George Veletsianos, PhD

Professor, researcher, consultant, speaker, educational technology, learning design, online education, emerging technologies

Category: courses Page 1 of 5

New Course | Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education

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On November 19, 2024

In courses, emerging technologies, futures, generative artificial intelligence, online learning, teacherbots

The Learning Technologies program at the University of Minnesota will be offering a new course this Spring.

CI 5330 (Spring 2025)
Special Topics in Learning Technologies: AI in Education
Instructor Dr. George Veletsianos (georgev |at| umn.edu)
Fully Online
Jan 21, 2025 – May 05, 2025

Short description: This graduate-level course offers an introductory and expansive investigation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education. It will enable learners to (1) investigate the foundations, possibilities, realities, and challenges of AI in education, and (2) gain practical experiences with using AI in education. Through practical and conceptual activities learners will grow their knowledge, skills, and experiences with GenAI in education, and become able to speak fluently about this technology’s proposed benefits (e.g., personalization) and challenges (e.g., biases) in education. The course will balance conceptual and practical experiences, and enable students to use AI tools more effectively and creatively. This course is relevant to numerous learning and teaching contexts, including K-12, higher education, adult education, professional settings, and informal settings.

Long description: This graduate-level course offers an introductory and expansive investigation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education. The course focuses on the foundations, possibilities, realities, limitations/challenges, and practical implementation of GenAI in education. Learners will critically examine literature and practice surrounding GenAI and consider both the benefits of this emerging technology (e.g., personalization) as well as its challenges (e.g., biases and environmental concerns). The course will balance conceptual, theoretical, and practical experiences and will emphasize both theory-to-practice and practice-to-theory through active engagement with AI tools. The course is relevant to multiple learning and teaching contexts and will encourage learners to apply concepts to their unique educational contexts, including K-12, higher education, adult education, professional training, and others.

All learners are expected to be active and ongoing participants in the learning process and foster a community of learning. Course activities will use various technologies to seek and share content; and class interactions will incorporate a variety of text-, audio-, and video-based tools. This is a completely online and asynchronous course and will require regular and active participation in class discussions as well as reflective, practical, and analytic work. The course will follow an engaging and flexible online format to include asynchronous activities that are convenient for working professionals and conducive to online learning for students who may be joining the course from across the country and abroad. This is not an independent study course, nor is it self-paced. Rather, the modules and learning activities are designed to promote and encourage social interactions and the development of a learning community as we learn together.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

  • Define a variety of terms relating to GenAI (e.g., machine learning, large language models, etc)
  • Identify conceptual, theoretical and practical issues relating to GenAI
  • Expand your GenAI literacies
  • Apply GenAI tools, processes, and technologies to education topics of interest
  • Explain benefits and drawbacks of GenAI
  • Formulate and articulate informed perspectives on key theories and issues relating to GenAI in education
  • Discuss the role and practice of GenAI in different contexts
  • Discuss contemporary research being conducted in GenAI and the major issues being studied
  • Identify, synthesize, and critically evaluate major issues affecting GenAI in education
  • Practice and develop prompt engineering techniques
  • Use GenAI to develop an education micro application

 

Are cohort-based course platforms “universities of the future?”

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On June 28, 2023

In courses, future education, my research, online course marketplace, online learning, papers

The edtech industry includes numerous learning providers and platforms providing tools, technologies, and resources for course creators to create and sell online courses. These platforms are interesting for very many reasons. What roles do they play in the learning and development ecosystem? How do they measure effectiveness and learning outcomes? What kinds of pedagogical and instructional design practices do they support and advocate for? What education-related claims do they make?

two people working on five laptops. They sit at a table littered with other devices, like phones, headset, and ipads. Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

In a paper we published a few months ago, we examined one such platform because it describes itself as building ‘the university of the future’ and has recently received significant attention and funding. This makes it a compelling case study to better understand the potential roles and risks associated with education platforms operating outside of and alongside more traditional higher education institutions.

We highlight specific concerns about cohort-based platforms. These include lack of transparency, risk of surveillance, lack of adequate financial support for learners, and over-reliance on social media networks as signifiers of educator/instructor qualification (this last one is a big one). Suggested benefits include adaptability, suitability to changing skills needs, and responsiveness to changing environmental scenarios.

The published version of the paper is here, but here’s a pre-print pdf: Veletsianos, G., & Houlden, S. (in press). On the “university of the future”: A critical analysis of cohort-based course platform Maven. Learning, Media, & Technology. 

 

A pan-Canadian certification program for higher education instructors?

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On January 12, 2023

In courses, future education, online learning

Tony Bates wrote his five wishes for online learning in 2023, along with reasons why he’s somewhat pessimistic about them being fulfilled. I wanted to spend a few minutes here discussing alternatives to Tony’s second wish: “A national certification program for higher education instructors.” If this wish has a “5% odds of happening” (and I agree with Tony here), what kinds of alternatives might have greater chances of success?

