ACUI The Commons - Non-Western Forms of Learning

ACUI The Commons - Non-Western Forms of Learning

ACUI The Commons - Making Resources Accessible to Everyone

ACUI The Commons - Making Resources Accessible to Everyone

Supporting Self-Directed Learners

The fact that people can and do learn on their own, without the aid of an educator, is no secret. However, in the 70s and 80s, researchers began exploring the possibility of instructors facilitating self-directed learning among their students. This formalized self-directed learning (SDL) was pioneered by the educational theorists Malcolm Knowles, Allen Tough, and Cyril Houle. The methods within SDL that have developed over time have become quite popular in today’s institutions of higher learning. The goals of the person facilitating this learning are to help learners be self-directed, and to encourage transformation and social action (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007).

            A lot of self-directed learning is already going on in our society. So, what can we do more intentionally to direct that in our work and life? The answer to this question will vary from institution to institution and person to person, based on the roles and resources at your facility. One method is to simply ask the right questions. Part of the interior design of the facility and/or promotional materials can ask questions to stimulate people into reflective thought or conversation, such as “What do you want to be when you grow up?” or “ What do you still need to do to get from where you are to where you want to be?” or whatever practical or deep philosophical questions you come up with. Another option is to design student activities that allow the learners to make choices about what they want the goal of the activity to be and, then, challenge them to decide how they want to achieve it. This has been creatively done in middle schools in Bloomington, Indiana, with an activity that could easily be changed to suit a theme relevant to adult students. The activity is called Reality Store and is provided to the middle schools via The Franklin Initiative. Businesspeople from the community come to the school and work tables, each representing a different item adults spend money on (housing, groceries, child care, etc.). Students are given a certain amount of money based on their grade point average. They have to budget that money by getting all the things they need, and then, they can upgrade or buy extras if they have any money left over. It’s a powerful life lesson for the students. They can decide whatever life they want to have, but it has to fit into a realistic income potential for them based on where they are academically. How could you adapt this type of activity for the learners with whom you work?

References

Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., and Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

ACUI The Commons - Best Practices for Facilitating Adult Learners

ACUI The Commons - Best Practices for Facilitating Adult Learners

Contemplative Education

Have you ever happened upon something interesting that has been around for a long time, but you had never heard of it, and that fact makes you feel really stupid? Well, this just happened to me as I was catching up on my Journal of Transformative Education reading and saw a couple of articles about contemplative education. I'm about to finish my masters in adult education, and I'm a big fan of transformative learning. I've also spent many years in the natural health field where Western and Eastern methods are blended and contemplative teaching is practiced without ever calling it contemplative teaching. So, when I read in Wikipedia (not scholarly, I know) that contemplative education has been in the U.S. since 1974, I thought, "Where have I been MY WHOLE LIFE that I have never heard of this"?

Apparently, contemplative education blends liberal education with contemplative practices such as meditation, tai chi, etc. If you are as interested in learning more as I am, here is a list of books on the topic available through Amazon.

Peace.

Informal learning is everywhere

If you read this blog, you will quickly discover that I am a HUGE fan of informal learning. Informal learning is the learning that just happens while you are out living life. It's not the formal education you get when you go to school. It's not the nonformal education you get when you take a ballroom dancing class. Informal education is the learning that happens when you read the newspaper or watch the news. It's everywhere!

I thought about that kind of learning often during the month of September. You see, September is a big festival month in my world. It starts Labor Day weekend when I usually run off to a nearby powwow. So much informal learning happens at a powwow. You can read about powwow etiquette in the program. During the powwow, the MC describes the different dances and regalia to the spectators. The traders explain the history behind their offerings to a potential customer. My favorite informal learning at powwows is what happens at the campsites. Groups sit around in circles and just talk. Some are usually working on craft projects or regalia, while the group gives advice and teaches new skills to others. Often there will be a point where everyone shows off what they have been working on over the past year. Everyone helps everyone else learn how to honor tradition and live within the cultural norms of the powwow.

In Bloomington, Indiana, there has been an art installation throughout town called The Brain Extravaganza. You can learn more about it here. There are giant brains all over town. Each has a plaque with different brain facts, and the different artwork on the brains tells a different story about neuroscience. People who happen to walk by a brain and decide to read the plaque just experienced informal learning.

Also in Bloomington was the Lotus World Music and Art Festival. You can find more about this event here. Now, some serious informal learning takes place at this event! This year was my first immersion into the Lotus Festival. People are not only introduced to new music and art, but through the music and art they are introduced to new cultures and places. I remember at one point my friends and I were talking about which artist we wanted to see next. We started talking about a Malian singer and dancer that would be playing. One of us said, "Where's Mali"? The rest admitted we had heard of Mali but really had no idea where it was. So, another lady pulls out her smartphone and looks up all about Mali and reads it to all of us. Now, we not only know where Mali is but the population and culture of Mali, as well. That is informal learning, people!

