Transforming an Institutional Ed-Tech Landscape

A newly formed School of Cybersecurity and Information Technology took stock of its inherited programs and needed to understand how educational technology was being used, adopted, and integrated into its course offerings. An edtech tool is any third-party, vendor-provided technology resource that supports teaching and learning. It can be a lab, simulation, application, or virtual workspace. These external vendor products and services, virtual platforms, and hosted software tools are integral to the rigor, currency, and competitiveness of programs. The school's commitment to providing career-relevant education relies heavily on edtech’s scenario-based and applied-learning offerings. Over its first year, the school curated a cross-functional edtech workgroup to develop best practices for the adoption and integration of edtech tools. Each new or existing tool must be able to demonstrate valuable student engagement data, accessibility, and data security. This session will share the value of investigating the integration of edtech tools and applications into the learning environment, the importance of developing intra-university partnerships to manage the workflow of these adoptions, and building relationships with external edtech partners. We will share our method for developing best practices around incorporating a new edtech tool into a program, provisioning access to edtech end users and ensuring compliance of edtech tool with accessibility and security needs.