Amber Dailey-Hebert

Emerging Tools and Applications of Virtual Reality in Education

Virtual reality is the next frontier of communication. As technology exponentially evolves, so do the ways in which humans interact and depend upon it. It only follows that to educate and stimulate the next generation of industry leaders, one must use the most innovative tools available. By coupling education with the most immersive technology available, teachers may inspire students in exciting new ways.

Shaping the New Professional for the New Professions

Preparation for the established professions (law, management, medicine, and engineering) has become increasingly more based in multi-professional settings, requiring training and development in a wide range of disciplines that support professional development (e.g., sociology, psychology, management, law). Over the past decade, many new job specializations have opened up which are in need of assessing the preparation of these new jobs by questioning the nature of their education programs and examining continuous development at the workplace. Modern higher education systems should rethink how to design learning systems that prepare young people as the new professionals in the established (engineering, law, health care, management) or newly emerging professions (consultants, governance experts, EU experts, specialists in finance or law). The present chapter will review current literature and landmark works on professional education and examine how insights from those traditional professions can be transferred to the new professions such as European European Studies. It will question the assumptions underlying higher education programs and the way they prepare young people for the new professions. Attention will be paid to what professional practice and society need for further development, yet which is not brought in by professional schools. The final part of our chapter will provide educators in the new professions with guiding principles for course and program design.

Problem-based learning in hybrid, blended and online courses: Instructional and change management implications for supporting learner engagement

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional format which emphasizes collaborative and contextual learning and hence has favored face-to-face course design. However, with the plentitude of online tools which technology offers nowadays, PBL courses can also be effectively offered to students who cannot physically be present at the campus. The change process from offline to hybrid, blended, or online PBL courses need to be carefully managed and the right combination of technology and learning activities selected from the ever increasing available set. Hybrid, blended, or online courses differ in the amount of integration between offline and online activities. A mixed-method design was used to elaborate on how the different (hybrid, blended, or online) PBL courses can be effectively build and taught to create learner engagement. Twelve people (change agent, instructor, and participants) were interviewed and 82 students filled out a course evaluation form. The data was used to describe how a hybrid, blended, or online course was created and how the instructor and students perceived it. Instructional and change management implications for implementation are presented. Instructional implications deal with the needs of the learner, the role of the instructor, and the importance of sound technology integration in the course. Change management implication highlights the need to foster intra-institutional collaboration.

From Envisioning to Managing Educational Development and Organizational Innovation

In light of growing complexity and volatility in the world, universities are challenged to tackle connected, ill-defined problems in need of innovative solutions. Yet higher education finds difficulty in organizing initiatives to address such issues and continues to structure solutions in traditional, hierarchical, and restrictive ways. In order to confront these changes and remain a relevant part of society, a mid-sized European university has started to challenge itself, the manner in which it conducts education and the group of people to whom it offers education. To achieve this goal, a bottom-up project structure was adopted, giving lower-level faculty members the autonomy, money and time to experiment and explore unorthodox methods. The research presented in this chapter details the perspectives and experiences of this unique project team, and outlines capacities needed and relevant questions to consider in dealing with wicked problems.

Transformative perspectives and processes in higher education

1. Introduction: New Opportunities for Development? Amber Dailey-Hebert and Kay S. Dennis.- Part I: Higher Education Redefined and Broadened.- 2. The Impetus for Change: Why Entrepreneurial Universities will Transform the Future (While Others Will Cease to Exist) Richard Milter.- 3. Challenging the Status Quo: The Influence of Proprietary Learning Institutions on the Shifting Landscape of Higher Education B. Jean Mandernach, Hank Radda, Scott Greenberger and Krista Forrest.- 4. Heutagogy, Technology, and Lifelong Learning for Professional and Part-Time Learners Lisa Marie Blaschke and Stewart Hase.- 5. What Can Higher Education Learn from the Workplace? David Boud and Donna Rooney.- 6. From Envisioning to Managing Educational Development and Organizational Innovation Katerina Bohle-Carbonell and Amber Dailey-Hebert.- Part II: Curricular Transformations.- 7. Making Students Responsible for Their Learning: Empowering Learners to Build Shared Mental Models Herco Fonteijn.- 8. Bringing Learning to the Workplace: A Smartphone App for Reflection and Increased Authenticity of Learning Karen Konings and Wim Gijselaers.- 9. From Challenge to Advantage: Innovating the Curriculum Across Geographic Boundaries Natalia Timus.- 10. The Potential of Communities of Learning for Dual Career PhD Programs - A Case Study Martin Rehm and Mindel van de Laar.- 11. Recommendations from Instructors for Adopting Successful Online Learning Maike Gerken and Therese Grohnert.- Part III: Looking Ahead: Learning in the Future.- 12. Higher Education Shaping the Unscripted Future: The Imperative to Affirm Human Values in Transformative Times Laurie N. DiPadova-Stocks.- 13. Higher Education 3.0: Knowmads Create Their Own Value! John W. Moravec and Ronald van den Hoff.- 14. Transformative Perspectives and Processes in Higher Education: Concluding Thoughts Kay S. Dennis and Amber Dailey-Hebert.

Does Increased Teaching Equate to Increased Learning

Amid continuous growth in student enrolments, the proliferation of e-learning technology and the global accessibility of vast repositories of information on the Web, higher education (HE) is struggling to keep pace with these changes. The classic response involves adjusting the amount of instructional time to achieve excellence, as evidenced by the 50-minute lecture-based learning structure still used widely in many institutions today. However, Dutch research in the 1980s and 1990s suggested that it is the learning process which accounts for learning outcomes and not the amount of teaching. Furthermore, such research found that after an optimal learning outcome is attained, increased teaching time is associated with a decline in learning outcomes. However, many HE institutions persist in their focus on teaching time to maintain ‘control’ over students’ learning activities. The present chapter examines the underlying cause of (and changes in) student learning behaviour in response to increased teaching time.

Introduction: New Opportunities for Development?

What might our future look like if higher education focused on the needs of humankind and the enablers for meeting those needs? How might our reality change if we embraced the complexity and uncertainty surrounding us and leveraged them to the advantage of the learner (and society as a whole)? We begin this chapter with questions that have helped to shape a growing conversation on the need for higher education to shift dramatically from its traditional paradigm. It has been said that higher education is broken, that we have fallen behind the emerging trends of our time. It has also been said that higher education is the indispensible cornerstone of culture and society. We assert that revolutions in education have already occurred worldwide and will continue to shape the face of learning as we know it. As lines blur across all forms of learning – be it informal, formal, traditional, professional, networked or otherwise – shifts in our perspectives and understanding are necessary to accompany such change. This chapter outlines concepts for consideration as we challenge ourselves to participate in innovating the future of learning.

Transformative Perspectives and Processes in Higher Education: Concluding Thoughts

At the beginning of this collection, we posed three questions for the reader to consider: What is the future you see for higher education? How can changes and opportunities in learning (i.e. with learner mobility, emergent technologies, new target populations, etc.) be harnessed to our collective advantage? What will invoke your next learning innovation? (i.e., what do you anticipate exploring during the next two years?) We conclude this collection of diverse perspectives, innovative strategies, and alterative pathways for higher education by synthesizing ideas shared within the collection.

An evaluation model for collaborative online courses: The impact of knowledge sharing and communication climate

Increasing globalization and changes in the business landscape have pushed the concept of lifelong learning into the center of employee development as companies’ strategic advantage arises from the knowledge and skills of employees. In order to stay competitive in the labor market, and to accommodate the multiple life priorities of family and work, an increasing number of professionals follow (part-time) courses and programs online. Yet, little research has neither focused on the perceived learning and satisfaction of professional learners in this virtual environment nor investigated the factors that contribute to them. Using a mixed method approach, this chapter compares two online courses (one successful, one unsuccessful) provided for professional learners. A model framework is presented to unearth factors that influence perceived learning and satisfaction of professionals in online courses, which results in a strong correlation between creating a positive communication climate, collaborative knowledge sharing, and perceived learning and satisfaction of professionals.