Provincial responsibility for higher education means that (at present) this is the kind of wish that is dead in the water. Some alternatives that might go towards addressing the problems of teaching competence might be the following:

  • Provincial certification programs for higher education instructors. The BC government has developed a digital learning strategy, which includes a variety of steps, resources, actions, recommendations, and tools to support and expand the effective and equitable use of digital learning in the province. With a strategy in place, developing a provincial certification program makes good sense. Some of the challenges that Tony identifies a federal program facing will still be present in the provincial context (e.g., research-teaching hierarchies, cost, academic freedom issues), but the odds of this are greater than 5%. My guesstimate? 10%. Still poor. And smaller-scale. On the other hand, a provincial program, say in BC, might become a proof of concept for other provinces, especially, if it is openly licensed, is cross-disciplinary, and is flexible enough in its design and assessment.
  • Institutional and cross-institutional certification programs, such as BCIT’s Polytechnic Academy proposal, which I understand to be similar to the work that Centers of Teaching and Learning at multiple institutions do, such as, for example, the Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) offerings, that are offered by a number of institutions/organizations in the province. There’s a slew of benefits that can come from  multi-institutional collaboration on such efforts, like Tony describes. I’m more optimistic on this, especially because there was quite a lot of collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic that might provide the impetus and support for this, and also because I see collaborative-minded institutions coming together for other initiatives (like the new campus that four island institutions are opening in the Westshore).
  • Institutional certification programs for future faculty. This is close to my heart. Preparing current doctoral students for online/hybrid teaching – and preparing them for teaching in general – is necessary (which, I might add, also prepares them with skills that are relevant outside of the academy, like leading teams in collaborative groupwork). There’s other challenges here to be sure (such as academic departments agreeing that this is topic that is significant enough to warrant a course/certificate/microcredential/something), but this might be an area where the office/school/college of graduate studies plays a pivotal role. Another challenge: this kind of initiative addresses the current problem, but in the future, while remaining unresponsive to the status quo. It’s not a solution, but it’s part of a package for a solution.

If you would like to add more to this, the comments are open!

Talk: Radical Flexibility as a Potential Solution to the Challenges Facing Higher Education

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On January 6, 2021

In courses, flexible learning, future education, my research, scholarship

Photo by Adam Valstar

I gave a keynote recently for the Centre for Research in Digital Education, University of Leeds, as part of their online symposium on Digital Transformation of Higher Education. The purpose of this symposium was to explore this transformation “from the perspective of existing and on-going research in digital education, to help the higher education sector to set a direction of travel which creates positive effects on access to higher education and enhanced student learning, through long-lasting changes.” My talk focused on Radical Flexibility as a Potential Solution to the Challenges Facing Higher Education, aiming to critique normative forms of flexibility that assume that everyone benefits from it in similar ways, and propose more broad forms of flexibility that account for diverse peoples’ unique and day-to-day realities. A recording is available here – and there recordings of all the other excellent talks are archived on this page. I drew on the following work for this talk:

Veletsianos, G., Kimmons, R. Larsen, R., & Rogers, J. (in press). Flexibility, Time, Gender, and Online Learning Completion. Distance Education.

Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (in press). The Problem with Flexible Learning: Neoliberalism, Freedom, and Learner Subjectivities. Learning, Media, & Technology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1833920

Veletsianos, G., & Houlden, S. (2020). Radical Flexibility and Relationality as Responses to Education in Times of Crisis. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 849-862. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00196-3

Johnson, N., Veletsianos, G., Seaman, J. (2020). U.S. Faculty and Administrators’ Experiences and Approaches in the Early Weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Online Learning Journal, 24(2), 6-21.  http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i2.2285

Veletsianos, G. (2020). How should we respond to the life-altering crises that education is facing? Distance Education, 41(4), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1825066

Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2019). A Posthumanist Critique of Flexible Online Learning and its “Anytime Anyplace” Claims. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(3), 1005-1018.

