Teaching Digitalisation: Impact on Innovative Learning

Introduction

Dynamic communication and knowledge sharing among participants in the learning process: the learners, the teachers and the educational organizations supports some of the main characteristics of innovative learning: teamwork, sharing responsibilities and credits, synchronous and asynchronous communication, ethical collaboration, research beyond the formalized boundaries, and most of all having fun while learning.

Technology-based teaching tools, e.g. learning management systems (LMS), virtual classrooms (VC), massive open online courses (MOOC), augmented reality (AR), etc., provide new means of planning and performing the teaching process. The potentials and challenges of innovative learning and technology-supported teaching largely affect all participants in the learning process.

Learners, teachers, and education institutions struggle with the digitalization that is redefining the learning process. Even though separate solutions are demanded for different learner age levels and different disciplines, the task is fundamentally the same: learning is acquiring new knowledge and skills, whereas innovative learning should provide innovation for all the participants in the learning process. Currently, learners are confronted with learning environments that to not meet their expectations and thereby are not fully engaged in the learning process, teachers are repeatedly using the same teaching methods and materials, while educational organizations are struggling to keep up with the environment and are unable to form of follow viable teaching strategies.

Teaching digitalization (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2016) is heavily researched and so is the creation of innovative learning environments (Groff, 2013). Nevertheless, to our knowledge the examination success in providing digitally supported lectures to the teachers has not been examined yet, especially in the relation to innovative learning itself. This chapter is focused in closing this gap and providing value-added for all the three key stakeholder systems in education, focused in enabling innovative learning. It helps them select and apply technologies well aligned with their visions and the level of innovation, which they expect to deliver and / or acquire during the learning process. It also helps them understand the importance of their mission as well as define the goals aligned with innovative learning.

Innovative learning concepts support students to reason on potentials to change, renew, reorganize, and develop new perspectives on the observed issue. The concept of innovative learning invokes the idea of change on every aspect of learning: the learning objectives, the learning process and its outcomes (Engestrom, 1999). It may be supported by the technology supported innovative environment (Groff, 2013), while the relations between these concepts are not defined precisely.

The organization, execution, and perception of teaching, learning, and its results are changing dramatically. For students, the memorization of topics and the wish for individual excellence in a subject (thus the concept of competition between students) are replaced by teaming-up to combine ideas and capacities in order to reach a common goal (Blair et al., 2016).

For the society, it is important to gain dynamic people, capable and willing to understand and reshape existing structures and models, and who are willing to work in transdisciplinary teams. At the same time, the preparedness to invest time and energy to comprehend complex matters is replaced by the desire for instant success (Črešnar and Jevšenak, 2019). The mixture of personal independence, empathy, capacity to explore and execute in its members, can drive organizations to the next level of understanding and facilitating the learning process (Baczyńska and Thornton, 2017).