Review of journal

The role of ICT in higher education for the 21st century: ICT as a change agent for education


1.0 Introduction:

This paper is written by Ron Olive from Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. This paper highlights the various impacts of ICT on contemporary higher education and explores potential future developments. This paper discusses the role of ICT in transforming teaching and learning and seeks to explore how this will impact on the way programs will be offered and delivered in the universities and colleges of the future.
2.0 Content:

Education is a very socially oriented activity and quality education has traditionally been associated with strong teachers having high degrees of personal contact with learners. The use of ICT in education lends itself to more student-centred learning settings. With the world moving rapidly into digital media and information, the role of ICT in education becoming more and more important and this important will continue to grow and develop in the 21st century.

A growing need to explore efficiencies in terms of program delivery, the opportunities for flexible delivery provided by ICTs (Oliver & Short, 1997); the capacity of technology to provide support for customized educational programs to meet the needs of individual learners (Kennedy & McNaught, 1997); and the growing use of the internet and WWW as tools for information access and communication (Oliver & Towers, 1997). These factors have strengthened and encouraged moves to adopt ICTs into classrooms and learning setting.

As we move into the 21st century, the contemporary trends enable us to see large scale changes in the way education is planned and delivered as a consequence of the opportunities and affordances of ICT.

2.1 The impact of ICT on what is learned

Conventional teaching has emphasized content. Contemporary settings are now favoring curricula that promote competency and performance. Curricula are setting to emphasize capabilities and to be concerned more with how the information will be used than with what the information is.

2.1.1 competency and performance-based curricula

Competency and performance-based curricula tend to require access to a variety of information sources; access to a variety of information forms and types; student-centred learning settings based on information access and inquiry; learning environments centred on problem-centred and inquiry-based activities; authentic settings and examples; and teachers as coaches and mentors rather than content experts. New technologies will continue to drive these forms of learning further. As students and teachers gain access to higher bandwidths, more direct forms of communication and access to shareable resources, the capability to support these quality learning settings will continue to grow.

2.1.2 Information literacy

There is a need for educational institutions to ensure that graduates are able to display appropriate levels of information literacy. This is to ensure that the graduates demonstrate not only skills and knowledge in their subject domains but also general attributes and generic skills. Traditionally generic skills have involved such capabilities as ability to reason formally, to solve problems, to communicate effectively, to be able to negotiate outcomes, to manage time, project management, and collaboration and teamwork skills. The growing use of ICTs as tools of every day life have seen the pool of generic skills expended in recent years to include information literacy and it is highly probable that future developments and technology applications will see this skills growing even more.

2.2 The impact of ICT on how students learn

The use of ICT in education had moved from content-centred curricula to competency-based curricula are associated with moves away from teacher-centred forms of delivery to students-centred forms. Through technology-facilitated approaches, contemporary learning settings now encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning.

2.2.1 Student-centred learning

Technology has the capacity to promote and encourage the transformation of education from a very teacher directed enterprise to one which supports more student-centred models. Evidence of this today is manifested in: the proliferation of capability, competency and outcomes focused curricula; moves towards problem-based learning; increased use of the Web as an information source, Internet users are able to choose the experts from whom they will learn. Students using ICTs for learning purposes become immersed in the process of learning and as more and more students use computers as information sources and cognitive tools (Reeves & Jonassen, 1996), the influence of the technology on supporting how students learn will continue to increase.

2.2.2 Supporting knowledge construction

The emergence of ICTs as learning technologies has coincided with a growing awareness and recognition of alternative theories for learning that is constructivist principles. These principles posit that learning is achieved by the active construction of knowledge supported by various perspectives within meaningful contexts. In the past, the conventional process of teaching has revolved around teachers planning and leading students through a series of instructional sequences to achieve a desired learning outcome. Contemporary learning theory is based on the notion that learning is an active process of constructing knowledge rather than acquiring knowledge and that instruction is the process by which this knowledge construction is supported rather than a process of knowledge transmission (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996). Learning approaches using contemporary ICTs provide many opportunities for constructivist learning through their provision and support for resource-based, student-centred settings and by enabling learning to be related to context and to practice (Berge, 1998; Barron, 1998).

