Education 2.0 & 3.0

Visible thinking routines that encourage students to document and share their ideas can have a profound effect on their learning.

"When we look at all the assumptions that have been overturned in higher education because of the pandemic and all the needs that have only grown during this time, what becomes clear is that frameworks that previously worked for higher education are no longer guaranteed to function. Something new is needed, and flipped learning may be exactly the right model for where higher education is headed once the pandemic is over."

Bloom’s Taxonomy can be a powerful tool to transform teaching and learning.

By design, it focuses attention away from content and instruction, and instead emphasizes the ‘cognitive events’ in the mind of a child. And this is no small change.

 

For decades, education reform has been focused on curriculum, assessment, instruction, and more recently standards, and data, with these efforts only bleeding over into how students think briefly, and by chance. This means that the focus of finite teacher and school resources are not on promoting thinking and understanding, but rather what kinds of things students are going to be thinking about and how they’ll prove they understand them.

"For most of us, hearing something just once isn’t nearly enough to commit it to memory. But with today’s crowded curriculum, sometimes one explanation is all kids get.

Ten years ago, Sal Khan set out to change that with his Khan Academyvideos, which let kids replay lessons as many times as they want."

David Jolliffe has seen how much trouble students have had in recent years doing their reading.

He has given them a full article or book and watched them struggle to read anything beyond an excerpt. He has handed them a nonfiction book and heard them call it a novel. He has asked them to tell him the main idea of a text and watched their eyes search the page for answers. 

“The main idea in a text is not on the page,” Jolliffe, who retired last year from the University of Arkansas as a professor of English and of curriculum and instruction, tells them. It’s “something in your head that you need to construct.”

The Digital Literacy Competency Calculator (DLCC) is a web-based tool for representing the connection between digital literacy competencies and the teaching and learning practices that produce them. 
For more information, read our White Paper.

Whether we do so consciously or not, we all form expectations about certain things in our lives, from how much we think we’ll enjoy a particular experience to the expectations we form about ourselves and others. Sometimes these expectations are based on prior experience, but more often than not, they’re based on what we’ve been told or the subconscious beliefs we hold.

Picture this: It’s Monday and Ms. D’Angelo, a seventh-grade science teacher in the South Bronx, gives her students a homework assignment about food chains that is due in one week. The assignment asks students to teach a family member about this concept by completing a model food chain together.

The following Monday, Ms. D’Angelo is surprised to see that that some of her students seem to understand the material at a deep level—they even use new vocabulary terms with great fluidity. These same students appear be much more confident than usual when engaging in the class discussion. Ms. D’Angelo scans her grade book and notices that these students are the same the ones who completed the homework assignment.

In order to get the most out of the digital classroom, teachers should utilize these teaching strategies to enhance student engagement and academic success.

“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.” —Jim Dator, futurist at University of Hawaii-Manoa Here’s somethin

Gender inequality is a pressing issue on a global scale, yet studies on this important issue have stayed on the margins of open and distance learning (ODL) literature. In this study, we critically analyse a batch of ODL literature that is focused on gender inequality in post-secondary and higher education contexts. We use Therborn’s social justice framework to inform and guide the study. This is a comprehensive social justice lens that sees inequality as “a life and death issue,” approaching empowerment as a central area of concern. Qualitative content analysis of 30 years of peer-reviewed literature reveals patriarchy and androcentrism as significant mechanisms that continue to produce gender inequality, in particular in women’s access to educational resources and formal learning opportunities. We highlight three themes that emerged in the content analysis: (1) ODL and equal opportunity; (2) Feminism and gender-sensitive curriculum design; and (3) Culturally relevant curriculum design. We critique views of access to technology-enabled education as an instrument for social justice, and provide a pedagogical model for an ODL curriculum centred on empowerment and agency, two concepts closely linked to existential inequality. We argue that such a curriculum is public service and requires a model of education that is based on participation and co-construction, and lies at the intersection of critical, feminist, and culturally relevant pedagogical practices.

Over the last week I've received a bunch of emails and Tweets from people looking for my suggestions on tools and tactics for teaching online if schools are closed due to COVID-19. I'm going to start this post with some tips for giving online instruction then get into some recommended tools.

There are many similarities to adults and students when it comes to learning. If you were an auditory learner in school, you probably still prefer that learning method [1]. If you were a verbal learner you still prefer that. Adults are able to learn from additional styles as they know what they need to pick out from training, and they know the impact it will have on their job if they do not. The motivation to learn is more relevant to adults than it is to students, but trainers need to be aware of learner preferences.

Learning anything comes with some kind of labour whether it’s time spent, a search for meaning, or a simple struggle to understand. After all, every learner is different. With those differences will come the process of overcoming learning barriers of every definition. You won’t always see them coming if you’re a teacher, but there are ways to help your learners get over them.

Here we have 6 of the most efficient methods for giving your learners the upper hand with overcoming learning barriers as they appear.

On a recent OnEducation Podcast episode (embedded at the bottom of this post), the hosts Mike and Glen got into a debate about what exactly is the “right” model of support when it comes to technology integration in schools? As they called out my name in particular, I felt it best to write this post in response.

Make no bones about it…Technology is a gift with a tail. It’s predicted that schools will spend $19 Billion dollars on technology in schools. This can range from a variety of devices, apps, software and various “STEM” tools but not necessarily servers, wires, and all that stuff in the closet.  Despite this large amount of money invested in technology, the amount of money to support and integrate these tools dwarfs the amount spent on the hardware and software. I’d also wager that a majority of that “support” money is primarily for personnel needed to repair and keep the technology running, not to integrate it into learning.

The technological imperative is writ large across university campuses – helping to create spaces and places for our students to flourish, as we flip, blend and merge our pedagogies to engage the generation “Z “ students – the first ones to arrive in HE with internet access from an early age.

The big data affordances of learner analytics with algorithms to monitor, log, and prompt us to intervene has the potential to automate our progression worries and responses. The drivers for change are evident. The current polarisation of the UK “politick” is reflected in policy for higher education in the UK. The needs of employers are paramount, and education for “public good” has been swept away in pressures to have digital savvy and knowledgeable graduates.

EDUCAUSE have published the results of their annual survey (1,400 members of the Higher Education community - I assume North American members of EDUCAUSE) on key issues in teaching and learning. The issues are: 
1. Faculty Development and Engagement; 2. Online and Blended Learning; 3. Instructional and Learning Experience Design; 4. Digital and Information Literacy (hurrah! this was no. 5 last year); 5. Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL); 6. Competency and New Methods of Learning Assessment; 7. Learning Analytics; 8. Open Education;