TechTrends

This survey explored practitioners’ perceptions and opinions about the match between their academic preparation program and the demands and challenges of their practice, as well as their opinions of exemplary programs for preparing graduates for professional practice in their career environment. Since the data collected were opinions and perceptions of participants and not observed behaviors, caution should be used in the interpretation and application of the results. In addition, the small and diverse sample compromises the generalizability of the findings. However, the survey provides a picture of the success of IDT programs in contextualizing the preparation of instructional designers and suggests several topics, like flexibility of program offerings and coverage of cultural workplace aspects, that represent areas for potential program improvement. The results of this study should serve to encourage IDT program administrators to survey their own graduates for valuable data on program strengths and weaknesses.

As global markets expand and distance education becomes more prevalent, higher education institutions will be competing for students from all over the world. Those institutions that implement globalization, internationalization, and localization into curriculum and the design of instructional materials will be successful in this changing market.

Considering the technology gender gap that exists today, there can be no doubt that our current educational system is not engaging female students in technology or awakening them to possibilities of the technology industry as a career. Females are not afraid of computers or lack the ability to master computer skills, but they find the computer environment objectionable (http : / / www.aauw.org/2000/ techsavvybd.html). Several factors within the educational system heighten these objections and impede female progression through technology classes. It is these factors that our educational system must address. Single-sex computer classes offer female students the educational advantages of learning in a comfortable, non-threatening classroom environment where they are encouraged to enthusiastically participate in classroom discussions and activities (Kumagi, 1995). In these classes, curriculum may be adjusted to reflect the need females to see computers as productivity tools (Caplice, 1994). As a result of positive experiences gained while attending single-sex computer classes, females are more likely to pursue higher level computer classes. Although it is possible to argue that single-sex computer classes do not mirror the real world females must contend with once outside the classroom, they are, however, effective interim interventions to enable females to lessen the current technology gap (Kumagi, 1995).

Much of the literature on artificial intelligence (AI) in education imagines AI as a tool in the service of teaching and learning. Is such a one-way relationship all that exists between AI and learners? In this paper we report on a thematic analysis of 92 participant responses to a story completion exercise which asked them to describe a classroom agreement between an AI instructor and a learner twenty years into the future. Using a relational theoretical framework, we find that the classroom agreements between AI and learners that participants produced encompassed elements of education, boundaries, affordances, and social conventions. These findings suggest that the ways learners relate to AI vary. Some learners relate to AI as an object, others relate to AI as a subject, and some relate to AI both as an object and a subject. These results invite a deeper engagement with the ways in which learners might relate to AI and the kinds of ethics and social protocols that such relations suggest.

Communication, collaboration and community development are processes that contribute to student satisfaction and learning in online courses. This paper describes a study that investigated how campus and distance graduate students in a library science program communicated with one another outside the official boundaries of their courses. We conducted a survey to answer two research questions: 1) What Web 2.0 technologies do students use to communicate with one another outside of the formal structure of their online courses? and 2) What do they talk about in such communication? The results showed that, while students used a variety of technologies to communicate with one another, those enrolled at a distance made greater use of technology to communicate with one another. Moreover, clear preferences emerged according to age. Younger students preferred mobile technologies while older students experimented with a wider range of web-based technologies. We interpret these results and offer recommendations for practice based on our interpretation.