Dive Brief:
- Each generation of students arriving on campus does so with more advanced mobile phones than the ones preceding them, making it important for faculty to keep up.
- The University of Central Florida addresses this need with a Mobile Essentials course for instructors so they can effectively integrate devices into their courses and prepare for hiccups.
- Key advice for using mobile include designing new courses with mobile in mind from the beginning, taking a broad approach that is flexible to changing technology, reflecting on where mobile fits into good pedagogy, and assessing effectiveness on a regular basis.
Dive Insight:
A recent study by consulting firm Deloitte found a half-life of technology skills of just 2.5 years, meaning educators who learn concrete skills in timely trainings cannot expect to survive with them alone for very long. Beyond incorporating mobile phones into classroom learning, instructors should be increasingly expected to get comfortable with video. These teachers will soon be working with a generation that spent their entire lives exposed to instructional apps and videos through smartphones, tablets, and computers.
In California, the state’s community colleges have teamed up with workforce development platform Grovo to offer a catalog of online digital skills courses to the system’s 87,000 faculty, staff, and administrators. For schools without internal training capacity, such partnerships may be a necessity to build the right talent.