Sep 28, 2016 02:01 AM EDT By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

As educational technology and alternative education is gaining ground, more and more universities see an opportunity in this area and are opening their doors in providing an academic discipline built around education technology, and Georgetown University is among them.

The university is launching its Masters of Art in Learning Design which combines educational technology, instructional design, and learning analytics. Eddie Maloney, executive director of Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, said that this new program is just the beginning of a new set of practices that will "resist, test, push back against and challenge each other on."

He also added that educators and educational institutions should re-assess the role of technology in teaching and learning. Through this reassessment, the university has observed that there has been a shift in the past four years regarding the use of technology in higher education. He said that this has also challenged a lot of assumptions on education as well as the stability and location of such work.

"Over the past four years, as we have seen that MOOC wave rise, crest and either fall or plateau. We have started to build capacities to think about technology, design and learning as core and central problems," he said. "Once we built that momentum, we started to raise questions about what that role is; about why we need to challenge some assumptions we have about the role of technology in teaching and learning; and how technology, design and analytics are helping us to do that better," he said.

Georgetown isn't the only one offering such a degree. Both Stanford and Purdue each has their own master's degree program centered on education technology. Maloney mentioned that the renewed interest came from that shift and mentioned that many in the education sector have been discussing that the education sector needs to adapt to the changing times where there is so much premium on technology. He added that instead of shrinking from fear caused by the changes, educators need to leverage those changes brought by technology and use that to put the practice of teaching back at the center.

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