Source: LearnDash
Archives For Learning
This is a very short blog post that has an excellent table that provides a summary of the results of the survey. It is encouraging to note:
the characteristics these students identified as belonging to those teachers who most effectively taught them were not absent in Typical professors. They just weren’t as pronounced. I take that to mean, if you aspire to be ideal, you don’t have to do new things, just more of those good things you already do.
The numbers reflect the percentage of students who endorsed this characteristic for their Ideal professors and the percentage who said they characterized the Typical professor.
Teaching Characteristic Ideal Typical Professor speaks clearly/not monotone 93 80 Course and daily goals appear on the syllabus 83 52 Students have a voice; input on course policies and procedures 40 7 Professor talks informally with students sometimes 43 15 Professor lectures 78 93 Professor uses discussion 58 37 Professor does in-class activities/demonstrations 57 21 ·Uses humor often/occasionally
·Uses humor occasionally only97 75 ·Cheating/plagiarism policy—investigates and resolves incidents
·Do not know what approach is used to deal with academic dishonesty58 64 Solicits anonymous, written, informal feedback on teaching/course 68 17 ·Solicits student feedback two or more times per term
·Never solicits student feedback72 3
Adam Bessie and Arthur King have created a comic that illustrates the numerous attempts over the past 100 years of automating teaching. They point to Fanz Kafka’s writings and highlight several attempts at automation from Pressley’s teaching machine in 1915, to Skinner’s Box in the 1930’s and finally to the EngKey egg shaped robot that is currently used by South Korea elementary schools to help teach English.
Perhaps the most helpful or alarming fact that Bessie and King offer is their statement that:
…we don’t need “teaching machines” to mechanize Education.
Human teachers just need to act like robots, teaching to the standardized test, never complaining, following the script and making sure students do as well.
If we were to focus on significant learning environments that incoporate critical and analytical thinking rather then the regurgitation of information the threat of the teaching machine wouldn’t be a threat.
Elliott Masie’s Learning TRENDS – Learning TRENDS – 785 – Goodbye eLearning? Jane Pauley on Boomers; Wearable Performance Support via kwout
Elliot Masie the prolific author on learning and technology; the head of the MASIE Center, a Saratoga Springs, NY think tank focused on how organizations can support learning and knowledge within the workforce; and the leader of the Learning CONSORTIUM, a coalition of 230 global organizations cooperating on the evolution of learning strategies has noticed that:
two phrases that are decreasing in presence:
“e-Learning”
“Instructional Designer”
Masie is not surprised by the shift away from “e-Learning” to the all encompassing term “learning” or to greater level of specificity offered by terms like: Virtual Classrooms, Webinars, eBooks, MOOCs or Online Courses. Despite being credited with introducing the term “e-learning” in the mid 90’s Masie too has moved to using the term “learning” for all his programs.
Having spent the past 18 years working on the cutting edge of e-learning/online learning/web-based instruction or whatever we are calling it today I agree with Masie that the general term “learning” is much more appropriate. Most recently I have been adding the prefix “digitally enhanced” to the term “learning” differentiate it from its more traditional meaning. Perhaps this move back to the use of learning to refer to what we do all the time and everywhere is most appropriate considering that we have really only limited learning to the classroom for the past 100-150 years.
I am also glad to see that terms like e-learning are going out of vogue and am now waiting in anticipation for the term “mobile-learning” or “mlearning” to fade away as well. It is unfortunate that our society tends to limit or constrain so many things through naming conventions and/or definitions. Learning is the making of meaningful connections and it happens all the time and everywhere with or without technology.
