Higher Education: A Medium in Search of a Message

Abstract

Educators have always blended technology and pedagogy. With written, aural, and visual methods of sharing information optimized over time, the college and university classroom experience became a planned presentation of explicit knowledge through the revelation of course content. A respectable academic space emerged across disciplines where “the sage on the stage” could require textbooks and normalize assessment outcomes because content was decidedly controllable. There is a pedagogical crisis looming in higher education, however, the epicenter of which is student access to educational content that is useful and reliable without the major investment of a four-year degree. This crisis challenges higher education instruction to be less the medium of explicit knowledge (as it has been for decades) and more the dynamic and interactive medium whose mission is improving the thinking capacity of students through sharing and creating explicit and tacit knowledge. This chapter accordingly suggests that a seismic shift toward collaborative, problem-based approaches to learning is in order so that higher education instruction can redefine itself.

Citation

Reinson, K.F. (2013), "Higher Education: A Medium in Search of a Message", Wankel, L.A. and Blessinger, P. (Ed.) Increasing Student Engagement and Retention using Multimedia Technologies: Video Annotation, Multimedia Applications, Videoconferencing and Transmedia Storytelling (Cutting-Edge Technologies in Higher Education, Vol. 6 Part F), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 17-37. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2044-9968(2013)000006F004