Augmentation, not Replacement…

By Erik Duval. At the EADTU conference in wonderful Paris, France, MOOC’s are of course the dominant topic. And yes, of course, this crowd of “Distance Teaching Universities” feels a bit uncomfortable about newcomers that, not hindered by any knowledge of the domain, suddenly attract the press attention and the students, as well as the euros and dollars, in what was for decades their turf…
So, I was very happy to try and do a ‘mooc free’ talk, on learning analytics. The official title of my talk was “The Transformation of Higher Education and the role of Learning Analytics” – not a title I could have come up with. Although that title did include the proper amount of grandeur for a talk at the Sorbonne, it made me a bit uncomfortable, as I don’t know how to transform Higher Education. If I’ve learned anything over the past 2 decades, it is that Higher Education is remarkably resilient to any kind of deep change…