 Yn ystod, dweud i'r llwyddiol iawn i'r ddau gwlad gennym ni i gyd yn ysgolio'r dyfodol hon. Rwy'n gweithio yw'r gwlad yn teimlo chi'n gweithio ar y moddiol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio ar y moddiol. Ac maen nhw'n gweld yw'r sicr. Gweithio. Rydym yn Y Oxford University, ymddai'n ddau am Llywodraethorsiol a Llywodraethor, Roedd ymarfer ymgylchedd Wrth i'r unrhyw ddeall hyd a relationshipaidd yw fynd i'r unrhyw bwysig. Felly ar y cyfrannu o'r uniondiad o'r unrhyw ddeall, ac yn gyfodusol er ag ysgrifol yma, mae yna'r bwysig ar hyn a'r gael eu rheidiau gwirio. Rydym yn gwybod am gyfrannu ar rhan o'r dyfodol, ac mae'r ddau i'r gwirio, yn gweithio ar 5 o 5 o 10 o'r unrhyw peth yn Oeddol. GS Research has culminated in the Special Interest Group, ELY Sig, a which I'm currently chair of, which has about 1600 members at last count which is a national group of people interested in conducting learning experience research and looking at the outputs of it and making sure that has had impact. So what I wanted to do this morning was to give you a bit of an overview of the 10 years of learner experience research and where we've got to a ddim yn edrych yn ymgyrch gweithredu yma ymlaen nhw'n cyhoeddu ar y cyfrannu ymlaen, yn y 16-19 yr oed, yn fawr y byd, yn amlwg y byd, ac yn ymlaen y byd, yn ymlaen y byd, ymlaen y byd, yn ymlaen y byd, ac ymlaen y byd yn ei wneud o'u cyfrannu ymlaen. Fy fryswp yw'r pryd yn y gweithio sy'n arweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ddweud a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y dyfodol. One is about understanding digital learning or online learning in a really holistic fashion. So we talked, mentioned e-portfolios earlier in the introduction. And when we've gone out and we've talked to learners and asked them about how they experience e-portfolios, they tell us how difficult it is to borrow dad's laptop or their son's laptop or the fact that it's got a crack in the screen or they can't quite work out how to sort out the virus software so that they can upload their own things. We really have to understand it in context. We have to understand how they experience online learning within the context of the discipline as well as the home and the organisation. So that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about was the holistic nature of learning experience. And the second thing I wanted to talk about is how it's really different for everyone. And it's something that we've struggled with a lot in the field is to say, how do we make sense of all the difference? Every time we go out and talk to learners, they tell us a completely different set of things. How do we try and organise that in order to make any recommendations about what to do on the basis of it? And then I said there were two things. Let's go for a third thing. And the third thing I guess is the historical perspective of how things are changing and how we react to that. So I'll get the book plugs in right at the beginning. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about is summed up in this pair of books. But it's also quite interesting how things have changed. So the first one, Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, was first published in 2007. And it was all about design for learning. And it was all about some of you nodding. She's great, familiar with it. And it was about how we prepare our courses in such a way that they prepare our learners for a digital age. And then the second collection, both edited collections, is about how learners are responding to all the design work that we've done. And that was quite a shift in emphasis and understanding for us. And then, of course, we had to go back and revise the first one, which is now in its second edition, in response to what we'd found out about learner experience. So a lot of it, if you want to follow up on any of this, a lot of this is represented in those two things. So I wanted to tell you about my granddad's piano to start. Unexpectedly, about 12 years ago, when my granddad died, I was left this in his will. And when it arrived in the van from Northampton, the piano stool was also with it, which was completely packed full of sheet music and old books and things. And after I had given away a lot of the sheet music and the books to people who could actually play the piano, I was looking through some of the things that was left. And I wanted to read you the foreword from this one. So this is called Music in the Home, and it was published in 1932. And the foreword is written by Sir Landon Ronald. And he says, statistics prove that the sale of music of every kind in description, excepting perhaps dance music, is so seriously on the wane that publishers are inclined to fight shy of bringing out new songs or piano forte pieces when they know there will be scarcely any sale for them. So why might that be so? Why is the sale of sheet music in 1932 going down so much? What has brought about this state of affairs? I fear there is but one answer, the habit of listening to music instead of performing it. This is to be so deeply deplored and is so damaging to the progress and development of a beautiful art that it is up to all music lovers to do what they can to prevent it from spreading. How did they do? Anyone got iPod, iPod headphones? And goes on to explain what's in the book and then at the bottom says, if this book assists to revive the desire of self-performance, which is innate in most of us, then the aim and object of this book and its editor will have been achieved. Fabulous, beautifully written, fabulous. Lots of interesting things in there. I need to find something about the advent of the gramophone and how it was going to be a wonderful, revolutionised progress. I'm sure there is a positive side rhetoric at the same time as that one. But there are different reactions to the progress that technology offers. So that's one thing to say. That's a real emotional reaction to what's going on. But the other thing that it says quite interestingly, and it doesn't mention gramophone at all in that forward, what it mentions is habits. It changes our habits. It changes what we do. And