Introducing New Classroom Technologies: Balancing Comfort & Innovation

This post is motivated by a comment in "The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (2nd ed.)" Edited by Terry Anderson. The particular Chapter is "Developing an Infrastructure for Online Learning" by Davis, Little & Stewart. (See full citation and link for access below.)

"...how much do we employ technologies, which we know the students are already familiar with and have access to, versus those which are new and unfamiliar and/or which are expected to become widely available?" (2008, p. 123)

This question is something I realized I am considering on a daily basis, but am never explicitly asking. With a diverse student cohort, it can be difficult to find technologies that the entire class is comfortable with. Additionally, working with many individuals employed by the federal government, I often run into pushback when trying to integrate social media tools into the course due to security concerns.

Given the current workforce and emphasis on job-readiness of graduates, it makes sense to me that students should graduate with an increased knowledge base, but also familiarity with new technologies. One particular technology we use that is new for our students is our platform for hosting online simulations. We previously used facebook groups to host simulations, however with enough pushback we moved to a different interface that I don't believe is as user-friendly, but quieted the many concerns about having a Facebook account. This platform is entirely new for our students and we use it throughout the course for four different simulations. The simulations get progressively better as the students become more experienced with the technology. I need to find a way to effectively train students in this technology before they use it for the first time, so that their experiences with the simulations are all high quality, not just those at the end. It is hard to do this with simply a live-walk through of the platform which I have done previously. The simulations go quickly and it is the fast-paced nature combined with the new technology that often leads to confusion in the first week.  This, and my previous post about training instructors in the course technologies has left a lot to think about and look for solutions within the remaining course readings and the rest of this program.

Davis, A., Little, P., & Stewart, B. (2008). Developing an infrastructure for online learning. In T. Anderson (Ed.), The theory and practice of online learning (2nd ed.) (pp. 121-142). Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/05_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf