Master in Educational Technology

Our master's program is designed for educators who are excited about the potential technology offers for increasing student engagement and learning. Our students want to extend their skills for implementing relevant technology-enhanced activities in their own learning environments.

The hands-on quality of the Educational Technology program addresses the disparity between understanding the functionality of technology and knowing how it can be taught to students. More accurately, it’s not just why you’d use technology, but how it could be strategically implemented.

Our graduates will be prepared to:

• Optimize the use of active learning techniques via relevant technology tools.
• Take existing curriculum and transform it for a contemporary student audience.
• Design and teach online, hybrid, or blended courses.
• Serve as a peer technology coach for colleagues.

Program Details

The Educational Technology master's program is designed for working professionals who are interested in both creative exploration and practical application of digital technologies.

Our focus is always on giving students tools and strategies that they can use right away in their own learning environments. We also understand that every school has different types and amounts of resources, so we explore a wide variety of technology tools with an emphasis on low-cost or free resources.

The program will be of benefit to teachers in both K-12 and post-secondary settings, educational leaders, curriculum and technology specialists, software developers, corporate trainers, and others interested in the intersection of digital technologies and education.

USF's Educational Technology program gives you five powerful ways to enhance your pedagogical toolkit and increase your impact on future learners. Enter as a savvy instructor, work hard, and leave as a:

• Digital leader
• Digital storyteller
• Digital educator
• Digital designer
• Digital change agent

Curriculum Structure

The curriculum focuses on the discerning use of technological tools to increase student engagement, motivation, and active learning.

Master's candidates are encouraged to leverage their learning for immediate applicability; course projects require students to apply new skills to discipline-specific content needs.

The Educational Technology program helps educators:

• Apply technology-enhanced educational practices in and out of the classroom.
• Prepare to evolve with the rapidly changing educational and technological landscapes.
• Understand the structure and function of educational technology systems.

The culminating assessment for this project-based master's degree is a portfolio website, which can serve as a platform for sharing and collaborating with other educators, as well as an electronic resume for those wishing to advance their careers.

Program Delivery

Classes meet on teaching weekends, an alternate weekend schedule of about two weekends a month to accommodate adult students, most of whom have full-time jobs and other obligations. The Educational Technology program is designed to be completed in five semesters (two years) including summers. To finish in this timeline, you can plan to take two courses per semester.

Courses

The courses are organized into five complementary duos. Students typically will take two courses each semester for five semesters.

Course Descriptions

DTTL 614: Navigating the Divide: Digital Leadership – Like it or not, the rapid development of technology has created a series of divides: those with access and those without; those who are comfortable with technology and those who are not; those who enjoy integrating technology into their work and those who are happy with the tools they have always used. Navigating this divide can be both challenging and rewarding. In this course, we explore how digital technologies can help solve key pedagogical problems, as well as create opportunities for new effective pedagogical practices. We start the journey of exploring what digital technologies mean for transforming academic environments.

DTTL 602: Digital Leadership Lab – Digital technologies do not just open up opportunities; they also raise new problems and challenges. In this initial lab course, we explore how to efficiently and ethically establish an intentional digital presence within your learning environment and the wider professional community. We also explore how to teach our students similar, age-appropriate skills. Finally, we grapple with the systemic inequities that digital technologies can reveal as well as mediate.

DTTL 603: Made to Stick: Teaching with the Brain in Mind – This course explores research-based practices that hold excellent promise for capturing learner attention, improving retention, and reinforcing the integration of knowledge. We explore this area through the lens of digital-learning narratives. We will use the Heath brothers’ six principles: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories as a springboard to explore the use of digital narratives in education.

DTTL 604: Digital Storytelling Lab – The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the essentials of good educational storytelling in a digital format. You get your hands e-dirty with the essence of audio production: recording, editing, mixing, and sharing. We start by identifying concepts that lend themselves to audio presentations, moving on to storyboarding, and the complete creation process. The course also introduces you to the power of concept maps and visual models. You learn how to combine audio with visual models to create effective integrated learning experiences.

DTTL 605: Multimedia Learning – In Multimedia Learning, we explore the reasoning behind the form and function decisions we make with instructional materials. We answer questions about why some content and presentations “work,” while others fall flat. We are guided in our examination by research-based specifics behind cognitive load theory and the principles of multimedia learning. The research behind these phenomena demonstrate the ways that making simple changes to digital products and presentations can greatly increase student learning. During the course, we examine theory, apply our knowledge to analyzing existing learning resources, and finally create new materials of our own.

DTTL 606: Media Lab – We explore the world of visual communication: from still images to video, to the specialized craft of how-to screencasts. In this course, you learn to more deeply apply multimedia learning principles to create effective visual learning experiences. The first part of the course focuses on effective instructional images of all kinds from infographics to the effective use of photographic images. The second part of the course explores how to effectively and efficiently develop video-based learning experiences. You leave the course well-equipped to create flipped or online learning experiences that utilize the best in visual communication techniques.

DTTL 607: Learning Designs – We have all heard the maxim that “good teaching is good teaching.” But how do the precepts of pedagogy change when our classrooms no longer look the way they did twenty years ago? In Learning Designs, we explore how to adapt and apply the best practices of curriculum design to 21st-century classrooms. We focus on effective techniques for increasing engagement, designing authentic assessment, sparking meaningful collaboration, and differentiating instruction for 1:1, flipped, blended, and online classes.

DTTL 608: Design Lab – In Learning Designs you developed a proposed blueprint for completely redesigning one course or one in-depth unit. In Design Lab, you now transform your blueprint into a living, breathing, ready-to-deploy curriculum by following the five-step process of Design Thinking used by Stanford’s d.school. This course draws upon the skills honed in your previous lab courses and provides the opportunity for you to deliberately match your technology repertoire with learning objectives.

DTTL 609: Change the World from Here – As a graduate of the DTTL program, you are sure to face challenges that invite you to put your learning into action, and lead with purpose. In this project-based course, you collaborate with a small design team on a rich, service-learning project to respond to a real-world educational need for an under-served educational institution or group. We also explore ways in which digital tools and virtual collaboration can enhance project-based and service-based learning experiences outside of the traditional classroom.

DTTL 610: Capstone Lab – In this hands-on culminating course, we focus on how to synthesize all your previous work into one beautiful professional website that you can use as a foundation for your professional presence for years to come. You learn the essentials of web coding that every educator needs to develop nimble, mobile-friendly, responsive websites. Reflection on your website portfolio will help you see how portfolio-based projects can be used and facilitated within the contemporary classroom.

Learning Outcomes

The Educational Technology master's program has seven program outcomes.

Upon completion of the MA in Educational Technology students will be able to:

• Demonstrate theoretical content knowledge of digital pedagogies.
• Curate and maintain relevant materials to share with an educational community.
• Create purposeful digital media drawing from research on design and the instructional use of multimedia.
• Reflect on practice to enhance pedagogy, to evolve as a professional, and to improve learner outcomes.
• Respond to systemic learning, cultural, and access inequities through digital pedagogy.
• Connect to various professionals and digital communities in a relevant, authentic and effective way.
• Contribute meaningfully to the education profession.