I have endeavored to report articles and trends in the field of online learning and teaching for several years.  Online strategic planning and policy, trends and innovations, theory and practice have all been topics of personal interest. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that as impact-ful as online learning has been in higher education, what we are witnessing is a sea change in teaching and learning, or the proverbial “paradigm shift” of Kuhn’s theory.

The shift in teaching involves more than technology tools or methods, and goes beyond the impact of online learning generally.  What I believe we are in the midst of is a change in learning that is so fundamental that most institutions cannot adopt to it even if they understood it. As Kuhn would argue, any new paridigm is always opposed, ridiculed, grudgingly accepted, and then finally adopted–usually after the generation in power has left the stage.  We are seeing this paradigm shift currently, to a new teaching model which would radically restructure the role of faculty and students in the learning process. More and more, I will dedicate blog posts to how this transformation is occuring on the front lines, at the very time being resisted in rear-guard actions of the entrenched.  Let the shift begin….Bruce Rosenbloom