Over 70% of our courses offered on-campus use LEARN to some extent to manage course content and communications and to support online learning activities. Data extracted from Waterloo’s LEARN system can provide us with the details of which courses are using its various built-in tools, such discussion forums, quizzes and rubrics. This data can give us a preliminary snapshot of our innovative courses that use instructional technologies.
However, this snapshot is incomplete because we are currently unable to identify blended courses that use external instructional technologies, such as Piazza, Twitter, peerScholar, Diigo, Top Hat, mobile apps, and so on. As a result, we have not been able to document the full extent of courses that are innovative by virtue of the technologies that they employ to support active, student-centred learning. Such technologies often offer learning opportunities that are not otherwise available, but tracking these non-LEARN instructional technologies is challenging and had not been attempted in the past. However, we know that many instructors are working outside the box. 
Innovative Instructional Technologies Project
This spring the CTE Faculty liaisons, myself, and the SID Emerging Technologies, Dr. Mark Morton, embarked on a project to gain a fuller understanding of the extent of use of instructional technologies outside of the LEARN environment on campus. CTE’s work in this area supports the Outstanding Academic Programming part of the current strategic plan, with the goal to “to expand the appropriate use of technologies to enhance students’ learning experience”. Our first step was to send a request to all instructors to indicate whether they were using Twitter, Quizlet, TopHat, IF-AT cards or Dropbox and to identify tools they were using in categories such as Google tools, polling tools, blogging tools, wikis, or screencasting tools. Many instructors replied and we have started to build a picture of the number and variety of external tools that are being used across campus.
What we found
Over 50 different tools were identified by instructors. Piazza, Google Tools, Camtasia (a screencasting technology), Dropbox (the external Dropbox, not the Learn one) and Twitter were the most frequently mentioned, and the categories with the most variety of tools were presentation tools, blogging tools and polling tools. Screencast-o-matic, Explain Everything, WordPress, MediaWiki, SurveyMonkey and Doodle are just a few of the tools that instructors are integrating into their teaching and learning activities. We will continue to collect information on the many and varied instructional technologies that are being used across campus. We will also be adding a new section to the CTE website in the fall outlining the objectives instructors have for using some of these technologies (for example, dissemination of course content, supporting group work, fostering a community of learners, etc.) as well as identifying “friendly contacts” for specific tools (instructors who are willing to talk to their colleagues about how and why they are using these technologies in their courses).
As we look to the future and how technologies will enhance students’ learning the trend seems to be towards a more modular or LEGO-like learning ecosystem rather than an LMS, but we may already be there as more courses use a diverse, and likely dynamic, set of technologies for a variety instructional purposes.
