric on selecting the proper LMS. It was a very interesting experience as each of use had different concerns on what a proper LMS must look like. We worked in a synchronous and asynchronous environment that supported our learning (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer 1999). We used Google Docs and Google Hangout to achieve the synchronous and asynchronous communications. Moreover, I found it very interesting how mobile learning or m-learning is a very important part of the digital learning space. Mobile learning can motivate learners through curiosity, challenge, recognition, control and cooperation (Ciampa, 2013).
I selected Moodle as one of two options provided in the ETEC 565A assignments. Moodle is open source yet requires a complex setup when first installed on servers and the user experience is difficult for educators who are new to the Moodle environment. I used assignments as a core formative assessment method in the design of my Moodle course “Building a successful startup” in order for learners to apply their knowledge (Gibbs & Simpson 2005). Furthermore, Learning management Systems are platforms that offer different features that are found to be important for education all under one roof. Throughout my experience in building a course on Moodle I estimate that a course of 4 units (1-2 weeks each) requires at least 72 hours of work if the content and design are ready.
It is important that we work to develop different strategies to support vast levels of interactions within the digital course (Anderson, 2008). One of the media content presented in my Moodle course is my digital story. I used Go Animate tool to build a short animated video that illustrates my own experience in the entrepreneurship field. Educators need to use creative and engaging tools with their learners. The digital story creates a relationship between the learner and the teacher and the learner and the content. I selected Go Animate because it allows for both visual and audio delivery of the digital story, which accommodate for different learning styles (Valley, 2011).
My Future Plan
Today I am focusing on EDaura. The platform that I have been working on for the last four years. I will be adding different tools and features as the product grows. I will keep following edtech influencers and educators on the social media in order to stay up-to-date with what they are expecting from the edtech industry. I wish to engage more in groups and organizations researching and studying different technologies and how such technologies can be deployed in the educational sector. Furthermore, I need to deepen my understanding in existing frameworks used to assess and evaluate different technologies. Such frameworks can be an outline for my next product or feature.
I will keep an open eye on my own children. How they learn and how they interact with new technologies. My daughter is using augmented reality on Snapchat without even knowing what it is. Snapchat is just a game for her. My son expects all screens to be touch and interactive. Both insist that technology is easy to use, available and connected, which means there is no place in the future for complex and disconnected systems. If I want to build edtech solutions for the next generation I need to stay close to them and understand their expectations towards technology.
I am also trying to find a way to help the less fortunate to access high quality learning. Distant learning is a good tool for university level yet when it comes to children we need to be careful how we design such environments. I do not think MOOCs as we know them will fit in such age groups. I wish to achieve this goal by build a space where teachers from allover the world participate in giving free online sessions for students on different topics in a synchronous & asynchronous manner. This can be possible with the growth of internet access around the world and the reduction in cost of owning technology.
Moving forward I seek to explore different technologies that can aid the educational process. I now have my “teachers’ app” product EDaura that is being used now by educators from around the world. I plan to understand how augmented reality can help in the educational sector. It can be an effective tool inside the classroom if enough content or creative tools are provided to the concept (Billinghurst & Duenser, 2012). Such tools can replace labs and offer learning experiences to students located in poor schools that cannot afford building labs for different subjects.
Virtual reality is becoming more hot in the technology sector after Microsoft finally released HoloLens. Again such technology is bounded with the content and tools built for it. I believe that not much content is being built for education when compared to entertainment. Yet again the virtual reality field is a space that I wish to explore.
I see the future of edtech as unified. Students will master writing code. Different programmable products both hardware and software will emerge. Learners will build learning as they learn. Web 2.0 will become Web 0. which means that people or young people or learners are capable of building environments from scratch “Zero” and make their own rules “Open/Closed”. We can see that trend today in the dark web (Bradbury, 2014). I hope that I can be part of this development and make learning better for our future generation
References
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/ (Chapter 7, point 6)
Bates, T., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Billinghurst, M., & Duenser, A. (2012). Augmented reality in the classroom. Computer, 45(7), 56-63.
Bradbury, D. (2014). Unveiling the dark web. Network Security, 2014(4), 14.
Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved fromhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Retrieved fromhttp://www.anitacrawley.net/Articles/GarrisonAndersonArcher2000.pdf
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers
Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled promise: Formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, i, 67-80. Retrieved from http://www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/jenkins.pdf
Microsoft, HoloLens. Retrived from https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us
Valley, K. (2011). Learning styles and courseware design. Research in Learning Technology,5(2)
Vygotsky, L. S. (1929). The problem of the cultural development of the child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, id, 414-434.