Teaching Impacts of Technology: Workplace of the Future (Coursera)

This course is part of a larger Specialization through which you’ll learn impacts of computing concepts you need to know, organized into 5 distinct digital “worlds”, as well as learn pedagogical techniques and evaluate lesson plans and resources to utilize in your classroom. By the end, you’ll be prepared to teach pre-college learners to be both savvy and effective participants in their digital world.

In this particular digital world (careers and work), you’ll explore the following Impacts & Technology pairs Impacts (Getting jobs in new ways): technology based freelancing, Linkedin and how it changed the way we work

Technology and Computing Concepts: Data retrieval, data vs metadata, SQL, Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT)

Impacts (Physical ties to work restricts people and businesses): work communication, the cloud, cloud computing, companies affected by ransomware attacks

Technology and Computing Concepts: how the cloud works, FTP, cloud storage, clients and servers, scalability basics, fault tolerance, AWS, devops

Impacts (Advancing your career in the fast moving technical world): digital technology changing jobs, online classes, machines replacing jobs, data science and artificial intelligence

In the pedagogy section for this course, in which best practices for teaching computing concepts are explored, you’ll learn how to effectively explore and critique curricular material you find and practice reviewing lesson plans, with a focus on material aimed at learning HTML.

In terms of CSTA K-12 computer science standards, we’ll primarily cover learning objectives within the “impacts of computing” concept, while also including some within the “networks and the Internet” concepts and the “data and analysis” concept. Practices we cover include “fostering and inclusive computing culture”, “recognizing and defining computational problems”, and “communicating about computing”.

Course 4 of 6 in the Teaching Impacts of Technology in K-12 Education Specialization

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Course Orientation

Welcome! Are you interested in teaching about the impacts of the technology you use everyday? To learn more about the computation and computing concepts that underlie those technologies? We'll be using a problem-based approach to explore interesting ways to teach concepts of networks and the internet, data and analysis, and even algorithms and data representation. Finally, we'll evaluate, critique and improve/personalize an "unplugged activity" where students learn how to create the minimal network needed to provide connectivity amongst a set of houses. This activity can be scaled for use in grade levels from 4th grade to 12th grade.

Getting a Job in New Ways

How has getting a job changed due to the Internet and ever growing amounts of information we choose to make available online? What new opportunities or flexibility are available because of the digital nature of much of our work? We'll explore this and some of fundamentals behind database storage and access that helps match us to possible jobs!

WEEK 2

Physical Ties to Work

How have cheap computers and "always available" Internet connectivity changed how and when we can work? What about the cloud -- is it just for storage? Finally, we'll look at two impacts on careers -- working in a truly "global" company and managing the updates of software that we seem to get all the time!

WEEK 3

Advancing your career in the technical world

How will the workplace of the future be different? Will workers be expected to constantly learn new things just to stay employable? How might that happen? Will machines be taking over our jobs? This is currently the subject of a LOT of discussion. Although exploring the technology behind machine learning and artificial intelligence is appropriate, we have already covered that in another course (Course 2 - Data). Instead here we'll look at the new "career" of data science and explore a tool you can use with students to give them a first introduction -- no programming needed!

WEEK 4

Impacts of Computing and Pedagogy

Technology and the Internet is changing not only what kinds of jobs we can get, but how we can stay trained and train for new jobs our entire life. This week you will find a resource for exploring the impacts of computing on career or work -- that you think would be useful with YOUR students. Additionally we'll reflect on how cognitive load can cause challenges when teaching computing and explore and critique a code.org lesson on learning HTML.