The Dean of KU’s School of Education, Rick Ginsberg, describes the KU experience as it relates to technology in the online classroom. Interested in online courses from the KU School of Education? Visit The University of Kansas https://educationonline.ku.edu/.
My name is Rick Ginsberg and I’m the Dean of School of Education here at KU. For years and years and years technology was always on the periphery of what’s happening in the core of the classroom. I mean the didactic relationship between a teacher and a bunch of passive students stayed the same for hundreds of years. Slowly but surely that’s starting to change. We feel that if we’re going to be preparing educators for the 21st century, that is contingent upon us to stay as far ahead as we can. What we’re trying to do is create a situation where when you take a KU online program, you’re getting the full KU experience just as if you were coming here in person on campus.
We’ve worked really hard, for example, in the online space to create situations so that it can almost replicate actually being out in classrooms. So in one of our programs, we’ve created a Virtual School District called Jayhawkville. And the school district is rich and there are videos and there’s data and there are test data and et cetera. And so that the students get the feel of actually being in the school district. We’re trying to bring in what technology can do to make the experiences as rich as possible. It’s not just replicating the face-to-face experience, it’s actually enhancing.