(h817 - block 1, activity 16)

Working in a organisation which is not primarily focused on education, none of the emerging techonologies mentioned in Johnson and Adams (2001) had yet had a significant impact on training.  There is however a lot of potential in most of them for learning and teaching in the travel industry and I would like to highlight the follwoing three technologies.

1. Tablet computing

Many of our learners need to be on the road quite a lot to do their job:

• they are usually responsible for several geographically distributed destinations
• they often rotate destinations from holiday season to holiday season
• they need to be close to customers who are travelling themselves

Because tablets are highly mobile and combine most of the functionalities of laptops and smart phones and in addition can also be used to present products like for example excursions to customers using text, pictures, and videos, etc., many of our staff at the destinations are equipped with tablets.  Therefore it is only logical that we are currently looking into improving our software courses for tablets.  

With a colleague, I am currently looking into an interesting new feature - though not restricted to mobiles - which will be released with the next version of Adobe Captivate.  It will enable learners and trainers to communicate via Twitter from within a Captivate eLearning module.

It works by registering a Twitter account when publishing the course.  This then allows you to tweet questions about each slide. When students launch the course, they can review and reply to the questions you have tweeted. Likewise, they can tweet questions to you.

This really could add an exciting social context to programed elearning content.  

For those who are interested, have a look at the short demos of the Twitter Widget via YouTube:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6FeQ_g3RaE&feature=share&list=UULpsk3UF7lh5l9fVkLIqu6g
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Mf8BYFpSs
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBzPz9eKqAU&list=UULpsk3UF7lh5l9fVkLIqu6g
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNwtuhKLBU

2. Learning analytics

Our organization has only recently introduced a new business analysis system. Its primary focus is analysis of financial data, but the critical business needs seem to be more or less covered by now and the team supporting the application has gained enough know how to plug in other systems and source their data.  Once there is a sufficiently solid database it would be very interesting to combine it with data from our VLE and create reports to measure the effectiveness of learning initiatives.

3. Augmented reality

There are obvious opportunities for the tourism industry to use augmented reality, e.g. provide locations with additional information such as historical maps or interactive audio visual content.  But of course I can also think of similar usage for educational purposes, e.g. to teach expert destination knowledge.  In this highly competitive market, the ability to offer niche advice is a key factor for a tour operator and AR could be a way to contextualize such knowledge.

References

Johnson, L. and Adams, S. (2011) Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011–2016, NMC Horizon Report Regional Analysis, Austin, TX, The New Media Consortium; also available online at http://www.nmc.org/ publications/ technology-outlook-uk-tertiary-education (accessed 3 March 2013).

(H817 - block 1, activity 7)

1. What drives innovation?

Innovation understood as ‘doing something different’ can have very dissimilar drivers. Three of them concerning education are:

• Ethical drivers: Education is considered as a basic human right and stated as such in article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Any innovation - technical or other - which helps to making education accessible to a wider audience which has previously been excluded from it should naturally find a driver in the governments, institutions, and otherwise organized individuals who claim to to adhere to this declaration.

• Economical drivers: Innovations can help reducing costs of providing education, offer new opportunities to attract learners and gain market share, or raise an institutions profile.  As educational institutions are acting in a more and more competitive environment, the capability of influencing these factors will necessarily favor respective innovations.

• Emotional drivers: Change is usually embraced by some and rejected to others. Curiosity, inquisitiveness, fear can help or hinder innovations.  This is especially relevant in the educational context, because changes usually not only create new training needs which need not only be met for those who are keen to learn, but - more challenging - for those who have difficulties keeping pace with technological developments.

2) Does an innovation have to be useful for the learners?

Innovations are not necessarily useful to the learners. Economical drivers might lead to innovations which are beneficial to learners (lower fees, broader access, higher quality, better support, etc), but need not necessarily be. A good example was given by Alessandro Saroli in the tutor forum: advanced learning analytics can lead to institutions/tutors focusing on successful learners and trying to avoid statistically weaker (in whatevher respect) ones.

3) Should innovation lead to far-reaching changes in practice for the learners or the teachers? Or both?

It very much depends on the context whether innovations lead to far-reaching changes in practice and who is affected by it.  But according to my undestanding of innovation (see blog entry of  11 Feb 2013), it should have at least lead to a change in a learning-relevant area.  To judge this, I did find John Baglow’s approach (in H817 forum) to use criteria of other, established learning situations, as for example from Jones, B.F., et al. (1995) for classroom teaching:

• learners should be engaged in authentic tasks

• assessments should be based on learners’ performance of real tasks

• learners should be interacting with each other

• they should work collaboratively

• the teacher is a facilitator in learning

• learners learn through exploration

If one of these areas undergoes a change in common practice it can be called an innovation - affecting the learner, the teacher, or both.

References

Jones, B.F., et al. (1995) 'Plugging In'