Learning Community, PhD, Reflections

Engaging Tomorrow’s Learners

While reading articles for an assignment, I stumbled upon a decent read in the T+D Magazine put out by ASTD called “The Time Has Come to Embrace Millennial Perspectives.” The article linked up to an interesting white paper about Millennials from Millennial Inc.

The white paper shared strategies and ideas of how to best engage Generation Y in the workplace. This got me thinking that a similar list could be applied to our learners. It is critical  and how we engage our students inside and outside the classroom at our institutions.

Here are a few ideas on how to meet our Millennial learners in higher education (adopted from the business workplace 10 core principles):
  1. Encourage open collaboration across the campus.
  2. Ask more from each student, faculty & staff.
  3. Recognize and reward good ideas, wherever they exist on campus.
  4. Use technology to customize services, resources and to personalize communications.
  5. Maintain high-quality learning curriculum and student services.
  6. Integrate responsibility on your campus.
  7. Connect to students in authentic, relevant, and meaningful ways.
  8. Keep two-way communication open by partnering with your students.
  9. Create opportunities that encourage students to share their positive experiences, leveraging word-of-mouth interest, and increase involvement on campus.
  10. Continually search, evolve, and find new ways of learning.
ATPI, Learning Technologies, PhD, Reflections

Determining Trends & Issues

The fall semester has kicked off into full swing and now the third week of school is coming to a close. This means many classes and assignments are underway, and the time for research and reflection is upon us – by that I mean homework and assignments.

ATTD 6210 – Trends and Issues in Applied Technology, Training and Development

A study of current national trends and issues in the fields of applied technology, training and development. Emphasis on topics related to leadership, organizational culture and total quality improvement.

The objective of this course is to research topics and trends that can best be applied to our professional fields of education, human resources and beyond since learners in our class have a varied professional background. This is one of the few courses for the ATPI Doc Program, and a starting point to engage in research and writing for publications. The goal for our first assignment is to provide a trends/issues report and key points to share for our next online session in Wimba.

Here are the “Trends/Issues” topics our class identified the other evening. This process took place after a review of over 100 articles,multiple reviews from peers, clustering of trend topics and debates of the groups (all completed in an online webinar format – FUN!) :

• Technology and Learning
• Workforce Diversity
• Performance Management/Consulting/Corporate Training
• Educator Quality – K-12 to Higher Education
• Learning Styles and Learning Models

Over the course of the term, I will do my best to include an article or thoughts on late breaking trends for a few of these themes listed above. I encourage readers to send any “hot topics” or readings I might have not stumbled upon on the way. I promise to commit a post or two each week for this reflection and sharing, as I think that blogging helps to work out the thought process and makes me a more informed learner/educator.

Past trends and tags from my blog include the following topics


Let’s see how much I can expand this Wordle by December 2010.