ELI Online Focus Session: Exploring the Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment

Exploring the Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment: Opportunities and Challenges

This year, ELI hosted its Online Focus Session in an Adobe Connect learning environment. Here, participants exchanged ideas and collaborated interactively with the teaching and learning community—all without leaving their institution.
 

About the Theme

Exploring the Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment: Opportunities and Challenges

Here's a paradox: grousing about the LMS is a favorite sport on most campuses. Yet nobody seems to think they could possibly do without one (or two or three). So what might a next-generation digital learning environment look like? What should it enable us to do? This successor environment will be enabled by digital technology, driven by a vision of a learner-centered approach to higher education, and will demand a great deal of innovation and creativity to realize it.

This focus session reviewed some of the discoveries that informed the ideas in the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's NGDLE white paper, and then, together with participants, we collaboratively unpacked the key components of this next-generation environment including

• interoperability
• accessibility and UDL
• learning analytics, advising, and assessment
• leadership and organizational considerations

By engaging in the focus session program, participants:

• Understood the scope of a next-generation digital learning environment,
• Learned about the teaching and learning community's consensus on what this environment needs to enable,
• Explored the ways in which the NGDLE framework is relevant to your institutional opportunities and challenges, and
• Learned about current and possible future applications and practices that are consonant with the NGDLE framework.