2.3 The impact of ICT on when and where students learn

ICT applications provide many options and choices and many institutions are now creating competitive edges for themselves through the choices they are offering students. These choices extend from when students can choose to learn to where they learn.

2.3.1 any place learning

Educational institutions have been offering programs at a distance for many years and there has been a vast amount of research and development associated with establishing effective practices and procedures in off-campus teaching and learning. This enables students to access courses and programs from their workplace. The communications capabilities of modern technologies provide opportunities for many learners to enroll in courses offered by external institutions rather than those situated locally. There are now countless ways for students completing undergraduate degrees for example, to study units for a single degree, through a number of different institutions, an activity that provides considerable diversity and choice for students in the programs they complete.

2.3.2 anytime learning

Through online technologies learning has become an activity that is no longer set within programmed schedules and slots. Learners are free to participate in learning activities when time permits and these freedoms have greatly increased the opportunities for many students to participate in formal programs so that the need for real-time participation can be avoided while the advantages of communication and collaboration with other learners is retained. As well as learning at anytime, teachers are also finding the capabilities of teaching at any time to be opportunistic and able to be used to advantage. Mobile technologies and seamless communications technologies support 24×7 teaching and learning. Choosing how much time will be used within the 24×7 envelope and what periods of time are challenges that will face the educators of the future (Young, 2002). The continued and increased use of ICTs in education in years to come, will serve to increase the temporal and geographical opportunities that are currently experienced.

2.4 Emerging Issues

A number of other issues have emerged from the uptake of technology whose impacts have yet to be fully explored.

2.4.1 Expanding the pool of teachers

In the past, the role of teacher in an educational institution was a role given to only highly qualified people. With technology-facilitated learning, there are now opportunities to extend the teaching pool beyond this specialist set to include many more people. The changing role of the teacher has seen increased opportunities for others to participate in the process including workplace trainers, mentors, specialists from the workplace and others. Through the affordances and capabilities of technology, today we have a much expanded pool of teachers with varying roles able to provide support for learners in a variety of flexible settings. This trend seems set to continue and to grow with new ICT developments and applications. And within this changed pool of teachers will come changed responsibilities and skill sets for future teaching involving high levels of ICT and the need for more facilitative than didactic teaching roles (Littlejohn et al., 2002).

2.4.2 Expanding the pool of students

In the past, education has been a privilege and an opportunity that often was unavailable to many students whose situation did not fit the mainstream. Through the flexibilities provided by technology, many students who previously were unable to participate in educational activities are now finding opportunities to do so. The pool of students is changing and will continue to change as more and more people who have a need for education and training are able to take advantage of the increased opportunities.

2.4.3 The cost of education

Compared to traditional forms of off-campus learning, technology-facilitated learning has proven to be quite expensive in all areas of consideration, infrastructure, course development and course delivery. The cost associated with the development of high quality technology-facilitated learning materials are quite high. We may have to brace ourselves for the advantages and affordances which will improve the quality of education in the near future to also increase components of the cost.

2.5 Stakeholders and influences

The various influences that have been discussed provide examples of an agent that has the capacity to influence education at all levels and hence to be an agent supporting and encouraging considerable change. When the future of education is considered in this way, it is interesting to speculate among the stakeholders, for whom the change will be the greatest. Clearly stakeholders for whom technology would seem to proffer the most influence and change are the students.
3.0 Conclusion

This paper has sought to explore the role of ICT in education as we progress into the 21st century. In particular the paper has argued that ICTs have impacted on education to date in quite small ways but that the impact will grow considerably in years to come and that ICT will become a strong agent for change among many educational practices. Learning should become more relevant to stakeholders’ needs, learning outcomes should become more deliberate and targeted, and learning opportunities should diversity in what is learned and who is learning. At the same time, quality of programs as measured by fitness for purpose should continue to grow as stakeholder groups find the offerings matches to their needs and expectations.