The need to review new Ed Tech before adoption can limit your institution’s ability to innovate. This session will help you streamline the process with good questions and best practices, focusing on five essential areas of inquiry: integration, accessibility, training, analytics, and measures of success.
Education technologies are an integral part of online learning. Each new technology brings the promise of greater learning with improved efficiency. Yet each new technology adopted carries the peril of technical problems, workarounds for poor integration, accessibility failures, inadequate training, compromised data privacy, and wasted time and money.
The responsibility of evaluating new technologies often falls to a small team at any given institution. This team needs to assess each new offering for a wide variety of potential problems such as an
- inability to integrate sufficiently, simply, and reliably
- awkward business models or provisioning
- inadequate consideration of accessibility standards or testing
- inability of the technology or team to scale or provide sufficient support
- underestimating the time and commitment required for faculty training
- forgetting to introduce new products and services to key departments
to name just a few.
The task can seem overwhelming -- something your presenters can personally attest to:
- Candis Shupe, Learning Resource Manager at WGU, who is currently working with over 100 different Ed Tech providers and leads a team in evaluating innumerable potential providers each year.
- David Lindrum, founder of Soomo Learning, who has worked through this process with hundreds of institutions over the past twelve years.
Over time and through many implementations, we have learned ways to streamline the process while making sure the right questions get asked in order to decrease the chances of problems during roll-out and after.
For this brief session we will focus on five key areas of inquiry:
Integration
- List each kind of integration needed or considered.
- For each integration, define the user experience and the technical handshake.
- Ensure purchasing, provisioning, and course replication will work for your school.
- Define methods for deep linking and navigation, with attention to variance from other tools in use.
- Specify the scale or volume at which you need the technology to function.
Accessibility & Reliability
- Select a clear accessibility standard. (.e.g WCAG 2.0 AA)
- Define how you will test for meeting the standard.
- If the content can be modified or created by faculty, establish a plan for review of new content.
- Make your expectations for mobile access clear.
- Establish standards for reliability, redundancy, and recovery plans.
Training & Communication
- Define the anticipated need for training of students, faculty, and staff.
- Scan your organization to find all staff who need to know about this release.
- Establish a plan for recurring training of future faculty, staff, and students.
- Clarify help desk services provided and any other support expected.
- Establish expectations, procedures, and points of contact for problems, maintenance, and ongoing improvement.
Analytics
- Discuss all data collected or potentially collectable by the provider.
- Consider available and potential reporting.
- Think through who will use these reports and how.
- Review processes for data privacy, backups, and archiving.
Measures of Success
- Clarify the provider’s offer and uncover assumptions.
- Agree upon a handful of success measures.
- Even before roll-out, schedule time to review results.
Each of these is a point at which a new technology deployment can fail. But you can reduce the risk of this failure by simply asking a few good questions and knowing what kind of answer you’re looking for. Establishing your standards, tests, and procedures can make the process faster, easier, and more effective.
Audience Engagement
In this sessions, we will each share the best of what we have learned about moving through these conversations with minimal time and fuss. For each of the five areas, we will frame the discussion and offer some war stories or best practices, and then call upon attendees to add to our collective understanding from their own experiences.
A PDF will be made available for download including
- rubrics and questionnaires used by WGU in evaluation of providers
- model responses for a few of the most important questions
- some of the questions we’ve found to be most productive
- as much as we can capture of the additions made through group discussion