Dive Brief:
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Ben Rossi writes in Information Age about the emergence of educational technology, and how colleges and universities could become more effective with Integrated Learning Systems by using them for more than regurgitating old styles of instruction on new equipment.
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He writes that ed tech should be more than just an innovative way of educational delivery, but part of the education itself by allowing students and teachers to create their own questions, answers and theories on a variety of elements on a given subject.
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Technology has the capacity for education to replace the currency of grades and test scores with imagination and creation in action, a necessity for an industry which spent more than $6 billion on teaching technology in 2015.
Dive Insight:
Several colleges and universities are working to reform higher education into spaces for innovation and commercial development. The University of Connecticut, Arizona State University, and Princeton University are among a handful of schools encouraging students to find entrepreneurial niches and to take learning and career passions beyond the classroom.
But most of these efforts do not require wide-ranging technology to inspire creativity, rather, startup funding to help establish ideas with technology. Colleges which forge industrial partnerships and community-based agreements to bring business to campus communities are the institutions that will find great gains through the academic enterprise, and the revenue which typically accompanies them.