by Mark Morton, Senior Educational Developer, Teaching Inquiry & Communications, Centre for Teaching Excellence
Just over twenty years ago, I moved from the University of Winnipeg, where I’d been teaching in the English Department for twelve years, to the University of Waterloo, where I took up a job as “Instructional Program Manager” in an academic unit called LT3 (an acronym standing for Learning and Teaching Through Technology). This transition was very exciting, especially as I had no idea what an Instructional Program Manager did. I soon learned, however, that it had something to do with delivering a workshop called the T5 Design Model, which stood for Topics, Tasks, Tutoring, Teamwork, and one more thing that now escapes me (one of its progenitors was Tom Carey, so maybe the fifth “T” stood for him).
Back then, if I recall correctly, instructors were only allowed access to Waterloo’s learning management system (which was called UW-ACE) if they completed a multi-day workshop on the aforementioned T5 Design Model. If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I felt kind of sorry for the instructors who took the T5 workshop. After all, did they really need to be told that effective teaching required them to come up with topics and tasks? But in all fairness, those were the early days of learning management systems. There wasn’t even agreement back then about whether learning that combined being online with being in the classroom should be called blended learning, hybrid learning, multi-method learning, mixed-mode learning, web-enhanced instruction, or (according to some reluctant instructors) just a bad idea.
Before long, “blended learning” did become the accepted name, but now, two decades later, I wonder if we should just call it “learning.” After all, in 2025, the vast majority of courses at Waterloo integrate our LMS (LEARN) in some fashion, so the term “blended learning” is starting to sound almost as old fashioned as “motorcar,” “aeroplane,” or “lady doctor.”
One more trivial thing that conveys how much technologies have evolved since I arrived at Waterloo: in 2005, my colleagues and I in LT3 were each given a PalmPilot so that we could use a plastic stylus to painstakingly etch notes, like medieval stonemasons, onto a small and dim LCD screen and then download them by a cable into our Windows XP desktop computer. Quaint, but at the time we thought we were cutting-edge, and it was even the height of fashion (at least among tech-savvy men) to wear one’s PalmPilot in a hip-holster, like a rhinestone cowboy.
The foregoing might suggest that I was anti-technology when I arrived at Waterloo, but I wasn’t. In fact, when I was still at the University of Winnipeg, I was among the first instructors to use an LMS, and also to teach in that university’s state-of-the-art telecourse studio. So, when the T5 Design Model was finally shelved, I was pleased to become the Senior Educational Developer in Emerging Technologies (that was in CTE, which had come into being in 2007 when LT3 merged with a couple of other academic support units).
Those years — let’s say from about 2007 to about 2018 — were very technologically fecund, because so many new learning tools were emerging: wikis, blogs, podcasts, online discussion forums, screencasts, clickers, timeline tools, lightboards, social media, iPhones, iPads, Web 2.0, YouTube, social bookmarking tools, collaborative annotation tools, backchannel apps, and more. You couldn’t turn around without tripping over a wiki. I was kept very busy investigating these new educational technologies and developing workshops and online resources to help instructors use them effectively.
But then, starting around 2018, things began to change again, and the need for Mark Morton began to dwindle. Or at least the need for me in my educational technology role. That happened, I think, for a couple of reasons.
First, as new instructors were hired to Waterloo, they required less support in learning technologies because most of them were so-called digital natives: they’d grown up with new technologies and had likely even been on the receiving end of learning technologies when they were undergraduate and graduate students.
Second, the learning technologies themselves had become more user-friendly, and the early plethora of different purveyors got whittled down through a process of technological Darwinism. After all, how many different blog platforms or clickers or LMS’s can the market sustain? Remember MySpace? Neither do I. And whereas there were around thirty LMS vendors in 2006, now just four of them account for 95% of the available market in higher education. So, that’s why my job shifted again, and my dwindling educational technologies role in CTE was partly supplanted by a communications role.
But then (yet another plot twist!) that changed again. Just when it seemed that learning technologies had achieved a kind of pleasant stasis, virtual reality and augmented reality began to rear their binary heads as potential teaching tools. So, in collaboration with a colleague from CEL, I began to investigate those technologies and their application to learning.
And now, even more recently, GenAI has inserted its smarty-pants self into higher education (as well as pretty much every other human endeavor). And while we’ve had a couple of years to begin to figure it out, I think we’re still a long way from fully understanding how to use GenAI in teaching and learning (as well as how we’ll prevent GenAI from eventually using us).
So, in my two decades of supporting teaching excellence at Waterloo, what have I learned? These are my nuggets of actual, quasi, or pseudo wisdom:
- Time flies. It astonishes me that 1963 (the year I was born) is nearly as distant from the year 2025 as 1963 was from the year 1902. Cognitively and affectively, it feels a bit like I’ve become my own grandfather.
- Things change. And they change whether we want them to or not. How we react to change is what defines us.
- Things don’t need to be perfect. Most of the time, good enough is good enough because at a certain point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
- Take on 20% less than you think you can accomplish. That 20% will soon get filled up with things you didn’t anticipate.
- Good relationships are crucial. Trusting, cheerful, supportive relationships with colleagues are the key to getting things done and having fun.
- We’re on this planet to learn and to help each other. Curiosity and kindness are the answer to everything.
That’s it! That’s all I’ve learned over the past two decades at Waterloo! (Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve also learned that Waterloo is south of Minneapolis; that people around here say “dinner” instead of “supper”; and that you should wear long pants when trimming juniper bushes.)
Anyway, thank you, CTE and Waterloo, for taking a chance on me twenty years ago! I'm going to miss my dear colleagues, but I'm also looking forward to spending my time writing more fiction! Mark