Abstract:

Mobile technologies and networked applications are continually expanding the scope and increasing the interactivity of the learning process for students. There is a concomitant burden placed on educators at all levels of the education system as they are called upon to provide content, structure, and management for these new technological innovations.

In addition, accountability to government and other sponsors, accreditation requirements, and conformance to quality standards all contribute to the administration, record keeping, and reporting requirements imposed on educators. Competition between institutions and new delivery channels means that educators must also take on marketing and promotional tasks.

Information technology service providers have tended to address the individual process areas of the higher education institution with separate financial, human resources, student administration, knowledge management, and e-learning systems. At the point of application, however, it is often the educators who have the most varied responsibilities, and therefore the highest overhead from the multiplicity of systems in use. That is, the educators constantly have to spend more time learning, using, and conforming to these systems. Ultimately this will occur to the detriment of time available for their primary role, teaching.

Simultaneously, students will expect the Learning Management Systems in use by their schools and institutions to support them in every aspect of their education. Once again, the disparate functions of content delivery, communication between student and educators, recording of results, and enrollment and financial transactions, are typically managed by systems which are only tenuously linked, if at all. As students progress along the path of lifelong learning, which may include new opportunities presented by the internationalization of education, they will often encounter impediments due to incompatible or disconnected systems.

The challenge is to get the information technology providers to understand the emerging requirements for both students and educators, and to design and build integrated and intelligent systems that will minimize the impediments and maximize the education.

Keywords:

educator, technology, learning management system.