Dr. David Wicks joined the School of Education at Seattle Pacific University after serving as the University’s director of Instructional Technology for 15 years. Dr. Wicks has had numerous roles throughout his career in educational technology, including high school teacher, university lecturer, school district technology facilitator, multimedia author, and project manager for an educational technology company.
As director of SPU’s MEd in Digital Education Leadership, Dr. Wicks is committed to helping educators improve teaching, learning, and assessment with digital tools, and believes SPU “is a great place to be if you want to participate in what the future of education can look like.”
Here he answers a few questions about SPU’s Digital Education Leadership degree.
How is SPU’s Digital Education Leadership MEd different from other Educational Technology MEd programs?
As far as I know, we have the only program based on the ISTE Coaching Standards. Our graduates will be educational technology leaders in their schools and universities, specifically equipped to coach their peers in effective uses of technology for teaching and learning. While other programs may focus on the “What?” (what technology to use in the classroom), we also focus on the “Why?” and “How?”, giving teachers research-based reasons for why to use a specific strategy and how to offer compelling training and mentorship to improve the likelihood of success.
What are some other innovative features of the DEL program?
Here are three innovations we emphasize in our program:
- All courses utilize a team teaching model with an SPU professor and an expert practitioner. The expert practitioners are teachers and content experts who are on the front line of digital education. The team model provides students with the opportunity to learn about the theories and research, how to implement best practices, and how current policies may impede or enhance their efforts to integrate technology in the classroom.
- We emphasize the use of open educational resources (OER), as well as the free journal articles and ebooks students can access through our library. As a result, our students have spent less than $30 on textbooks during the first year of the program’s existence. A recent study reported that college students spend approximately $1,200 on textbooks and required resources each year. Besides saving money, students can apply what they learn about OER to their own classrooms as they look for ways to reduce costs while keeping the quality high.
- The program is taught entirely with the use of free educational software such as Google Drive, Google Classroom, Haiku Deck, PiktoChart, and SnagIt for Chrome. The students, mostly K–12 teachers, are able to use these tools with their own students without needing to submit funding requests to administration or their parent-teacher association.
Watch a presentation with other features.
The program is classified as an online program, but you refer to it as a “blended” program. What do you mean by that?
While the courses can be taken 100 percent online, we use specific strategies to help “humanize” the course. By this I mean that we design the courses to increase the social presence or the ability for online students to make themselves known while taking the course. We do this by “blending” asynchronous (text, screencasts), synchronous (real-time web conferences), and face-to-face instruction. This is done in four ways:
- We have text-based discussion forums and screencasts (recorded lectures) like conventional online courses.
- We have weekly real-time web conferences where students can see and talk to each other. These conferences are student-led, meaning that this is a time for students to talk about the questions they have rather than listening to a live lecture by the professors.
- All major assignments in the program require students to create real-world products or provide services for their schools. For example, in the Educational Technology Leadership course, DEL students choose a colleague to coach throughout the term. Activities like this add important face-to-face interactions that are missing from fully online courses.
- As a program, we seek opportunities to gather as a community. During this school year we hosted a lecture by Alec Couros. We had a Christmas party hosted at the home of one of the students. We attend conferences and edcamps together.
In this web conference students asked author Dr. Katie Davis about her book, The App Generation.
Does this emphasis on face-to-face interaction limit where students can live and still participate in this program?
Students are not required to attend these events, but it is clear from their feedback that they like having opportunities to gather face-to-face. I would never tell prospective students that they live too far away to be part of the program, but I would make it clear that they would miss out on community-building opportunities. We want our students and faculty to develop professional relationships that last long after the last course. There is nothing like meeting face-to-face to help build the trust necessary to sustain long-term online relationships.
Learn more about SPU’s MEd in Digital Education Leadership. Or follow the program online on Facebook and Twitter.