DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY

This paper reports the current findings in literature on the impact of instructional technologies on teaching and learning environments pertaining higher education institutions. This study investigates the instructional design strategies in terms of (1) the scope of change in design strategies as a result of current school reform in the United States (2) impact of instructional technologies on teaching and learning, (3) evolving roles of teachers and learners within these new environments, (4) new networked technologies available for teaching, and (5) implications for changes in instructional strategies. The paper also brings two models of instructional technology integration (Harris’ genres of telecollaborative activity structures and Tomei’s Taxonomy of Instructional Technologies) for higher education faculty who are interested in applying learner-centered design principles. As this paper is an interactive document taking advantage of the full range of hyperlinks, it is recommended to be viewed to online. Higher education institutions are undergoing substantial changes as a result of education reform that is taking place at schools. Universities are making the shift from face-to-face print only delivery to digital delivery in both traditional face-to-face and online courses. Coupled with socio-economic and pedagogical changes over the last decade, higher education faculty has become increasingly responsive to creating flexible technology-supported teaching and learning environments. In this growing demand, higher education faculty has begun to integrate instructional technologies into their existing course design. The paper investigates the instructional design strategies in terms of (1) the scope of change in design strategies as a result of school reform (2) impact of instructional technologies on teaching and learning, (3) evolving roles of teachers and learners within these new environments, (4) new networked technologies available for teaching, and (5) implications for changes in instructional strategies used by faculty in higher education. Scope of Change in Design Strategies for Higher Education Faculty From a larger perspective, two most important recent developments have shifted the focus on instructional design strategies for conditions of successful teaching: (1) social and economic forces of change and (2) a dramatic shift in the beliefs of learning and education itself. These two developments have neither developed in isolation nor independent from each other. They reflect the larger social and economical conditions that are shaping the industrialized democratic societies of today. Specifically, the movement of educational change or reform began in the 1990s in the US. Today’s social and economic change forces – demographic, economic, and global - are affecting higher education organizations and their functioning (Morrison, 2002). Student enrollments in higher education institutions are increasing in numbers and becoming ethnically diverse. International movement in capital, labor, products, technology, information exchange and business are expanding beyond national boundaries. Technology is both changing and being changed or reshaped due to the current social and economic forces, affecting the local as well as global economy and culture in which we do everyday business. In parallel to social and economic change forces, education reform since 1990s suggests a fundamental shift in the direction of educational beliefs (Wasser, 1996). Due to recent neuroscience research and convergence of evidence from a number of scientific fields, human intelligence is now believed not to be a fixed entity, but a spiraling and evolving human capacity. Recent findings indicate that there is a positive relationship between the amount of experience in a complex environment and the amount of structural change in the human brain (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). More specifically research now points to evidence that (1) learning changes the physical structure of the brain, (2) learning organizes and reorganizes the brain, and (3) different parts of the brain may be ready to learn at different times. The shift in the belief of learning, moving away from a fixed entity to an ever-evolving nonlinear process that is enriched by providing learning experiences, has yielded the revision of learning theories, giving way to constructivist learning environments for successful teaching and learning. Changing social and economic forces combined with changing beliefs in learning have compelled an educational reform to sketch out the expectations of what students should know and be able to do. Since the quality of learning has a direct relationship to the quality of teaching, new educational standards have been reinforced to ensure the preparation of teacher professionals to meet the demands of the modern post-industrialized society. In the last few years, higher education institutions that prepare future teachers have been expected to the respond to these changes in society at large by following the standards to achieve reform. To ensure that beginning teachers are prepared to