Edtech should become an academic discipline: Report
Eddie Maloney, executive director of Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, has said that edtech should become an academic discipline. Maloney cites the growth in popularity of the MOOC (massive open online course) since 2012 and the renewed focus on the delivery of teaching as two strong reasons for edtech to have the focus of academia. In five years, he estimates that academic edtech will lead to more flexible teaching in higher education. Georgetown University is currently in the process of launching an edtech-focused master’s degree programme in Learning and Design.

Education Trends

Why It's Time for Education Technology to Become an Academic Discipline

Eddie Maloney, executive director of Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, makes the case for a new academic discipline built around the study of educational technology, learning analytics and instructional design.

As Georgetown University prepares to launch a master's degree program in Learning and Design, a new academic discipline built around the study of education technology, learning analytics and instructional design is starting to take shape. Leaders in the field are "bringing about a set of practices that require a knowledge base, that require an ability to share information and that start to form a set of practices that we can all share — but also resist, test, push back against and challenge each other on," according to Eddie Maloney, executive director of the university's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

In a lively Future Trends Forum video chat last week hosted by consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander, Maloney made the case that now is the time to think more deeply about the role of technology in teaching and learning. Analyzing all the components of the work he and others in the field do around education technology, he said, "We can see it as a way of engaging around a set of problems that we think are important but that we don't think have a single solution. There may be multiple solutions that require research, that require an approach that I think mirrors or suggests the contours of a discipline."

Of course, Georgetown is not alone in this realm. Stanford University has a Learning, Design & Technology master's degree

program, as does Purdue. So why the renewed interest in 2016? Has an accumulation of practice built up gradually, or has something occurred in the last year to make this happen?

Maloney, who is also professor of the practice of narrative literature and theory in Georgetown's Department of English, has observed a trajectory in the discipline of education technology over the last four years. "We saw 2012 as an inflection point regarding the role technology plays in higher education," he said, referring to what The New York Times dubbed "The Year of the MOOC."

As Maloney explained, the "MOOC moment" began to challenge some assumptions about the work educators do, the stability of that work and its location. "Over the past four years, as we have seen that MOOC wave rise, crest and either fall or plateau. We have started to build capacities to think about technology, design and learning as core and central problems," he said. "Once we built that momentum, we started to raise questions about what that role is; about why we need to challenge some assumptions we have about the role of technology in teaching and learning; and how technology, design and analytics are helping us to do that better."

The momentum developed over those four years has highlighted some gaps, Maloney insisted, but also some strengths, continuity and consistency that people focused on this topic can leverage to make sure it is part of the core of institutions of higher education. "We have seen an evolution in the understanding of the impact of the work we do."

Something else that has changed since 2012, Maloney added, is that senior leadership has begun to pay attention to learning as a problem higher education needs to do better at. "Many of us have been talking about this for a long time — that colleges and universities are not just about research and creating new knowledge, and that the practice of teaching needs to be brought back to the center. In some ways you can credit the pressure of technology and online education as pushing learning back to the center of a lot of conversations. Let's leverage that to make sure that in four or five years we don't just retrench back to the place where we were and where we allowed that fear or anxiety about disruption to erupt so prominently."