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Section: Activities and Outcomes l
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Our goal is a self-study that can guide action at your
institution, resulting in improvement of outcomes. In
the past, it wasn't unusual for self-studies of technology
to focus on technology, presumably with the goal of deciding
whether to abandon technology, maintain it, or buy more.
While those may be possible policy options, it's much more
likely that the key to improving outcomes lies in
influencing the ways that students and faculty use available
technology.
The first step toward such influencing activities is to
understand the factors that have affected those activities
in the recent past. It's almost always the case that
technology is only one of many, many influences on such
activities.
So, for example, one way to get better support for
collaborative learning (based on use of your
institution's course management system) is to increase
the incentives and support for such academic
assignments, while lowering some of the barriers and
disincentives for faculty to make such collaborative
assignments. It's possible that none of those
changes in policy and practice have anything directly to
do with technology, yet the result of those changes
could well be a doubling of the value of the course
management system for learning, as gauged by increases
in collaborative activities that rely in part on its
online discussions, file sharing, and other
capabilities.
In other words, activities drive technology use far more
than the reverse. And to understand how to influence
activities, we first need to study them.
So your next task as a designer: how will you
study the factors influencing your activity or activities?
Which factors are most important to understand? What kinds
of inquiry and data will be the easiest, quickest way to
analyze them?
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