The College of Education’s Learning Design and Leadership program is 25 years old and running stronger than ever.

Begun in 1998 and then titled Curriculum, Technology, and Education Reform (CTER), the program offers a certificate of specialization, a graduate certificate, an Ed.M., an Ed.D. (all online), and a Ph.D. (on campus).

The Ed.M., initially offered in 1998, is believed to be the world's first fully online regular university degree. In 2014, Bill Cope developed a proposal for a fully online Ed.D. for Learning Design and Leadership. The program was launched in 2016 and became the first online doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“CTER was one of the first—if not the first—online education programs in the world,” says Cope, professor in the Education Policy, Organization & Leadership (EPOL) department. Cope and fellow EPOL professor Mary Kalantzis have been in charge of the Learning Design and Leadership (LDL) program since 2011.

During that time, they’ve developed nine Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for LDL, attracting more than 150,000 students. “It’s a great way to introduce people to the Illinois brand,” Kalantzis says. “They take the MOOC, like it, and decide to enroll in a degree program.”

Changing the Way Education Uses Technology

Cope and Kalantzis came to UIUC in 2006 from their native Australia. “Mary and I were involved in online learning almost immediately from when we arrived,” says Cope. They developed an online program called New Learning, which explores new ecologies of teaching and learning as afforded by social and technological changes. When the leaders of CTER, James Levin and Michael Waugh, left Illinois, CTER was folded into the New Learning program—as were the online courses from Illinois’ Global Campus, the short-lived experiment in online education that ran from 2008 to 2009. Kalantzis and Cope turned CTER and the Global Campus courses into MOOCs. The LDL courses were the first MOOCs offered by the College of Education.

“The business model for Global Campus was wrong, but the idea wasn’t wrong,” Cope says.

“We’d never have come to Illinois if it hadn’t been for its inventiveness,” Kalantzis agrees. “For being bold. For changing the world with new ways of delivering access to education, reaching out to students who couldn’t take years out of their lives to come to campus.”

And changing the way education uses technology to enhance teaching and learning.

“You can’t just reproduce traditional learning environments online, with lectures, tests, and assignments,” Cope says. “With technology, you can do a lot of things that you can’t do in a regular classroom. Our question is, how can we create different kinds of learning ecologies that are really powerful and, in some ways, better than traditional learning environments?”

One way is to use technology to build cultures of collaboration through peer review. Another more recent initiative is to provide AI feedback before peer feedback. Students get AI feedback, revise their work based on it, and then share their work with their peers for additional refining feedback. “We’ve created these environments which are not talking heads and a test or an assignment to hand in at the end,” Kalantzis says.

Another way is to turn the courses into flipped classrooms, Kalantzis says, where students view content videos before coming to synchronous online sessions. “Then we hand the session over to the students—they present, and we use that time to engage with their ideas,” Kalantzis explains. “The key question for us has always been how do you make the technology more human, more about relationships than content transmission? If you lecture to people online in Zoom, that’s not making the best of the online medium.”

“That happens a lot, to be quite frank,” Cope adds. “As do Q-and-A sessions where one person talks at a time. We want to get away from that.”

Cope and Kalantzis have secured a series of major grants to research and develop educational technologies. They are world-renowned for their work in learning design and new literacy, which focuses on multimodality and diversity in contemporary communications. Together, they have authored numerous books on learning and design and related issues, and they created CGScholar, a virtual community space for creating, publishing, and disseminating new knowledge with more than 27,000 published works and 350,000 users.

“We don’t see tech as machines,” Kalantzis says. “We see them as tools for engagement. That’s what was experimented on right from the beginning, from PLATO to what we’re doing now.”

Illinois’ Long History of Technology in Education

PLATO—Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations—was developed at UIUC, released in 1960, and functioned for four decades, offering coursework for elementary through university students. It was the world’s first computer-assisted instruction system. Donald Bitzer led the design of the first demonstration system; his wife, with a master’s degree from the College of Education, used PLATO for nurse education. Cope and Kalantzis have recently written an article on the role of the College of Education in the development of PLATO.

