Abstract:

The University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) was founded in 2002 (http://www.uoit.ca/). Located in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, the university was founded with a specific mission, namely to address a shortage of highly qualified personnel in areas of health sciences, engineering, science, management and information technology disciplines. Since its first class in 2003, the university has grown to include over 9700 undergraduate students and 500 graduate students in a variety of programs (49 undergraduate programs; 17 Masters programs; and 7 PhD programs).

A founding feature of UOIT was the design, implementation and evaluation of a Technology Enriched Learning Environment (TELE). This innovative program was fundamental to both the brand of the university and its academic programs. The TELE program (http://itsc.uoit.ca/teaching_learning/technology-enriched-learning/) embraced the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in all aspects of teaching and learning as well as the integration of ICT into curriculum design. Today, TELE continues to be the largest program of its kind in North America.

The pillars of the program include: provision of a new laptop computer for each student; a bi-annual hardware refresh to ensure learners have access to up-to-date hardware and technologies, similar to those used in future employment settlings; course-specific software pre-loaded on each computer to support course and program learning outcomes; integration of the online learning environment including an LMS as well as collaborative software for real-time interaction; and importantly, a belief that a ubiquitous ICT learning environment was best managed centrally to ensure lower costs to students. These foundational beliefs were based on the computing environment of the early millennium characterised by the high cost of rapidly evolving hardware and software with few alternatives; lack of consumer cloud computing; and the requirement for specialized knowledge to manage personal computing environments.

In 2015, the currency of TELE program at UOIT was questioned based on a re-examination of the program tenants. The growth of mobile devices, lower costs of laptop hardware, cloud computing affordances, changing software requirements, student desire for greater hardware choice, the growth of low cost online alternatives to centralized computing services and enhanced abilities by the university to monitor individual usage patterns, together established the rationale for evolving Canada’s largest ICT program. To inform this evolution and the resultant programmatic changes, four questions were posed?

These included:
a) What is the sense of how well TELE has met the needs of faculty and students;
b) What are the unfulfilled needs of students and faculty;
c) What constraints are there to changing TELE; and
d) What new and emerging technologies support transformation?.

This presentation addresses these strategic questions based primarily on survey and institutional data and will outline the next phase of technology enabled learning at UOIT.

Keywords:

Learning innovation, laptop computers, cloud computing, software, mobile learning strategy.