Take a moment to bask in just how much information is easily available to you that was not available just a few decades ago. It is astounding how accessible learning is in this day and age. As you go about your week and find that you have learned something new, take a moment for gratitude.

Peace and learning to you all.

The Joys of Online Education

This blog post is in response to Mark Edmundson's Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on July 19th. Here's a link to that article.

Professor Edmundson has a poor perception of online education based on his experiences at the University of Virginia where he claims online education "came close to tearing the university apart." He describes a situation where administrators were essentially forced to create an online program. As a result, they hired an outside company to create the online courses for them, apparently in a hurry.

Throughout the article he shares a bit about his own philosophy of teaching and education when he mentions cringing when someone suggests he might learn something from his students. He apparently has a preference for lecture-based classes. In other words, based on the article, he sounds very teacher-centered rather than learner-centered. I'm not criticizing this, just making an observation that will be relevant later in my response.

He also makes several negative claims about online education. These include statements such as:
"Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor."
"It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue."
"The Internet teacher...can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms."
"You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning."
"Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely."

As someone who has been both a student and instructor of online education courses, I could not disagree more with Professor Edmundson's opinion. I am not familiar with the University of Virginia's online program, but based on this article, it sounds as if the introduction of online education for this university was rushed and filled with strong negative emotion as a result of the dismissal of the president. It does not surprise me, therefore, that the resulting program might have been below par. As for the online course from Yale he mentions, it sounds more like a video of a lecture than an actual online course. I would like to reassure the professor that this is not the reality of online education as a whole. It certainly has not been my experience in the MSAE program at Indiana University.

I would argue that the "trouble" is not with online education. It is in the design of the online courses. My experience with online education is that it is better able to engage multiple learning styles than face-to-face classes, making it far from one-size-fits-all. Most of my courses (those I've taken and those I teach) are mostly dialogue. They involve learner-content, learner-learner, and learner-instructor interaction. While much of this interaction is asynchronous, video chats and live satellite feeds provide ample face-to-face time, and you might be surprised how much you can glean about a student's mood and enthusiasm from the written word. I have also found my online courses to provide far more vital learning communities than any face-to-face course I've ever taken. A lot of bonding takes place and a lot of extracurricular sharing and topic discussion, as well.

I'm happy to say that I have only had two online courses that could be described as sterile and lonely. And, yes, they were miserable. If this is your experience, I feel for you. However, the problem was not that they were online. The problem was that they were taught by people who did not know how to teach online courses. It has been my experience that instructors who prefer teacher-centered, lecture-based education make poor online instructors. There is nothing wrong with that. There are people who are really great an online instruction, but who fail miserably at face-to-face interactions. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. The problem is when someone who is not well-suited to online instruction is forced to teach an online course. That is a management problem, not an online education problem.

My advice to Professor Edmundson is to read the following books and articles and to consider taking D525 - Introduction to Distance Education Systems through Indiana University's Master of Science in Adult Education program to experience what a good online course is like.

Recommended Reading:

              *Clark-Ibanez, M., & Scott, L. (2008). Learning to teach online. Teaching Sociology, 36(1), 34-41.  

               *Conrad, R., & Donaldson, J. A. (2004). Engaging the online learner: Activities and resources for   creative instruction (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

              * Gonzalez, C. (2009). Conceptions of, and approaches to, teaching online: A study of lecturers teaching postgraduate distance courses. Higher Education, 57(3), 299-314. doi:10.1007/s10734-008-9145-1  

              *Guri-Rosenblit, S. (2009). Distance education in the digital age: Common misconceptions and challenging tasks. Journal of Distance Education, 23(2), 105-122.  

               *Larreamendy-Joerns, J., & Leinhardt, G. (2006). Going the distance with online education. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 567 -605. doi:10.3102/00346543076004567

          

               * Liebowitz, J. (2003). Teach people skills totally online? College Teaching, 51(3), 82-85.  

               

               *Lynch, M. M. (2002). The online educator: A guide to creating the virtual classroom. New York, NY: Routledge.  

  

               *Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.  

               *Porter, L. R. (2010). Developing an online educational curriculum: Technologies and techniques. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.  

  

              *Selwyn, N., Gorard, S., & Furlong, J. (2005). Adult learning in the digital age: Information technology and the learning society (New edition.). New York, NY: Routledge.