About

Community action is at the heart of every positive world change. Moving higher education towards of a vision of equal access, high-quality learning experiences, and continuous innovation requires concerted effort between a diverse range of stakeholders. Emerging technology, a topic proliferating institutional planning, has great potential to advance such a vision …but has equal potential to be misunderstood and misused. If you believe that technology should be explored and contextualized in ways that concretely connects it to making teaching and learning better, we invite you to follow along with this collaboratively-led community program that turns edtech innovation thought leadership into action leadership.

Penn State founded this initiative to establish a shared set of values across global higher education towards driving innovation. This program will initially generate an open online repository of resources that advance technology innovation at the intersection of pedagogy, implementation, and learner engagement. In addition to Penn State, 18 universities and colleges — known here as Community Partners — are engaging in this prototype that catalyzes the contribution of professional insights, research, and educational resources while reinforcing critical values at the participating institutions. A team-based approach is being leveraged; participating institutions have representation from three stakeholder groups: students, learning facilitators, and technology leaders. This strategy will ensure a diverse viewpoint and more effectively diffuse findings and best practices across the network.

Together, participants from the Community Partner institutions identified the core values that should drive decision-making around technology and innovation in higher education. The ultimate goal is to leverage participating institutions’ strengths to create a wealth of centralized online resources in a variety of formats that provide support and promote innovation for a range of higher education stakeholders.

Download the official program charter (PDF).

Objectives

• Create an online library of free resources, organized by which CoAction values they help diffuse, that informs 1) strategic planning around teaching and learning innovation and 2) the meaningful integration of emerging technology.
• Produce high-quality, openly licensed original resources about each value that concisely describes and analyzes its landscape.
• Curate high-quality, openly licensed existing resources (research, articles, papers, videos, visualizations, etc.) about each value.
• Foster an authentic and diverse community of educational technology stakeholders (Community Partners) who will support and extend this work.
• Facilitate vital, continuous conversations between learning facilitators, students, and technology leaders.