I have the luxury of being in a simulation lab, so our learning sessions typically involve new forms of technology for educating medical students and other learners in the medical field. I am going to use an example of CPR because I am a Basic Life Support Instructor.
They used to teach and some places still do, CPR on half-torso dummies that acted as a person. Now, they have a new tool in CPR technology called QCPR. These high-tech CPR manikins help to ensure the students are enhancing their learning. Instead of not really understanding how far they need to push down when doing compressions, learners are able to see in real-time how they are doing. A tablet comes with the manikin that allows the facilitator to see exactly how far down the learner is compressing, how fast they are going, that they are lifting off the chest properly, their hands are in the correct place, and if they are giving breaths, that they are getting enough volume pushed into the lungs. This QCPR manikin is a substitute for any of the older CPR dummies and it lets facilitators augment the education by using it. In addition, the education is transformed because of the modification of the high-tech manikin and redefined by allowing the learners access to the real-time data of their encounters. The QCPR manikin is a great tool in CPR teaching because it gives the learners a better sense of how to actually perform CPR correctly. Just watching a video and taking a test does not ensure that one knows how to perform CPR on a human being. The data that can be collected using this tool is infinite, as well.
It would be interesting to test the learners before the class started using the QCPR manikin and then again afterwards to see improvement or a decline. I think that would be a great project to help understand if the videos and hands-on practice of CPR is really helping students learn. The only downfall to these manikins is that they are expensive and the dummies that have nothing to them are cheap. That is why not many institutions use QCPR.

I will use faculty development as an example. Right now we have workshops that are Face-to-Face with some content push and an application activity. So this might be something like “ Apply Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction to a course module”. These activities allow the participants to apply the content we have just discussed. The whole workshop will typically last an hour. During this process I might also use poll everywhere or just ask the room for feedback on the content and their experience.

We want to create online versions of the workshops as well. We already record and post them using lecture capture software. A better way to do this is to use Articulate Storyline to post the content with some interactive elements. We can still present the activities for download for the online user. In these ways we are replicating the f2f experience and adding some basic interactivity. This would be augmentation.

What I would like to do is get to the modification and redefinition levels for the online users of the workshops. I have developed ways to include asynchronous polling. I have also considered adding social elements like Twitter, WordPress discussions or Yammer. I think there might be an opportunity for collaboration software here too. So participants might work online together to build and improve course module collaboratively, creating authentic work products. However, to be honest I am open to ideas. I want to have the online users not only have and equal experience, but also have the online experience add value. I would love to use technology to get to those higher levels for these asynchronous users!

Our institution offers a Licentiate in Sacred Theology program where priests from all over the world have the opportunity to complete the program in a blended delivery format. Students completed the program by taking online classes in the Fall and Winter terms, with a one month residency component during the month of July. A large section of the programs is the homiletics component where priests refine their preaching skills. There is a strong interpersonal component to teaching this material and instructors will use Panopto, our lecture capture tool, to present the material. This is an example of the substitution level where instructors are using old methods with a new tool. In recent semesters instructors have been requiring students to use Panopto to record their homilies and post them to the LMS for peer review. This would represent moving toward the Augmentation stage. Looking forward, instructors could start using Zoom as a tool to allow students to work collaboratively in a synchronous setting to develop and co-author homilies as a learning exercise. This would maintain the heart of the current assignment, but also facilitate a new social component in the learning process. This next step would represent moving into the Modification stage.