this is something we've talked to learners about an awful lot. And I wanted just to play you a little bit of a video here. I can find it. When we go out and talk to learners about... So I've done a lot of work with the GISC over the years. And this is actually taken from last year's year before 2013, Summer of Innovation. It's quite a long video, but I'm literally just going to play you the first minute and a half also of students talking about how they experience the digital environment. I'm probably quite disorganised when it comes to keeping notes and things. Because I've put some on my tablet and I've put some on my phone and I'll flag up a few emails. I know I need to read, which I never read and then I read it again when I get the reminder email. I think it just differs from student to student. I haven't found anything that's sort of transferable. We have a moodle and we had a workspace at the university and these other online systems that they have. And I don't find any of them very useful. I use like mendeley, reference management stuff. It's like saving a lifetime. Software is incredibly useful, but you have to find it specific for your task. But I guess people have to be aware of what's out there to actually try to use things out. It's really interesting to talk to learners about what they do and the first one they're talking about, not about the technology, but about how they manage it and the kind of habits that they have and the strategies they have for managing their email. Coming back later, I don't know if you noticed and said, oh, and the institution provides all sorts of stuff, you know, moodle and loop and things that you've invested greatly in, but I don't bother with any of that. Well, that's not really important to me. So institutions are making massive investment in all sorts of technology and learner experience research is really trying to make sense of how do learners, how do we understand how learners experience all these infrastructure and services and systems that we're providing for them in ways that we can improve them. So what I think I'll do is I'm going to run you through fairly quickly a little potted history of the last 10 years or so of learner experience research just to make sure we're all kind of on the same page with this. And then I want to tell you in a little bit more detail about the most recent just project that I've been involved in. As I said, the FE one talk a little bit more about that. So what do we know so far about how learners experience education in a digital age? So I started working this area in about 2005 on a series of projects that were funded by the JISC and Oxford Brooks was responsible for the support and synthesis of a number of funded projects. So we had the role of bringing the projects together, synthesizing their findings, disseminating the Miniseries of National Workshops, that kind of things. And these projects were great and really, really exciting at the time, partly because of the methods that they use. So one of the things that they did was give students video cameras to take into their bedrooms and do that kind of big brother audio video diary thing and these are some screen grabs from students speaking into their diaries. And they really brought to life a lot of stories that we had never previously heard from students. So the young woman at the top and remember this is in 2005, 2006 was a computing student and talked about what she got from her lessons but also was one of the very first users of MIT OpenCourseWare and was following courses from MIT as well. Young man in the middle was one of the many who said, I open my laptop as soon as I wake up in the morning, I just have to check my MySpace or Bevel social media, whatever it was at the time we had an awful lot of those. Without wanting to stereotype too much, we also had an awful lot of mature learners who just talked mainly about fitting in their life but really vivid, really, really vivid use of diaries and logs and made us think about technology use in context. So uncovering student voices we hadn't previously heard, forcing us to think holistically and in a way that was really contextualised to understand the services that we're providing for them and as we're all now well aware of, a powerful relationship, we were going out giving conferences at the time, we had this lovely quote about how much I love my iPod. A powerful relationship and emotional attachment with technology in particular with social media. Another series of studies after that took us a little bit further and this word habits again, which keeps cropping up in our work, which showed a great variety in what learners are actually doing with the technologies that we're providing for them and this is when we started to explore the concept of digital literacy as well as design for learning and thinking about that as a social practice and these two studies that Oxford Brookes ran, the Supporting Learners in a Digital Age, which was Slider, the institutional case studies project and INSTEP, which was our own internal e-pioneers project, introduced us to some of our most confident, agile digital leaders who were really experimenting with lots of technologies, really surprising us with what they could do, although they have told us since these two down the side, that putting E in front of any word, even pioneer, just makes it totally unpalatable to students. We started to run a lot of digital literacy workshops and think about the concept of digital literacy. At the time, we were really excited about this notion of e-pioneers or our most experienced learners, ones who were most imaginative and creative with their use of technology and what we could learn from them. Five years' time, this is going to be all our learners. We're really going to have to catch up. It hasn't really proved to be the case and I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute. In terms of impact and impact for all, some of the things that this learner experience research and this digital literacy agenda has given us is an understanding that although we started going out and talking to learners about Moodle or WebCT or