#2: learning is more effective if a student can take responsibility for his own learning.
the student (and not the instructor) has direct access to own brain. "teaching" is the art of setting up the circumstances under which a student is likely to teach himself. we must let go of this concept that an instructor directly causes a student to learn by lecturing, explaining, demonstrating, et cetera. if a student learns during a lecture, it is because she chooses to process the information at that time and to intentionally learn.
but how can a student take responsibility and learn with intent if she is ignorant of the competencies she lacks? when an instructor steps up to the podium and begins to lecture, the student does not know what competencies that instructor intends to foster in her. the implicit instructional design in this instance is "listen to me." lecturing better or teaching "harder," in this instance does not result in better learning.
good instructional design makes explicit the competencies a student must acquire. effective student-centered learning can occur when a student can assume responsibility for removing a known incompetence by saying "i want to learn that." when the course design is reduced to "listen to me." the student cannot accelerate her learning processes through deliberate learning.
practice: getting a student to take responsibility for her learning requires a "pilot in command" approach to designing her experience of your site. that is, each student must take full responsibility for his or her own learning journey. help the student to clearly understand 1) what competencies constitute successful "learning" in the class, 2) the base of prior learning from which she starts and her "distance" from the goals, and 3) the effectiveness of her ongoing efforts to acquire the target competencies at the prescribed level of mastery.
the web environment is an ideal venue for offering a student the appropriate richness of information in this regard. a course structure map that clearly outlines course competencies, self assessments that index prior learning, and formative assessments explicitly linked to target competencies motivate the learner to take responsibility for her learning.
application notes: an excellent way to hand responsibility to the student is to clearly articulate and post the "course structure map" (csm) in which the target competencies for the course are outlined. the competencies must be precisely defined for this to work. each competency must state who will demonstrate what concrete knowledge, skill, or behavior at what level under what conditions, what will be the process of demonstration, and what, if any, will be the product. in defining competencies, one should avoid "fuzzy" and hard to measure terms (e.g., understand, appreciate, learn about). this is one example of a solid competency definition:
the student will be able to draw a timeline diagram and write a short paper about the diagram, describing the major interacting factors (political, economic, social, and religious) that led to ww-ii, then project how these circumstances might plausibly repeat in the future. the student will demonstrate competency by offering a 15-minute presentation and lead a q&a session with fellow students.
the assessments of prior learning as well as the summative assessments linked to the course structure map and competency list should be further broken down in terms of mastery. so, in the instance of the historical analysis of ww-ii above, a student can rely on three levels of summative assessments, one for familiarity, one for understanding, and one for mastery. competency statements can also be linked to rubrics, provided the terminology in the rubric is very clear and specific. normed standards can be of use in a subject that lends itself to quantitative assessing, as in the case of math or physics in which a certain number of correct answers can effective index a student's acquisition of the target competency.
#3: student motivation is a strong determinant of the outcomes and success of learning.
learning is a response to tension (positive and negative, internal and external), and this tension can be highly motivating. negative tension, such as intense anger or fear can prompt rapid learning even though we elect to rely on neither to encourage learning.
tension is a state of mind that motivates learning. as a first step in a learning activity, gagne suggested staging a stress event to evoke curiosity, wonder, and perplexity in his students. the positive tension of curiosity or wonder can be understood here as a discrepancy between the reality the student observes and her ability to explain it.
even though the importance of student motivation is emphasized in the research literature, the creation of positive tension through rewards and incentives is under emphasized in instructional design. traditionally, it has been the instructor's responsibility that learning occurs and the student's responsibility to get motivated. a more informed, student-centered, view asks students to take responsibility for learning, and this approach requires the instructor to assume responsibility for motivation.
good design evokes positive tension in order to motivate learning and recognizes that being unhappy is one of the most distracting obstacles to learning. the inclusion of rewards (in the form of praise or simply feedback) and features (such as assessments, evidence, and testimonials) that convince a student that the learning a class requires is necessary, valuable, purposeful, and possible will motivate that student to learn.
practice: an instructor can help keep a student happy and motivated by minimizing frustration for the student, maximizing the positive tensions the student experiences, and by offering the student time-management assistance.
a student in a web-based class is prone to frustration because of the technical skills required, the isolation, and because an online class lacks the built-in conventions of the traditional classroom. the physical setup and interaction patterns of the traditional classroom are a form of instructional design that is reassuring to the student because of its predictability and familiarity. the isolation of working at a distance in a predominantly asynchronous manner can often leave the student feeling as if no one is "listening" or no one notices or cares if he succeeds or fails. moreover, the student can easily grow bewildered by the choices offered by an online course. the ability to perform class work "anytime, anywhere" can create serious time management problems for the student.
application notes: the increasing popularity of campus portals or otherwise robust enterprise solutions to campus communications and computing may enable you to link directly from your course site to resources for student support and assistance. minimize a student's potential frustrations by finding out what training, guidance, and counseling resources are available either through your institution or elsewhere on the web. simply knowing that the resources are there is not enough, providing direct links from within the site to these resources is important. feelings of isolation can be assuaged by including a "cyber café" area or by simply providing an open-forum discussion board. many course management systems include student "meeting place "tools or features.
positive tension results from encouragement, attention, and the belief that one's efforts will have a meaningful end. you need to build very strong feedback mechanisms, other than assessments, into your site. activity and effort in the class will drop if your students suspect that no one hears their ideas or views their work. one way to provide your students high levels of feedback without exhausting yourself is to assign discussion board threads to student teams for moderation. you can lurk and comment when your effort will have the most impact. you can also respond in a more public manner by posting a site announcement that includes a direct link to the work on which you are commenting.
when guiding a class through a particularly difficult subject matter, you can motivate students by identifying these difficult "crux points" and inoculating them to the negative impact by giving them a just-in-time warning paired with reassurance and encouragement.
you can evoke positive tension in your students by helping them to visualize themselves as successful in the class and by making them hungry for the benefits that success in the class will bring. the web environment facilitates employing learning activities that involve doing a salary search for or performing research on the nature of a specific course-content related.
a site feature that provides time-management assistance is a simple time-to-completion chart in which you define the average time needed to perform each task the course requires. in a class with many collaborative projects, such information reinforces the message of responsibility as something a student owes to other students, as well as to himself. by defining the time on task for a collaborative project, you are recruiting the student in the course quality effort. a further application of this idea can be to ask each student to do a time-management self-evaluation so that he can make an informed decision about his ability to succeed in the class.
#4: higher order learning requires reflection.
the active work of constructing a base of new knowledge a base of new knowledge by linking it to prior knowledge can be compared to receiving inventory in a warehouse. higher order thinking and learning occurs in the lull following the active work of intake as the brain orders and reorders what it has received. the learning brain requires the periodic expanses of mental white space we refer to as reflection.
gardiner's study reported, "the amount of time spent listening is negatively related to change in critical thinking, and positively related to memorizing." the high bandwidth activity of new knowledge acquisition impedes meta-cognitive thinking (i.e., thinking about thinking) and crowds the larger perspective from which broader links between and among elements of new knowledge can be made. the brain needs to be left alone, so to speak, so its subliminal constructive work can occur.
when we speak of higher order reasoning and learning, or critical thinking, we are gesturing at this still somewhat mysterious brainwork we call evaluation and synthesis. clearly, it is one thing to help a student to learn how to apply a math equation and an entirely different matter to help her to learn how to behave like a mathematician. a student "does math" by evoking bits of knowledge to work a math problem. but she behaves like a mathematician when she evaluates the relevance of the problem and/or evokes principles employed in other problems to synthesize new ways of thinking about or solving the problem.
good instructional design provides reflective time within which higher order thinking and learning can occur. additionally, it prompts reflection and meta-cognitive thinking by requiring the student to pause to summarize, to evaluate, to take inventory, and to construct (draw) broader connections.
practice: your course site is the ideal environment for providing your students time for reflection since you are not constrained by the event we call "class time." when in class, the effect on the student of "turning off teaching" in order to create mental white space is less effective overall learning. on the web, the student can freely turn on or off the flow of information and modulate his "teachable moment" in a manner individually perfect for him.
to maximize your students' ability to tune in to and away from your course content in a manner that facilitates reflection, your assignable units need to be finely broken down. by avoiding learning activities that require large expanses of attention or time on task, you increase the likelihood that your students will have energy and mental focus left over for reflection. building reflective time into learning activities by including language that actually directs students to reflect is fine, provided you also design in some mechanism for appreciating and recognizing the reflection they do. perhaps the best way to encourage reflection in the absence of requiring and assessing it is to model reflection. again, an online class provides an excellent venue for this. you may post an announcement or other public document in which you share the results of your reflections on some aspect of the class or student work.
the online classroom also greatly facilitates meta-cognitive thinking because the course site is a cumulative archive of all that has transpired in the class. after all, you cannot run a search on all in-class discussions. nor do verbal exchanges accumulate into organized discussion threads, such as occurs naturally on the web.
application notes: chat tools will help you leverage your online class to prompt reflection in a student. one effective learning activity that entails giving two students a topic on which they are to take opposite sites and debate via synchronous chat to the best of their abilities. the students are directed to review their chat or discourse archive (easily assessable in most courseware) and to analyze or reflect upon it in some manner. for instance, each student can analyze his own statements to see if he can detect instances of deductive or inductive logic and, in the case of deductive logic, if he can write out the syllogism implicit in his assertions. an instructor can reinforce the value of such reflective work by commenting publicly on the student's work and by including a direct link to the work in this public comment. most courseware packages have tools for the posting of public announcements.
asking students to perform some closing work on a discussion board thread prompts meta-cognitive thinking. you might require students to revisit all the postings in a thread, for instance, and to post a capstone comment that includes a summary, an identification of main or "best" themes, a nomination for "best comments or ideas," or simply a summary of his own learning on the subject of discussion. performing this online version of the in-class five-minute paper is facilitated and expanded on the social dimension by the fact that all "public" thinking is archived on the site and available for review.
most discussion board thinking occurs at the lower levels of bloom's taxonomy of thinking. students recite knowledge, explain things and display various levels of understanding. you naturally want to push them to function at higher levels of reasoning by prompting them to analyze what they have asserted, to synthesize their ideas with those of others, to evaluate ideas, and, ultimately to extend their ideas beyond the confines of the discussion topic. the review, analysis, and evaluation of chat archives and discussion threads will achieve this for you.
group work or large projects also provide opportunities to prompt meta-cognition. ask your students, for instance, to reflect upon themselves as members of a group by analyzing their collaborative styles. a simple survey of behaviors and choices administered at the conclusion of a group project will suffice. surveying students about their progress on or reflections upon a large project engages them in the meta-cognitive thinking practiced by project managers. even something as simple as a self-audit of work completed, work remaining, and mid-point success rates can cause a student to reflect upon the nature, purpose, and context of the class as a whole.
