Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Educators are not risk averse and complacent

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

One thing we saw with the onset of the pandemic was that educators were not prepared to use digital media and to teach online, this despite the twenty years of the development in the field they've had to learn and adapt, so there is an argument beyond anecdote to make that educators are risk averse and complacent. This observation aside, though, I am entirely in agreement with the tone and argument in this post, a criticism of a Times Higher Education article arguing that educators should jump on board with virtual reality. The context was a Fordham instructor who had a VR company create three learning scenarios for her, which she then tried out in her class on entrepreneurship. Every part of that context was (a) not original - I could point to dozens of similar experiments reported in the literature and the popular press, including work we're doing here at NRC, and (b) not scalable - most instructors can't just work with the president of a VR company, and can't indulge in the luxury of a technology rollout that stands a good chance of failing.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 24, 2024 04:59 a.m.

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