Teaching Impacts of Technology: Workplace of the Future

Welcome! Are you ready to explore the impacts of the technology on the workplace and new types careers available to us? 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. Additionally, this course features a series called "Career Explorations" -- resources you can use to help students broaden their ideas of future career opportunities. Finally, we'll explore several lesson plans supporting online learning resources around data science and html programming (don't worry -- not prior programming experience is required!).

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!

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!

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!

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.