New Executive Director of Learning Experience Gives Insight into the Future of Digital Learning

UTO is excited to announce the reorientation of the Academic Technologies group into the Learning Experience Group, which has increasingly taken on new responsibilities to cater to the Universal Learner. In conjunction with the Learning Futures Collaboratory, Learning Experience, as the academic support and learning design team for the University, will focus on operational excellence and services for learning. 

Today, the Learning Experience group’s Executive Director Kyle Bowen begins the work to frame the vision of enabling and catalyzing high-quality learning experiences at ASU. Kyle comes to us most recently from Penn State University as the Director of Innovation for Teaching and Learning with Technology. We sat down with Kyle to get to know him and his philosophy on digital learning, including the promise of new technologies he’d like to see developed for learning experiences in the near future.

How did ASU’s strengths and challenges attract you to contribute your skills and outlook, and why now?
ASU has a rich history of being very forward-looking and innovative as it thinks about being a learning-centered institution, and it’s exciting to be a part of that. No matter where a student may be learning or how they engage the institution, I’m looking forward to how we can design that interaction that supports their ability to learn in the most effective way. 

I’m thinking about the technologies as a platform, from our learning management systems to Slack and the digital environment where people learn, and connecting that to the physical spaces where people learn. 

I started my career at Purdue University and I worked there for a number of years looking at new and novel technologies, things that didn’t exist in the market, heavily leveraging social media and other types of interactions to help our students learn. And I’ve been at Penn State for the last six years, which has been an opportunity to really take a lot of new ideas for teaching and learning to scale at an institutional level. So that’s what I’m looking forward to most at ASU, the opportunity to continue to grow in the ability to support innovation at scale so we can reach all of our students and enable and empower our faculty.

What is your philosophy when it comes to the integration of technology with learning?
A big part of it is [asking] how do we leverage the diversity of this institution, the world-class faculty and scholars who are developing work in a lot of different places? How do we leverage the excitement and abilities of our students? A big part of thatis reducing barriers to entry. How do we make it easier to get access to and make use of these kinds of new technologies? How do we think about the ways people make these things useful as part of their instruction, so it’s not just a technology and rather it’s included as a part of a teaching and learning experience? What we can do to answer these questions is to work with our faculty to pioneer new approaches to engaging students. 

Key and central to being successful in scaling these new learning experiences is having close relationships with faculty and students, and working as partners. It’s not just a matter of adoption or use of a tool, but in many cases it’s about developing a new approach and understanding the needs of our students as they continue to evolve.

What previous, personal areas of focus in your work do you think can be brought to scale or enhanced at ASU?
One of my big areas of focus has been on scaling immersive experiences. We can think about that two ways. One is the experiences people consume through virtual reality or XR technologies. The other side of the coin is enabling students to be creators of immersive experiences, using these environments to support entrepreneurship and research and other kinds of experiential learning. To do that involves the development of new understanding of scaling these technologies. Immersive technologies are generally designed as solo experiences, so how do we transition that into group experiences, from small groups to much larger groups, what we would call “classroom scale?”

We also have to think about the spaces where this happens, the intersection of the physical spaces that support virtual spaces. If you have a room with a lot of people with headsets on, how do you manage that? If you’ve ever heard the phrase “it’s like herding cats,” now you’re herding blindfolded cats! So that introduces its own new set of challenges.

What are you hoping to see added to Learning Experience group’s efforts?
A lot of it comes down to challenging long-held beliefs and traditions [about] how teaching and learning happens. ASU has already demonstrated through a long track record of examples how it challenges those assumptions, so I’m excited to continue to accelerate that growth. How do we begin to transform these environments such that they’re not based on 20th century ideas of what learning is, but really as a transformation of that experience that engages the most diverse selection of ideas?

What are some of the new technologies or learning experience trends out in the world that you’re excited about?
Digital fluency. The goal here is to enable our students to be creators, not just people who know how to use tools but people who know how to create new knowledge through technology. So one particular area to focus on there is around digital storytelling, really empowering a student to be able to tell a story in a meaningful way and leverage various forms of media to tell that story. One of the learning experience areas that is particularly important is technologies that are digitally authentic -- meaning that these are the same tools that our students [will use] as they move into their future endeavors. As a student is learning with that technology, they’re getting the practical skills they would apply going forward. 

Any final words about your new role at ASU?
It’s all about partnering with our faculty and working closely with our students. I’m always thinking about how higher education has this ability to innovate and change. Sometimes it may not evolve as fast as we want it to, but it does evolve. The opportunity is for institutions to differentiate themselves by driving that evolution. Friction to change isn’t usually fundamental. People aren’t slow to adopt something out of principle; they’re slow to adopt something because they don’t see the value yet. It’s incumbent on us to make them recognize that value, and that’s part of the story we tell. 

It’s important for those to work in technology to tell our story through our faculty and our students and their successes, and that’s how we engender that kind of evolutionary change within our institution.