It’s time to challenge and correct the fascination with “disrupting” higher education!

Ten years ago, we were subjected to an avalanche of bold promises that technology can disrupt traditional approaches to school, college and university education, radically accelerating learning and democratizing education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, were launched, and a decade later, this pronouncement seems premature.

Join Dr. Justin Reich, Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, for a 60-minute discussion on the latest “supposedly” transformative educational technologies.

During the first 30 minutes, Dr. Reich will:

•    Provide a tour of massive open online courses (MOOCs), auto graders, computerized “intelligent tutors,” and other educational technologies whose problems and paradoxes bedevil educators.

•    Demonstrate how learning technologies, even those that are free to access, often provide the greatest benefit to affluent students and do little to combat growing inequality in education.

•    Describe how institutions and investors often favour programs that scale up quickly, but at the expense of true innovation.

•    Highlight the crucial role to play in the future of education and the need for new teaching tools, and classroom experimentation.

As our colleague, George Siemens, Executive Director of the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington aptly puts it, Dr. Reich “ guides us to understanding the failure of technology in lecture halls and classrooms, what needs to be done to make a real impact, and the critical importance of education as community” .

The remaining 30 minutes of this interactive webinar is a moderated question and answer and discussion session with Dr. Reich.