Blackboard as it was in the time and whether they were online students or blended, you know, are you on a fully online course? Are you on a partly online course? To them, it didn't matter. All learning is technology, technologically mediated. Learners are using their own technologies as well as those that provided for them right from school upwards to enhance the experience that's provided for them in an organisation. So, there's no longer useful to think about a distinction between online or blended or face-to-face learning. It just all includes technology. Another big impact, I think, has been the understanding of digital literacy as contextualised for the discipline. And in fact, when we've been going out and working with academic staff, when we started talking to them about social media, really difficult to get any kind of discussion or engagement about that. But as soon as you start saying, what does it mean to be a digitally literate chemist, geographer, historian? That's when you start to have really interesting conversations about what's going on and how they have to prepare their learners for being a historian in the digital age. Lots of frameworks, a couple up here, frameworks for staff and student digital literacy. Development have come out of this work, which are useful and you may know about. And really, it's been about how the services that we provide, if we understand the learner experience, how then do we target what we do at the learner needs that we've uncovered. And that's what I wanted to explore a little bit this morning, okay? How do we talk about difference in a meaningful way? How do we make use of some of the findings to actually make recommendations that can be useful to us? So I don't want to sound that it's job done. There has been a lot of work. It has taken us somewhere. This is the stuff that we know now. But there are also lots and lots of questions that remain and I've just put a few of them up here. And I really just wanted to concentrate today on this first one, although to acknowledge that there are lots of other things going on as well. And I wanted particularly to think about this notion of difference. And if all learning is technology mediated and learners experience it very differently, how do we provide courses and services which are going to meet the needs of all our learners? It's terribly complicated. What can we do about that? But there are these other questions that I know going on. I know Ron Barnett is talking a lot at the moment about attributes and 21st century attributes. So saying, well, we've talked a lot about skills. We've talked a little bit about practices. But really we need to be thinking about the attributes of successful learners. I think that's an interesting conversation. We have talked a lot with institutions about what are students entitled to when they arrive and what actually is an enhancement and nice to have activity. We've talked a lot about the learning line and is it different for every institution? And we're still talking an awful lot about research methods that we can borrow from lots of different disciplines and lots of different research philosophies to keep track of the learner experience because every time we go and talk to learners we find that it keeps changing and this is something we can't say we now know what the learning experience is like. What we actually have to say is this institution constantly monitoring its learners experiences because they keep changing. So with that in mind, sorry, that was a little bit of a race through of where I'm coming from and the research that I've been involved in and now I want to slow down a little bit and tell you about one particular project. It is from FE. We were asked to undertake it or bid to undertake it for the GISC. I think there's lots and lots of things that we can learn for all sectors of education not just from FE but I'll leave you to draw those own parallels yourself. And what I wanted to do was to think about this concept of difference and meeting all the needs of all the learners and how we can approach that. So the FE sector in the UK when we started working here is absolutely a wash with reports telling it what to do. I don't know if you feel like this in the sector that you work but there's a roadmap for this and a policy for that and a strategic initiative for something else. Absolutely a wash with reports about the digital environment and progress and what's going to happen next. I noticed coming to this slightly as an outsider so coming as an HE researcher into FE that firstly most of the reports all the reports I think were not research based there has been a real lack of research in the sector since about 2007 when some agencies like Bechtur and Elsis were shut down by the government and because it's not research based people are caught up with the rhetoric of the time and in particular in these to present learners all learners as confident, positive motivated about the use of technology and I think this is a tendency that we need to be really really cautious of so they said things like modern learners expect enough familiar with technology and global communication the biggest challenge for the sector is the underexploitation of learners skills devices and technical knowledge so lots of things like this are not based on any particular research so that was our starting point at the same time I have to say setting really ambitious targets for the sector about how to make use of technology in a short period of time so we came in and this project started about this time last year it just finished as in I just submitted the final project report Monday so hot off the press for you we started with some desk research we started just looking at what was around in the published literature and I put these figures up here for you because we found 23 sector reports that were really interesting which were about they were about this topic of digital learning in FA and despite a very extensive traditional academic literature search we found 8 peer-reviewed articles which actually looked at the learner experience in FA none of which was cited in the 23 sector reports we