Far too often we begin planning a class with the content, pedagogy, technology and outcomes in mind — without first researching the students.

When teaching, it seems logical to begin with the content or the pedagogy and then apply technologies to meet the outcomes we see, yet this misses the most important foundational step in the process. This is a step that needs to be formalized in the design and development process. It is to get to know the students who have enrolled in your program in the past or for whom you are designing the class. We cannot make assumptions. Over time the characteristics, knowledge and aspirations of enrolling students change. Especially today, with a range of career changers, adult learners and online learners from different regions, continents and cultures, we must be vigilant to monitor them to make sure we are meeting their needs. Some may be leaders in the field; others are novices.

How do we know where to begin the class if we don’t have an understanding of the experiences and prior background of the students? Harvard Business School provides a card stack to faculty members teaching online classes:

At Harvard Business School instructors have access to online class cards that provide a detailed profile of each student, including a photo, name pronunciation, educational background, work experience, demographic data, and extracurricular interests. Instructors study these profiles before the start of the term to develop a strong familiarity with their students and to consider the perspectives and expectations specific individuals are likely to bring to the course.

With each class meeting, the instructor can review and revise a case study or other content to best match the backgrounds and goals of the students. Thus, the class is much more dynamic, drawing on the expertise of individual students, challenging those who are advanced and filling in any deficiencies that others may have.

K-12 educators have done more in this area than some of us in higher ed. I really like the spreadsheet Jennifer Gonzalez features in her Cult of Pedagogy article “A Four-Part System for Getting to Know Your Students.” Our category columns will be different, but the concept is the same — to find the salient information that will help the instructor understand and meet the needs and goals of the students.

Collecting data on each group of new students is useful if you have already started the term, or if you have taught the class a number of times previously. However, what if you are designing a new curriculum for a certificate or degree? In this case, we need to make a deep data dive into characteristics in related disciplines, labor statistics and a host of job sites including LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and many others that provide career data. We should begin with thorough research in this area.

Only after we understand the students and those who are already successful in the careers to which they aspire can we know what content they are likely to have mastered and what they have not. This may involve mining the collection of big data about our students from the student information system. The content expert/faculty member and the instructional designer can dig deeply into these data to set the foundation that will let them begin to shape the course content, the best pedagogical approach, the technologies that may best facilitate learning and the most appropriate assessments.

Designing and developing learning modules is not an assembly-line process. It is not linear in most cases. And, just as the process does not begin with assumptions, it should not end with a final project or final exam. More than a dozen years ago, I began promoting the “semester without end” approach. The concept is that the department or faculty member should continue to deliver content to the student even after the close of the semester.

I accomplished this with my seminar students in New and Emerging Technologies in the Electronic Media by having them subscribe to a curated reading list blog. We used it during the semester to identify appropriate articles for critique and ideas for further research. After the end of the term and now even years later, many of those students continue to read and subscribe to the email list that has evolved over the years. It provides a steady stream of selected news, trends and exemplars to inform and update the readers. I highly recommend this process of providing an ongoing “value add” to the students after they have left the class. This is helpful in many ways to the students and to the institution.

Do you collect and provide rich data about your students to the content experts/faculty and instructional designers as they begin to create new courses? Is this systematized as it is at Harvard Business School? Do you conduct an effective feedback loop from students/graduates to faculty/administrators in order to assure that content is relevant, timely and useful? Have you considered keeping the flow of information going after the end of the term or degree?

This article originally was published in Inside Higher Ed’s Inside Digital Learning blog.

The enormous potential of virtual and augmented reality will be enabled through the wide-scale rollout of fifth-generation mobile bandwidths.

Technologies are converging to bring about a wholesale upgrade of online learning through the adoption of virtual and augmented reality. The pivotal development will be the wide-scale deployment of 5G bandwidths to support VR and AR protocols and devices.

The enormous power of VR and AR requires not only a high-download bandwidth, but also a low latency — the time between a request and the response. Current 4G connections often sport a latency of 50 milliseconds (ms) or more. Sol Rogers in Forbes writes that more than 20 ms can cause nausea in those viewing VR:

With 5G’s sub-5 or sub-2 ms latency, the user experience will be amazing. In other words, it will be smooth and natural. As VR is all about immersion — feeling like you are in the immersive virtual environment — this is incredibly important. The benefits will be felt by many industries using VR — from healthcare to entertainment.

At the same time, the speeds of 5G will soar above the 4G top rates of about 1 Gb/S to up to 20 Gb/S. That, of course exceeds many currently installed local area and Wi-Fi networks on campuses across the country. Imagine, for the first time, distant learners will have connectivity equal to or exceeding those on campus.

It is clear that 5G will be able to hurdle the standards required for seamless and spectacular virtual and augmented reality. The nature of online learning in its present format can once again radically change. We will be engaging activities, places, simulations and real-life situations well beyond the two-dimensional online presentations of the past. This will take us a long way from the text-intensive and low-resolution videos and PowerPoint into an immersive world without bounds.

In many ways, widespread deployment of 5G will enable online learning to leapfrog the traditional classroom in providing meaningful, realistic and impactful engagements for learners at a distance. Providing simulations and real-life engagements to students will take the learning field virtually outside the classroom and directly into the workplace and the world, from subatomic spaces to outer space. In addition to an assortment of reality formats reaching unlimited locations, 5G will enable even more robust-sized, larger group discussions than we have been able to support in the past.

The prospect of the instructor and entire class connected via ultra-high-speed, low-latency mobile connections opens a host of possibilities. These possibilities will emerge just as quickly as the 5G network rolls out — the availability will vary depending upon the smartphone you are using, the network to which you are connected and your location. While 5G is already in use in some selected areas today, more general use of the enhanced network will continue to grow throughout 2020 and 2021, with substantial saturation likely following that. One can anticipate that the access issues of today will melt away over the next two years in this country, though some rural sections of the U.S. and foreign countries are expected to take longer for full deployment.

Of course, as with all technologies, there will be advantages and challenges. In education, the advantages seem to far outweigh the disadvantages. The potential of enhanced video, full-featured VR platform adaptive learning, personalized learning and much, much more could be realized through this high-performance mobile network.

Early concerns over any health threat from the lower power but higher frequency 5G signals largely have been dispelled. While the health risks of 5G signals cannot be proven to be zero, the Live Tiles report includes this assessment: “The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency’s Dr. Ken Karipidis said last year, ‘The only established health effect [of radiofrequency radiation] is that of rising temperature,’ and cannot cause cancer.”

The 5G industry has incentives to advance early adoption of the network and technologies among universities. Peter Lindor of Ericsson points out, “Network operators and businesses have realized there is little room for 5G fast-followers. The 5G revolution can only be sparked by striking out early and fostering innovation — and colleges and universities are the perfect place to do that.”

Fifth generation is already deployed in scores of cities across the country. Fueled by competition among the network providers, the build-out is progressing in rapid fashion. A majority of our learners will likely have access to 5G networks within two years. At that point we all should have completed our experimental tests utilizing the technology and be prepared to compete online via 5G.

Is your university preparing to take advantage of the low-latency, high-bandwidth potential of 5G? Who is planning for the implementation of a mobile strategy that includes 5G? Will competing universities get to the starting line ahead of you — reaching those eager learners with shiny new 5G phones ready to capitalize on their greater-than-gigabit/second mobile connections? How might you make use of that connectivity to enhance your online/mobile-friendly curriculum?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Inside Digital Learning blog.