Innovation and Technology for 21st Century Education

What is happening to higher education? There is a search for increasing the effectiveness of learning and expanding educational opportunities by using a combination of information technology and distance education. Teaching with technology takes time. There is the challenge of choosing equipment, redesigning courses, learning software, and building new protocols for projects, quizzes, course administration, feedback routines, lectures, and course administration. Today, these efforts must be somehow carried out in addition to continuing to teach and update current courses via the traditional means. The challenge of each innovation is that it must be carefully measured against the successes of the traditional approaches. In addition, when dealing with technology, methods and techniques mastered last year or even last semester are often upstaged by new products that involve new time-consuming “re-learning” needs. Technology makes it easier for instructors to respond to students individually, even between classes and after the course is over. It also gives access to more course material, more media, more simulations, and more powerful indexing and search protocols. This article will review common tools and technologies used in distance education and demonstrate why they can facilitate learning and expand the educational opportunities for both distance and traditional students.