found hundreds of case studies of teachers practice hundreds on things like the excellence gateway very teacher centered not really exposing learners views particularly so we just picked 25 which we had the most learner experience and we had access to seven institutional documents so that's kind of institutional strategies or their own learning experience research that they'd done we were expecting more than that we didn't get quite as much as we were expected as in as in previous research in HE when we looked particularly through the case studies there's a great diversity in experiences and it's quite difficult to make sense of this we then went out and did some primary research so we met 220 learners in 12 focus groups in six general further education colleges over a period of a few months and we did kind of card saw exercises with them here we had a whole series of little cards and some of them were about access and some of them were about attributes some of them were about experience and we asked them what do you expect your college to provide which of these do you use sought them in different ways we photographed everything we weren't terribly interested in what they put top we were interested in the conversations that were elicited through this method it was a good way of getting the students talking and then we went out and ran a series of national consultation events with our draft findings and recommendations and get some feedback on what was needed in the sector and lots and lots of data arising from those as well one of the most interesting things that we found was a study called the learner in their context which was a Bechtre fund study one of the last ones to be funded was actually shut down early went back to closed which was run by Chris Davis down the hill from us and they over a three year period interviewed 132 young people including 35 home visits so they really picked up on this notion of holistic and contextualised understandings of learners experience and that was really important and if you're interested they published last year a book called Teenagers and Technology which is a really nice read which is about this project you can also read their project reports the learner in their context and they provided this spectrum of experience a way of understanding the experiences of all the different learners that they talked to a way of helping us to understand difference so what we did in our FE project is we took this spectrum and we mapped a lot of the case studies and things that we found onto it and we mapped some of our focus group data onto it as well to see if we could find some support for it and we did we found it to be a really useful framework to understand a couple of things to say and I'm just going to go through each of the bits in a bit more detail and tell you about what dominates the digital experience for learners at different points on this spectrum and how you can develop recommendations things to do differently within your institution on the basis of this but one of the things to say before I do that is what changed over three years so this project ran from 2007 to 2010 and they found a bit like us when we were doing learning experience research previously is that we were expecting the intensive specialist enthusiast group to grow over that three years but that isn't what happened actually they got more mainstream and the mainstream became even more pragmatic about their use of technology so for instance by year three they found that learners who had very plentiful access to technology talked about their use of technologies rather mundane as necessary I have to be on Facebook because everyone else is not because I actually feel any connection with it or because I really want to be that kind of thing so I'll take you through the minority ends of the spectrum first and then maybe spend a bit of time with the majority in the middle so we still have and I'm sure you do too a proportion of the communities that we serve who are unconnected and vulnerable and I'm not sure actually those two terms should be together I'll say a bit about that so the latest off-com data that I could find from 2012 91% to 16 to 24 year olds have web access at home that means 9% don't 71% have a smart phone 29% don't and they're still dealing with a small minority of learners who are unconnected and for these learners family and personal circumstances really prevent ownership or access to technology and make it particularly difficult and interestingly this group of learners if they're not having access at home when you look at who's using the access that's provided by college it's the people who don't have access at home aren't using it at college either and the provision of technology doesn't help this group and we met some learners like this in our focus groups and they said things like this quote that I've pulled out at the bottom here this is the group who are waiting to be told how to use it just providing Chromebooks nice easy to use Chromebooks isn't enough to actually get them to use it their experience so when you say what's the learner experience of digital learning for this group they'd say it's dominated by issues of access they're stuck on issues of access before they can move on and things that work are the kind of targeted solutions which take note of their issues of access use technologies that they're very familiar with lots of one to one mentoring lots of confidence building those kinds of things we found when we met learners who might be classed as vulnerable and particularly learners with disabilities they turned out to be some of our most sophisticated uses of technology very experimental very confident so I'm not quite sure about the wording of the spectrum here certainly unconnected, vulnerable I'm not sure let's go to the other end of the scale then so for the intensive and specialist enthusiasts so these are the learners the digital leaders who personal digital literacy practices very easily between the different contexts of home and work and study and college so they're able to negotiate that boundary land that border land between all those different