“The idea of using technology in education has been addressed and invented by our university and college,” Kalantzis says. “This isn’t something that has come upon us just now. We were experimenting and offering online courses way back then, very successful ones, in part because PLATO gave us the tools that made it possible.”

Another tool invented at Illinois is Mosaic, a web browser that was one of the first browsers to be widely available. Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, was released in 1993 and was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web.

“People in the College were keen to apply Mosaic and did apply it in MSTE [Mathematics, Science, & Technology Education], forming virtual collaborations almost as soon as Mosaic was released,” Cope says.

“There’s this continuous thread of building on our past,” Kalantzis says. “And of inventing the tools that allow the values that we have now. We need to invent and keep on inventing the digital tools that make access possible for all students and that allow us to address inequalities and diversity. How do we use technology to achieve these goals? That’s what the College has wanted to do, and we are doing it through the affordances of the digital.”

Producing Leaders in the Field

Cope and Kalantzis have helped the College build on that strong past in part through their Learning Design and Leadership program, which attracts a wide range of educators and professionals in instructional software, workplace learning and development, NGOs, and various industries.

“We’ve had people from the Obama Foundation, from the medical school at Stanford, from the business school at Princeton, from the head of helicopter training in the US Army,” Cope says. “They bring a wealth of experience and can immediately take what they learn through our program and influence the world in very substantial ways.”

“We’re getting people who are in mid-career in education and social settings,” he says. “It’s very different from our on-campus cohort. These people can’t come here and rent a flat for three or four years and get out of their lives. But they bring a lot to the table based on the depth of their life experience. They represent a market gap that we weren’t previously serving; we’ve captured a demographic, a very diverse group, that would not otherwise be here. But they’re just a group of really interesting people who work with each other and learn from each other.”

And, Kalantzis adds, who are impacting their workplaces and fields.

“We’ve got an army of people out there who have gone on to be leaders in the field, to help produce more human, more effective, more inclusive teaching ecosystems,” she says. “That’s what we’re proudest of. And we haven’t had a single student drop out, which is pretty rare.”

Cope also notes that the Ed.D. program has become very important financially for the whole College. “Our first objectives are to provide access to quality graduate education,” he says. We have tended to take for granted the millions of dollars of income that cross-subsidizes other programs.”

Education At Illinois Plays “Significant Role”

The College of Education, Kalantzis says, has “played a significant role for a very long time” in creating tools and preparing educators and professors to use technology in education. “There are a lot of players in the College now,” she says, “and Bill and I have played a thread by maintaining the Global Campus offerings after the collapse, by picking up CTER and rolling it into LDL, by showing you can invent tools with our CGScholar program.”

The College, she adds, has played a vital role in helping other colleges on campus, such as Gies College of Business and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, set up units online.

“The College has attracted really great scholars who are looking at all aspects of the affordances of technology,” Kalantzis notes. “There’s all sorts of exciting research going on about how you enhance the human component of what you do online.”

“The Opportunity to Create a Better World”

Given that Illinois is creating a new strategic plan called “Boldly Illinois,” Kalantzis poses this question: “So, what are we going to be bold about?”

Answering her own question from the College’s standpoint, she says, “Being bold is about rethinking everything that we thought was natural and normal and enduring. I think Bill and I have contributed to that, and we’re on the frontier of that because we’re in the College of Education. As educators, we have to keep grappling with the tools and opportunities with only one thing in mind: How do we enhance the learning or the research and innovation capacities of the people we’re working with? How do we get to a place that is more human, more engaging, and more creative than the traditional ‘sit down in rows, raise your hand’ environment? These are the things we are trying to do through our Learning Design and Leadership program. These are the things we are trying to achieve through the people who come through our Ed.D. program.”

Cope sees the transformation in the educational environment through the use of digital tools to be one of “disruptive innovation.”

“This model denotes a fundamental change,” he says. “Between the internet and now generative AI, everything’s going to change. It’s actually a great time to be doing this work and thinking about these issues. And thinking that we can now create another entirely new education system.

“In this moment of incredible disruption, we have the opportunity to create a better world.”