We were flying high at #DLNchat on November 28 when we discussed Product Pilots & Experimentation with fellow instructional designers, faculty, administrators and entrepreneurs. Chatters shared a lot of resources for finding new products including, of course, the EdSurge HigherEd Product Index. We also talked about using non-edtech specific tools to address edtech pain points. "Call it hacking, revamping, flipping upside down, whatever you want" – Dr. Ryan Straight (who inspired this #DLNchat topic) gave this simple advice: “avoid unitaskers.”
EdSurge’s own Aneesa Davenport fell in love with a new hashtag, #techlifebalance as we discussed the challenges of creating your own products. Though many folks admitted they were intimidated by the time, expertise or cost of homegrowing, Alex Luge made this selling point, “You can create an exact match to what you want and the students need. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, there is a lot of code and content that can serve as a great starting point.”
Eric Mistry suggested two tracks for piloting products at your institution: “fast, experimental track and break-potential VS slow, thorough, & dependable.” Dr. Connie Johnson, who has run many a pilot, shared that pilot results at Colorado Tech University are often more positive than full scale adoption. The reason? A lot of us had guesses, but Dr. Johnson believes the success is mostly due to the additional attention given during the pilot.
#DLNchat-ters have learned a lot from their failures. @Lingers reminded us of the importance of research before implementation and Philippos Savvides has fine-tuned product selection process at ASU. You also have to know when to stop using a product.
We finished by dreaming up our holy grails of edtech products. Scroll down through the #DLNchat history to see them all but, hint hint, there was a lot of AI involved…
Join our next chat: The Skills Gap – Fact or Fantasy. Add it your Google calendar for Tuesday, December 12 at 1pm PT/ 4pm PT. #DLNchat is co-hosted by the Online Learning Consortium, WCET, the New Media Consortium and Tyton Partners.
Check out the latest #DLNchat thoughts, tweets and deets here:
