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Requiring Online Learning

Our learners don’t have the skills they need to learn today. We’ve taught learners how to learn in a classroom, how to memorize, how to take true/false, mutliple choice test, etc. Essentially, we’ve given our learners the skills they need to navigate our education system today. But things are changing, and unfortunately, it appears that our educational institutions are slow in responding (Dave Warlick has recently done some good thinking on this subject with his notion of “flat classrooms”). Our students are graduating with skills that would have served them well 20 years ago. Today, a learner needs a skill set that reflects the environment in which they will be working (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has some useful publications in this area). The Chronicle recently ran an article on the Governor of Michigan’s requirement that all students must take at least one online course before graduating high school. It’s a start…but far too little. We need to teach learners the skills they will need tomorrow – pattern recognition, not information processing, connection-forming, not content consumption, critical thinking, not memorizing. It’s a huge task, and I don’t feel that many institutions “get it”.

This was written by gsiemens. Posted on Sunday, April 23, 2006, at 6:49 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. Suzanne wrote:

    I agree completely however I think undergraduates aren’t ready for online learning at least in its current state. They haven’t yet developed the cognitive and emotional maturity needed to success in online learning which requires quite a lot of self direction, discipline and intrinsic motivation. They’ve turned the corner as it relates to socializing online, but as I read in a recent post on online communities, it’s the potential of sex that keeps them engaged, not the grades, nor the degree.

    Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 11:21 pm | Permalink
  2. Kristin Helen wrote:

    I couldn’t agree with you more. Working in an educational institution myself, I most of the time feel alienated when I try to make our leaders undertand how important it is that we change the way we teach, in order to meet higher technological demands in society. The problem is that most consider LMS as equal to e-learning, and hence the educational community think they have technology in relation to learning covered.

    Monday, April 24, 2006 at 5:10 am | Permalink
  3. 公司法 wrote:

    They haven’t yet developed the cognitive and emotional maturity needed to success in online learning which requires quite a lot of self direction, discipline and intrinsic motivation. They’ve turned the corner as it relates to socializing online

    Monday, April 24, 2006 at 9:07 am | Permalink