Planning and Managing Technologies in Higher Education (UBC – ETEC 520)
This course was unlike the others I had taken in the MET program – it didn’t really deal with any pedagogy or direct application of technology to teaching, it dealt a lot more with the administrative side of educational technology in an organizational context. Being exposed to the institutional perspective of planning and implementing eLearning technology was quite eye-opening (apparently it’s not just as simple as installing an LMS on a server somewhere in the IT department 😉 ).
Despite being “out of my element” in this course, I felt like I learned quite a bit. While I didn’t feel very confident about my contributions to the online discussions, I did enjoy analyzing institutional plans. Two examples are given below:
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I feel like these exercises gave me a new perspective on what goes into incorporating educational technology from an organizational perspective. That’s a perspective I’ve been missing; whenever I’ve tried to incorporate technology into my teaching at one institution or another, I’ve always felt like one of those “Lone Rangers” described by Bates and Sangrà (2011), and wondered “what’s taking this institution so long to put something in place?” Having completed the course, I now have a better idea of what the answer might be.