contexts they don't need to keep them separate and they're able to transfer practices across now we found and the David Sess out study as well found this is maybe 10% of our learners pioneers as we used to call them 10% they present themselves as highly engaged highly adaptable users of technology they often have a personal interest in it, they're taking IT or audio, media courses something like that they see this as a way forward for employment interestingly a number of them said their parents and careers advisers have often tried to talk them out of it but they saw this as a personal interest area when you say well what's the learner experience as if there is one learner experience but for learners on this part of the spectrum their experience is dominated by the extent to which they are allowed, encouraged, supported to transfer their practices across social and work and study contexts so they find some things particularly challenging so if the infrastructure isn't reliable and robust for instance it's really challenging if they're not allowed to bring their own device if they're kicked off the wifi after an hour of inactive use or something all those things they find really challenging and they're really interesting group to study because they learn from each other rather than from the teachers they learn more from each other and they develop practices in one context which are really purposeful they have really good ownership of them and then they'll take them into their classes the majority then the ones in the middle I think the naming of these even is really interesting mainstream certainly 80% or so of our students but these are the pragmatists good access to technology not particularly enthusiastic about its use see technology as instrumental in achieving the goals that they need to now when you talk to these say all sorts of different things but I've just picked out this quote here which was from an A level student who sociology teacher was doing the flip class from thing so that's what was going on in this case so the lessons rolled around using YouTube because the lessons were on YouTube and then you'd see that outside of school and you'd bring it in and then you'd talk about it that's what was going on and for these learners when you say what's the learner experience for them it is dominated by the issue of pedagogy it's institution led it's without creative teaching these pragmatic learners use technology in rather superficial uninteresting ways they use technology for research by which I mean they Google it they use technology to improve the presentation of their work publisher, PowerPoint and not really for terribly much else so there's obviously very clear recommendations particularly for FE on building capability and confidence of teachers in using technology in order to have any impact on the experience of this group so putting that all together where does it get us then so this is the spectrum that we picked out from our desk study which I've just shown you this is what we can say about how they experience the digital environment and I'm often asked for one answer what's the learner experience like in the 21st century well I can't give one answer because it's different and maybe this is a framework that helps us understand how it's different for different people so for the unconnected it's predominantly about access for the majority of our learners it's predominantly about course design actually and for the intensive and specialist it's primarily about what they're allowed to do and what they're banned from doing or what they find difficult to do and so what we did is we took these kinds of findings with lots of examples of case studies out to the consultation events and we asked people to think about what supports and what challenges these learners okay so if you think about learners at different points in the spectrum and we get them to kind of think about when are these learners best supported and I've got a lot more than just a few that I've put up here and when are they challenged and this is an exercise which I think it is really useful for institutions or course teams to undertake for themselves okay so if you take anything away from this talk it's probably this slide this framework and the idea of thinking about okay where's the difference in my learners so this is a framework you might be able to use but you might have your own notions of difference and actually for these learners on the left when are they most challenged when are they best supported what should we be doing about it when we were talking to the learners in the focus groups they talked a lot particularly the unconnected the ones about access about we had initial induction and then we had nothing else so there's certainly something there about ongoing support ongoing assessment of skills for the mainstream pragmatists well actually their experience is very tutor led at the moment but we'd like to move them on a little bit from that and to be a little bit more self-directed so talking to them about developing self-management skills and criticality skills and things that they can help them transfer their practices from one context to another is something that's particularly interesting and for the intensive and specialist enthusiasts they talk a lot in the focus groups about some of the things that they bring to the classroom being devalued or dismissed and so we need to turn that around and say well how are their practices valued how can we not be so scared of some of the stuff that they're bringing in and be a bit more open about the conversations so there might be something here you can do like an audit within your own programme team or an audit within your campus or your institutional level or something like that and I don't expect to read this I've got it blown up in a minute but this is the kind of structure that we used in the consultation event so we started at the top here with learners of challenged when, you put in your columns the different we had the different areas of the spectrum and then get people to generate ideas so I've just all I've done is just expanded one of these columns so that