Digital Technology

Introduction

Digital technology has particular value to universities, business schools, and organizations. It may help to provide an additional or substitutive channel to traditional education and training. The opportunities are twofold: On one hand, flexibility is the key word. Computer-based instruction provides the possibility to break the usual paradigm of “same time, same place,” as pointed out by Applegate in 1988. There is no further and strict necessity to be in the same classroom at the very same time, for the fruition of a given learning content. This opens up the possibility for international universities to provide education without the stringent necessity of relocating every student into their geographical venues. The same can be applied to the traditional mutual engagement between firms and business schools. Managers may not be forced to leave their companies for long periods of time, and are still able to participate in long-distance sessions and debates (McKeachie, 200).

The second area of opportunity, as pointed out by Gioia and Brass in 1984 and by Proserpio and Gioia in 2005, is that technical and social changes in the wider environment can have major implications for teaching and learning pedagogies—i.e., optimal teaching and learning occur when teaching styles align with learning styles. The current generation of students is well attuned to ICTs, and this means that we can add a further dimension to the previously cited flexibility. Digital technology can be used in face-to-face or blended classrooms to enhance the compatibility between teachers' styles and the Playstation generation of students (i.e., students who have grown up with mobile phones, the Internet, and video games). As a viable example, students may benefit from computer simulations and business games to play in a safe test bed with the main variables of a theoretical model, such as city management, chemistry or physics exercises, historical events, and so forth.

Opportunities tied to digital technology are noteworthy, as are the critiques and pitfalls of such learning. This section highlights the most important tools for digital technology , as well as some possibilities for their recombination into different courses taught via ICTs. In the next section, we discuss the cautions that have to be applied to provide successful computer-based education.

Within ICT-based environments, the learner's interactions with instructors, peers, or learning materials (e.g., assignments, exercises, and tests) are totally or partially mediated through technology. It is important to note that face-to-face learning and computermediated learning are not mutually exclusive. We can envision a continuum ranging from the copresence of teachers and learners at one end, to maximum teacher-learner dispersion (e.g., international) at the other. All points between these extremes can be labeled as “blended learning,” as pointed out by Webster and Hackley in 1997 (Murray, 308).

Discussion and Analysis

We are living in a society with changes at a speed no one has ever experienced in history. This situation requires learning of high quality, which no existing theory of learning appears to be adequate to guide. The situation calls for a 'community of learners' where learning does not end at the point of learning but is expected to sustain itself over time, across different situations...