Talk: Striving for Balance in Online Learning

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On January 5, 2021

In courses, online learning, scholarship

Photo by Dalton Touchberry

Recently Middlebury’s Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry, hosted me for an online faculty workshop on the topic of Striving for Balance in Online Learning as part of their ongoing Teaching Online and Hybrid Conversation Series. For many faculty, the experience of remote teaching this fall has raised questions around how to create a balanced course workload for themselves and for their students. Students, like faculty, are struggling with the challenges presented by learning in a new way (and during a pandemic), having to navigate new course structures, systems, and expectations. During this session, I offered strategies for faculty seeking new ideas for how to create balanced course workloads that consider the student experience. We started by discussing what it may mean to view our own courses or degree programs from a lens of “balance.” I argued that balance isn’t about doing less, though this process may invariably result in less of something, which *can* be a good thing. Instead, balance is about intentionality and reflection on how course design choices impact students. Next, we discussed balance

  • in using technology (e.g., low-tech, new-to-students and new-to-faculty technology)
  • in assessments (e.g., grading, ungrading)
  • in discussion board activities, writing, and commenting
  • in student reading, listening (e.g., podcasts), and watching (e.g., documentaries)
  • in individual vs. group/collaborative work
  • in synchronous and asynchronous sessions
  • in reading lists (e.g., required vs. recommended/suggested)
  • in timing (e.g., coordination with courses other than one’s own; multiple end-of-semester deadlines)

Great questions raised were the following:

  • What does balance look like for faculty; what does it look like for students; and is there any tension there?
  • What are some of the ways you heard from students about how faculty have created balance in the courses they have taken? Tips/tricks/suggestions. How is it operationalized?
  • We sometimes hear from faculty concerns about finding balance by scaling back what they normally do in a face-to-face class. What advice would you give to those faculty in light of both what you’ve heard from students, and given the current context of a global pandemic?
  • Many faculty will return to teaching primarily face-to-face as soon as possible, perhaps as early as spring or next fall. What lessons, based on your study and what we’re hearing from students now, might faculty consider carrying forward independent of future teaching modalities?

Video, tapes, histories of educational technology, and growing up in Cyprus

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On August 21, 2018

In courses, E-learning, sharing

One of the courses I teach examines the foundations and histories of the field. Writings about the histories of educational/instructional technology/design predominantly identify and examine particular technologies that were in vogue at particular periods of time.  For instance, Martin Weller discusses the use of streaming video in his 25 years of edtech series. One might do the same with radio, overhead projectors, mySpace, and so on. Here, I want to share with you a personal story, a story about a particular VHS cassette.

VHS tape – By Evan-Amos – Own work, Public Domain

My Twitter bio identifies my location as Canada and Cyprus. Cyprus is where I grew up, and where I tell people I am from when they ask me the seemingly innocuous but loaded question “Where are you from?,” as if people can be from just one place. Growing up in a divided country like Cyprus, I was constantly reminded of conflict, war, occupation, fleeing, and loss. I grew up with textbooks emblazoned with the slogan Δέν Ξεχνώ, a nod to a national policy aiming to convince GreekCypriot children to “never forget” the occupied areas of Cyprus. It wasn’t just the not-so-hidden national curriculum. I know of many people who were and are refugees and people who were directly or indirectly impacted. Friends. Friends’ parents. Uncles and aunts. My parents. My maternal grandparents.

In the 1980’s my grandparents were given a tape. Someone – an acquaintance of an acquaintance of a family member – visited the occupied areas and drove for hours, recording what they could from their car. I don’t remember the details. I do remember that the video was grainy and mostly uninteresting to a pre-teen. But, it brought us together to discuss issues more important than the roads, farmlands, and abandoned villages depicted in the tape: war, coup d’état, peace, borders, the “other.”

My aunt and uncle owned a video store in the 80’s. I spent many days in the summers there and watched my fair share of tapes. But that tape, that grainy tape, is forged in my memory. The impact of video on education reveals a worthwhile pedagogical story because it often culminates in how video replaces other media and rarely causes pedagogical change. Particular artifacts though, in particular situations, at particular times, with particular participants, do. That may not be the norm in formal educational environments, but I can at least point to one instance where a tape had impact.

Do you have any similar stories?

An important lesson from an external evaluation

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On May 7, 2018

In courses, online learning

Two colleagues and I just finished an external evaluation of a universityʼs online MA in education and MEd programs. The programs are stellar, the students are engaged, and the faculty are thoughtful. Their graduation rates are above 90% and their students do important work, evidenced in part by the number of theses that are subsequently published and the number of projects that seek to make meaningful contributions to practice. The programs do many things right.

You have to look inside to get a clear view of what is happening
The photo is of Georgetown University, and has no relationship to the program evaluated

 

Their outcomes contradict the opinion that online learning is solitary and lacks inclusion. Rather – and despite the fact that these programs are thriving – they face institutional obstacles that prevent them from doing better, that preclude them from further expanding equity and quality. We have a few recommendations for improvement, including suggestions for course design, evaluation, assessment, and enrolment, and Iʼm looking forward to following their work in the future. Being able to examine degree programs in depth and interview faculty, staff, administrators, and students is a worthwhile experience in its own right.

This program is a single case, and by no means an accurate reflection of online programs in general. However, the more I do these evaluations the more I see online learning curtailed not just by forces external to the institution, but also by recurring internal barriers that staff, faculty, and administrators can address.

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