According to an announcement made at the annual Educause conference earlier this month in Chicago, the new eLearning 2.0 project will explore the potential of emerging ed-tech technologies to transform how faculty approach instruction in the years to come. The initiative will be sponsored and supported by the ed-tech company Class Technologies.
“The emergence of AI and new virtual classroom technologies will be significant catalysts for change across all sectors of American higher education,” Casey Green, founder of The Campus Computing Project, said in a statement announcing the project. “Campus officials are eager for data and guidance that will benefit their institutions, faculty and students. We are launching the eLearning 2.0 Project to provide timely data and insights to help academic institutions navigate an exciting and high-impact future.”
Green told Government Technology that the project will draw its findings from conversations with a broad national network of campus officials from higher ed institutions, adding that the study will be completed and released in January. He said the research aims to generate new data about how AI and other emerging classroom technologies will contribute to better institutional outcomes and how those tools will affect academic integrity, curriculum planning, advising, career counseling and instructional design.
Noting that the topic of AI tools was the elephant in the room at many if not all panels at this month’s Educause conference, Green said the direction of AI ed-tech tools and policies on them in the higher ed sphere remains uncertain.
“It’s uncharted territory with tremendous potential and some potential problems as well. We’re hearing a lot about the problems. We’re hearing a lot about the potential,” he said. “We don’t know the direction [AI ed-tech tools will take], but we do know that something’s happening here."
While much of the discussion about how AI tools — specifically generative AI tools like ChatGPT — should be used ethically in colleges and universities, Class Technologies CEO Michael Chasen noted that ed-tech developers have been working in recent years to develop new AI-driven platforms that can assist with lesson planning, grading and instructional design and allow instructors to focus more on teaching itself. He added that the use of AI tools in general is already becoming increasingly ubiquitous across the higher ed landscape today.
“We’re looking at AI as a way to actually help instructors,” he said. “We give teachers an AI teaching assistant that automatically transcribes the whole class, and all the materials from the class.”
Green said the study will also take a closer look at other ed-tech trends, such as the emergence of HyFlex and hybrid learning models that combine digital tools for remote learning with in-person learning, which have grown in popularity since the pandemic first forced universities to offer more remote learning options. He added that the study will also take a look at how classroom technologies like learning management systems and video conferencing tools have improved for education applications, as well as the role tools such as these will play in higher ed learning in the years to come.
“This is about looking at what goes forward,” Green said. “Learning management systems do a lot more and they do it a lot better. ... Video has also emerged as a stable and increasingly essential resource, and of course, over the last 12 months, there’s this whole issue of AI.”
In addition, Green said, the study will examine how colleges and universities have made use of COVID-19 federal relief funding in recent years, which he said varied across institutions depending on their size and tech capabilities before the pandemic.
“The schools that made decisions years ago in terms of infrastructure resources, technology and adopting learning management platforms and technology resources for students did quite well; others had to scramble,” he said. “Some campuses had strategies for [addressing the digital divide]. Some campuses created strategies for that in partnership with technology providers that didn’t exist in February 2020.”
