The SUNY Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success (#EmTechMOOC) is a self-paced, collaborative, and engaging course that helps learners everywhere gain comfort, familiarity, and mastery of freely-available web-based collaboration tools. #EmTechMOOC uses discovery exercises to guide participants’ learning while building a personal learning toolkit for a lifetime of use.

A decade of #EmTechMOOC history has resulted in an online community that supports life-long learners at all levels: college students, faculty, current and career-seeking professionals, or retirees supporting thematic interest groups as the result of increased digital literacy.

#EmTechMOOC is driven and sustained by the ephemeral nature of technological evolution. In order for individuals to keep pace with current collaborative tools that leverage and reach beyond commercial social media, it’s important to be able to evaluate and identify new tools to meet specific objectives. As a result of solid project design and crowdsourcing, this 24x7 resource is stable and available “on demand.”

Due to current circumstances, our reliance on new technologies to communicate and to collaborate has become an even more essential and critical part of our lives.

The project aims to assist learners to:
- Identify the implications of using emerging technologies for personal and professional growth.
- Develop lifelong learning strategies and habits to keep pace with technology change.

Participants, including students, faculty, and others, who complete #EmTech will be able to:
1. Build 21st-century skills: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, & Critical Thinking.
2. Establish lifelong learning habits to develop initiative, self-direction, and agency.
3. Describe why it is important to be a digitally literate citizen.
4. Evaluate your digital footprint to portray a professional online identity.
5. Practice safe and secure habits within digital environments.
6. Locate and evaluate information using basic & advanced search strategies.
7. Communicate & collaborate using technology tools and social media networks.
8. Demonstrate visual literacy to effectively use media creation tools.
9. Apply Creative Commons guidelines to ethically use text and media.
10. Evaluate the quality and applicability of emerging technology tools.
11. Analyze & evaluate information to identify truthful, unbiased points of view.
12. Apply accessibility principles and strategies to achieve digital equity.

This past year has seen a number of changes in EmTech. A new version has just been launched to counteract some lessons learned due to the pandemic. The enrollments in the MOOC went from a healthy 5,000 learners who had enrolled in the first 3 years and has recently expanded to add an additional 25,000 learners in the past year. This increase is in line with trends across a variety of self-directed professional development initiatives. Everyone has a lot more time on their hands and they are using it for self-improvement. This expansion in enrollments has caused the EmTech team to reflect on how much effort needed to be spent to manage the MOOC community. Because of this, changes were made and a new version of the MOOC has recently launched.

The following changes have been made to make it easier to complete the MOOC:
- Quizzes now help participants search EmTechWIKI more efficiently.
- Learners may create an ePortfolio or a private journal to reflect on artifacts they create during hands-on experiments to earn an optional ePortfolio Badge.
- Completion badges and certificates are automatically awarded and can be added to resumes, CVs, and ePortfolios as a way to demonstrate learning and accomplishments. EmTech is one of the first Coursera MOOCs that has integrated automatic badge issuing using the new processes now embedded within Coursera.

No special technology is needed to take advantage of EmTech. Students can enroll directly on their own and faculty have also adapted the MOOC and portions of the MOOC as a part of required course activities.

Website analytics also show that the EmTechWIKI website is a well-used resource and many people make use of this as a resource independently of the MOOC and those in the MOOC also report that they plan to utilize the WIKI well after their completion of the MOOC requirements.

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The origins of EmTech began from what was once one of the largest goal setting communities on the Internet called 23 Things. The value of encouraging learners to self-explore and participate in discovery learning activities was then adopted by EmTech’s originator to help students in a graduate level class to provide introductory technology skills to those studying to become information professionals. This concept went over very well with the students who enjoyed autonomy. While presenting the project results at a SUNY conference, faculty and instructional support staff who were in the session suggested transforming the activity for faculty professional development to trickle down to their students. This conversation led to the successful SUNY Tools of Engagement Project SUNY-wide faculty professional development initiative. That idea has transformed once again to become EmTech where faculty now work side-by-side with students and others from across the globe to help and support each other as they gain technology literacy and 21st-century skills.

The circle of history made itself evident when the pandemic caused the recent annual SUNY CIT conference to move online. A faculty panel was prepared to share their experiences integrating EmTech into their instruction for a CIT session. Since the CIT format was modified due to COVID, the faculty panel went forward anyhow to provide an online webinar to share their experiences. A recording of this webinar is available on the EmTech website.
http://bit.ly/emtechscholarlywork