you can read it but all the documents I'll show you on the website in a minute so I've just picked unconnected and vulnerable so this is unconnected and vulnerable are challenged when now I'm not saying this is the way it is I'm saying these are the kinds of things you need to generate so within your context within the types of courses that you teach the learners that you have what can you say about what challenges your unconnected and vulnerable from your own studies that you've done and your own conversations that you've had with your learners what can you say about this we had a very interesting conversation about online assessment across all three of the levels so for the mainstreams they really like being able to submit from home for the Intensive and Specialists well their files are all too big and in the wrong format to be able to use it and for the unconnected and vulnerable it just makes them want to give up completely so you take a service like that that we think we've been really good in providing and actually try and map it across the needs of all learners so how do you provide a surface like that in a way that it meets the needs of all learners then we did the same again learners are supported when again I don't expect you to read all of this but I'll show you where the files are but I just picked out the other end of the extreme here the right hand column the Intensive and Specialist Enthusiast and I think one of the most interesting things here was about they said in the focus groups particularly that these learners were best supported when their lecturers weren't afraid to learn with them the lecturers didn't not think that they had to be ahead of the game all the time and then teaching the learners saying to the learners what do you know about this and how can we work together on it and certainly one of the key themes that arose from the 220 learners that we spoke to in the focus groups was this thing about don't make assumptions about what we can do and what we can't do we want to work with you we want to work with the lecturers if you can just ask us what we need there was a real willingness to work collaboratively with the teachers and lecturers that I think we weren't expecting so these were some of the main overall findings from the focus groups and I think the thing about assumptions about our skills levels continue giving us feedback all the way through not just at initial induction and engage us in a collaborative exercise so that we can work out how to make the best use of technology were really important things so finally then I just wanted to hint at some of the other findings from the study so I've just given you one little strand through our findings just one little thing which is about learning a difference and hopefully a kind of framework or tool that you can go away and have a think about but I'll just put up here our kind of main set of findings which you can find in our project report because there are obviously some other things there that you might want to think about the if you're interested in knowing any more and I'll put that slide back up again in a minute if you go to the FE digital students site in fact if you just google jisk digital student you'll find your way there to this project and you can see all our project reports and those support and challenge documents that you can find as well there's the teenagers and technology book that I've referred to and there's also some other information there on communities that I'm involved in and I will put these slides up on the slide share later today so you can find that as well I'll just lead that up and take any questions I suspect the general concept is not that different that we need to think about meeting the needs you know when we think about designing a course or providing a service we need to think about all the different needs we really expected going into FE to find more unconnected and vulnerable that was our assumption but actually it really wasn't when we've done other work to look at how expectations are formed and things at school is such an important determinant and whether you go through to FE or HE you have that common grounding of school so how technology is used in school your previous educational experience I think is what kind of grounds your approach that you take to technology Okay Yes Say when You see that third on the college culture Yeah That is where we're going so orientation towards mobile Are you seeing that as a general trend as well? Yes definitely and it's partly the financial reality of not being able to provide enough kit to keep up with learning we can't keep the IT labs we can't keep them upgraded as frequently as the students would like them so it's partly a financial reality but also it's about people have really personal connections to the technology and they like to use the technology that they're familiar with and the software that they're familiar with and it's giving people just a little bit more freedom about that it's about developing learners supporting learners to develop their own personal practices that they'll take with them you know through into life and work that's what we really need to be concentrating on Briefly How do you see that translating back into the actions of lecturers? Yes yeah well it's the mainstream isn't it the lecturers are most important for the mainstream 80% of the learners okay because at that stage if you remember the learners are fairly pragmatic fairly instrumental in using their technology so they might come in very familiar with technology but not really thinking about how they're going to use it to support their study and that's where the lecturers can really come really have an important role to play to say well this is the role of technology in your course in all sorts of ways it's transactional it helps you to book a time to see your academic advisor that kind of level but it also is transformational in terms of connecting you with a global community of people within your discipline for example and learners tend not to have that understanding of how technology can be transformational without a creative teacher to help them