Page 88 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 71

approaches form the scaffolding for further modifications to the learn-
ing environment, enabling the optimization of educational practices
for their effectiveness rather than for simple efficiency. The elements
that support the learning environment integrate advanced knowledge
about technology, people, processes, and organizations.

The report also included the following descriptions of the future:

In the world of IT-transformed education, advanced learning ob-
jects are the building blocks of IT-enabled educational materials. Ad-
vanced learning objects will be developed based on community-de-
fined requirements for a services-based architecture that supports
varying levels of interoperability and emphasizes operational commu-
nication and data exchange.
STEM educational practices will have a learner-centric orienta-
tion and will reflect advanced, evidence-based knowledge on learning
and cognition.
IT-based teaching and learning practices will be generated by an
active community of authors and users who create, share, and modify
IT-enabled educational materials. This community will embrace a
scholarship of teaching and learning and will have a continuing goal
of advancing learning.
The dissemination of IT-enabled teaching and learning resources
will be supported by a novel legal framework (e.g., open licenses and
attribution systems) that promotes creation and sharing, while main-
taining incentives for authors (including individuals, teams, and in-
stitutions) to create and distribute or assemble and reuse high-quality
learning materials.

In the remainder of this paper, I briefly describe the efforts of the
Greenfield Coalition to move toward this IT-enhanced learning future.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN
SUPPORT OF PEDAGOGY
One of the lessons learned at the Greenfield Coalition was that,
even though IT can open new avenues to enhance learning, technology
is not a silver bullet that can promote learning by itself. We posed the
following question: What do we want to accomplish by using IT to

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