2019 has been a tremendous year of learning for me. From writing my first full book manuscript to presenting at some new conferences, from forming new collaborations and experimenting with my own faculty development and teaching practices, this year meant a lot of growth, re-thinking, and re-learning for me. There’s an old adage I always enjoy: the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. That felt particularly true for me this year as I aimed to do a lot of listening alongside writing and speaking. I have much more work to do, and in 2019, I felt tremendously grateful to read the scores of excellent writing out there on teaching, learning, and technology in higher education.

It was really challenging to narrow my favorite reads down to a Top 10 list (and I tried to highlight some different voices than the ones I compiled in 2018). But without further ado, I hope these articles help you find some new ideas to inspire you in 2020!

1. How to Make Smart Choices about Tech for Your Courses: Michelle D. Miller (for The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Are you wondering about how and why you might consider choosing technology for your teaching? Dr. Miller’s advice guide is just about the best place I can think of to start that conversation. This advice guide is thoughtful and practical and, most importantly, it grounds its conversation about why you might want to use technology as part of your teaching in the learning sciences. I appreciate that this advice guide also doesn’t assume that using technology as part of your teaching is necessarily a good idea. On the contrary, this advice guide states clearly up front that interventions have to be completely and purposefully integrated into the course’s learning goals. Don’t miss the great resources, including scholarly journals and books, at the end of this advice guide for more.

2 Rethinking the Context of EdTech: Tressie McMillam Cottom (for Educause Review)

If you want to understand what edtech should ideally accomplish in higher education, Dr. Cottom’s article is where you need to begin your exploration. Dr. Cottom’s article encourages leaders in educational technology to consider what should be done with edtech rather than what can be done with edtech. She makes the compelling case that education technology units and academic departments should merge efforts more purposefully to align the equitable possibilities of edtech with real applications in academic disciplines and departments. As a technologist embedded in an academic program at the moment, I agree that my partnerships with students and instructors is what makes my work meaningful. Her reminder that “Edtech is not a set of tools; rather, it is a set of practices that further a greater good” is salient in a moment when institutions are leveraging educational technology for often-predatory purposes (e.g. with tools that track, surveil, and curtail students’ experiences).

3. Calling All Online Instructors: There’s a Secret Bonus Level!: Thomas J. Tobin (for Faculty Focus)

Online learning design has followed some rote and uninspired patterns: quiz, discussion forum, video, rinse and repeat. What Dr. Tobin advocates for is something that really got me thinking: integrating “spaced repetition” to help learners navigate new ideas with familiar patterns. As educators, it can be easy for us to cram in as much new stuff as possible week-by-week, but when we engage in intentional repetition and ask students to recall old ideas and connect them back to new ones, we can form some familiar pathways. I don’t think this practice need to be restricted to online learning either! For those unfamiliar with Dr. Tobin’s work, I also found his book (co-authored with Kirsten Behling) Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone to be a helpful read for better understanding Universal Design for Learning in higher education.

4. Personal Space: Rethinking Distance Learning: Robin DeRosa (keynote from Distance Teaching and Learning Conference)

If you still think that online education is only about impersonal MOOCs, think again and read Dr. DeRosa’s compelling keynote address from this year. Online and distance learning suffers from limited imagination, Dr. DeRosa argues, and she traces here the history of distance education, both in terms of what it means for education to be “distant” in the first place, but also in terms of how distance education has been deployed and discussed over the last several decades. She ends this keynote with lots of practical advice for instructors, specifically in terms of humanizing online learning and encouraging instructors to establish a “commons” with their online courses where students can collectively share their ideas, experiences, and learning pathways with agency.

5. Learning Technology as a Professional Practice: Developing a Critical Perspective: Maren Deepwell (for Educause Review)

Dr. Deepwell makes the valuable case that learning technologists need to be engaged in constant reflection about the nature of their work. Specifically, Dr. Deepwell invites us to consider how and whether educational technology is the proper learning intervention and to what ends it advances equity and inclusion. With some practical frameworks for assessing the work of learning technologists, Dr. Deepwell makes a case I’ve rarely seen made: that technologists need to engage in iterative assessment of their work not just to stay “up-to-date” on the latest technologies, but to understand the human consequences of what they do in higher ed institutions.

6. The Smartest People in the Room? What Silicon Valley’s Supposed Obsession with Tech-Free Private Schools Really Tells Us: Morgan G. Ames (for Los Angeles Review of Books)

To understand the role of technology in higher education, I believe we need to have a clear understanding of the ideologies that drive technology’s role in education, broadly speaking. So, while Dr. Ames’s incredibly smart essay is not about higher education per se, this essay precisely pinpoints a critical tension in conversations about technology and learning: that we need to understand not just how the technology works, but the context in which that technology is deployed. Specifically, Dr. Ames unpacks the trend that the wealthiest parents in the most tech-saturated place (i.e. Silicon Valley) are banning screens for their kids. This essay is worth reading to understand why this trend exists and, in my estimation, reveals how much work learning technologists need to do to help people understand and form healthy relationships with technology, ones that don’t feel compelled to pathologize the usage of tools themselves, but rather, decries uncritical practices.

7. Universal Design for Learning as a Framework for Digital Equity: Beth Holland (for Getting Smart)

If you’ve been wondering about the relationship between accessibility, universal design for learning (UDL), and technology, then Dr. Holland’s short essay is a great place to understand these connections more clearly. Dr. Holland makes a compelling case that digital technology can help students navigate, modify, and engage with curriculum in flexible ways. While educators need to remain mindful of what kinds of digital technologies students use to engage in this flexibility, I appreciate that Dr. Holland points out some examples of ways that digital technology can be leveraged to promote equity-related goals.

8. The Nuance of Note-Taking: Karen Costa (for Inside Higher Ed)

It is sort of astonishing to me that in 2019, we’re still debating whether laptops and mobile phones should be in our classrooms. Yet here we are, and to me, Dr. Costa’s intervention in the debate offers one of the most comprehensive and important contributions to date. She breaks down in clear and generous terms what’s at stake when we ban devices from classrooms: inclusion, engagement, and students’ rights to their own learning experiences. Plus, she makes clear what students really need to become successful learners: academic strategies that allow them to take notes purposefully and engage with the learning content on their own terms (through the instructors’ and their peers’ support).

9. Teaching Online Will Make You a Better Teaching in Any Setting: Kevin Gannon (for The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Dr. Gannon breaks down all of the ways in which teaching online helped him interrogate his teaching practices, from the framing of his discussion forum prompts to the ways that he measured and understood engagement from students. Pacing out his online course also helped him to see what he prioritized and valued in his teaching and to which topics he thought he could give greater attention. If you’re an instructor who feels a bit hesitant about what teaching online might mean, this article is a must-read.

10. Competent, Literate, Fluent: The What and Why of Digital Learning Initiatives: Mo Pelzel (for Educause Review)

For the past decade, “digital literacy” has been a major goal among institutions, but it’s often unclear what institutions mean when they refer to digital literacy and learning in the first place. Dr. Pelzel does a great job of breaking down the different terms that learning technologists and designers use to talk about the acquisition of digital learning (i.e. competent, literate, fluent) and offers helpful guiding questions for those engaged in conversations about what it means for students to be engaged in digital learning spaces.

Here’s to a year of more great reads on teaching, learning, technology, and higher education!