Experience it Online: Significant Learning on the Internet

What is significant learning? The concept comes from a 2003 book by L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences. Fink argues we need to expand our teaching beyond a content-centered approach to one that also provides opportunities for students to do and observe, and to engage in reflective dialogue with self and others. In other words, the content of students’ learning only becomes significant to them when they have an opportunity to put it in practice and connect it to their own lives.

In this post I want to brainstorm some ways in which a blended or fully online course might facilitate the experience (that’s the “do and observe”) prong of Finke’s taxonomy of significant learning.

At first, this idea seems a bit counterintuitive to me. The internet is the place we go for virtual experiences. The best we can hope for here is (to quote my favorite ‘80s mumblecore demigods quoting classic cinema) an "Imitation of Life."

But Fink suggests that in an online course, the teacher can “assign students to directly experience _______________.”

How do we fill in that blank?

Once we accept the inherent limitations of online experiences—for example, I’d hate to be operated on by a doctor who’s highly experienced in virtual surgery—it’s pretty fun to think of all the ways.

Assign students to directly experience . . .

• a virtual museum exhibit.
• a conversation on a blog post related to the topic of the class.
• a place (using Google maps’ “street view” feature).
• a big news event, via a live blog.
• a TV show via a microblog feed.

 It occurs to me as I’m writing that what the internet mostly enables us to do is participate in far-away experiences via a filter. What we’re actually experiencing is someone else’s and perceptions of the experience.

And that’s one way in which blended learning strikes me as particularly useful for teaching students about narrative, about the ways in which writing / video / social media / media in general places a filter in between us and “the real,” if such a thing exists. Maybe I’m getting way too theoretical here, but wouldn’t it be great to teach students about the limitations of primary sources—and the need to consider author bias, genre expectations, purpose, etc. in analyzing them—by having students compare their experience of an event to a live blog feed’s? Or interrogate the selves represented in autobiography by comparing the person represented on a Facebook profile to the person we know?

In the end, when we invite students to directly experience something on the internet, what we’re really doing is inviting them to experience someone else’s narrative. This is reason #997 why we’d better make darn good and sure that we teach our students to approach narratives critically, the humanities will never go out of style, and I should really get paid more.

                                                           

Why has eLearning been slow to catch on to Web 2.0?

We’re witnessing the second generation of the internet now, folks. The beginning was the internet as information source. But the dawn of social networking—starting with LiveJournal and Friendster, and evolving into today’s technologies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram—has made the internet into a source of connection. This is Web 2.0, where information is not just a static object to be accessed at will. Instead, information is a conversation-starter. It’s for sharing, connecting, circuit building. The purpose of information in Web 2.0 is to start a conversation so that a community of users can grow up around it and re-purpose it in creative ways.

But eLearning has been slow to catch up. Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) still style themselves primarily as information delivery systems. In my experience, when professors want to do something truly “2.0-like”—have students blog, create a wiki, publicly share course content in whatever manner—they’ve had to go outside the LMS to do it. Many high schools still forbid extra-LMS activity altogether. Slowly but surely, the tide is shifting, but it still begs the question: why has eLearning been so slow to “catch on” to the new way of conceptualizing information that Web 2.0 represents? Here are two theories:

• educators are nervous about sharing ideas in the Wild West of Web 2.0 If your bread and butter is the information you create, you’re understandably nervous about “opening it up” to be re-mixed and re-purposed. Your tenure depends on ownership of your ideas. This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle—after all, we’ve found ways to share content in the academic space and still give credit where credit is due—but the rules of information sharing in Web 2.0 aren’t as cut and dry as the Chicago Manual of Style and probably won’t be for a long while yet—if ever. 

• educators still think of teaching as a “top down” process where the professor is the “sage on the stage.” Even educators who are conscious of the Web 2.0 paradigm shift and love to think of their classrooms as a collaborative learning space struggle with this one (and yes, I speak from personal experience). We got our education way before the internet was a thing and the “learner-centered classroom” was all the rage. It’s hard to break our preconceived notions of what learning and teaching should look like.

 Overcoming these stumbling blocks requires us to fundamentally rethink not only what we do in the classroom but who we are as teachers. New metaphors of the teacher’s role—for example, curator, concierge, network administrator, and most delightfully, game designer—offer a lot of promise for helping us do this. In a subsequent post, I’ll think through some of these metaphors and consider what a seriously-undertaken adoption of one or all of these identities might look like in the classroom.

In this post, I’ve considered the consequences of Web 2.0 primarily at the non-profit university level. But I believe my comments about a need to fundamentally rethink our paradigms apply to for-profit eLearning companies, too. Those who take eLearning 2.0 seriously must rethink what their product is. It can’t be simply the information that is for sale, because many very credible experts have taken to the web to offer it for free. It must be a specific approach to that information—and in particular, what the company’s product enables learners to do with it—that takes center stage in an eLearning company’s marketing efforts and instructional design.

Why Design a Blended Course?

Why design a blended course? In other words, what are the advantages to having a mixture of online and face to face instruction?

 Institutional prerogatives aside—i.e., the need to deliver a course to geographically dispersed learners or the need to leverage instructional resources more efficiently—why would a teacher want to design a blended course? How can a blended course help students to better meet the learning objectives?

 My first instinct is to say that computers do some things better than people, and these are the things that we should seek to use in a blended course first: metrics, data, analytics. Computers are also better (read: faster) at grading objective responses. Multiple choice quizzes are obviously something it makes sense to deliver on a computer so that a teacher can expend her energy elsewhere.

 But what else can computers do better or more efficiently than a teacher? A quick brainstorm:

• Immediately connect students to resources. A teacher can suggest resources, but if a student is sitting at a computer, she can usually go get them right now.
• Facilitate group collaboration. It’s much easier for students to, say, write a group paper, or edit one another’s work in real time, when they can use tools such as Google docs.
• Provide a “safe space” for shy students to participate. Some people are uncomfortable speaking in front of a large group. Such students might actually prefer to participate in online discussions, in which they have time to gather and edit their thoughts before presenting them.
• Encourage students to gather and edit their thoughts before presenting them (see above). I often have students do a quick-write before engaging in class discussions. This might be something better done online before class even begins.
• Connect students to a larger learning community. Teachers can have students Skype with experts in the field, watch videos that other instructors have created, and even access the online course components of other professors. All of this is valuable because it shows students that the issues they’re discussing are live and active conversations.
• Make students a part of the scholarly community. The internet provides a democratic medium for people to participate in scholarship. If students can blog, create learning objects for others, and showcase their work, they can actually add their voices to the scholarly conversation in a way that would never have been possible pre-internet.

As I was browsing other student blogs for BlendKit2014, I also found this list of the benefits of using technology in your teaching, from David Soliday (EdTech at OWU), to be useful.

In general, I think that a great goal for blended course design is to stay away from using technology just for the sake of using it (which would be the higher ed equivalent of what corporate instructional designer Cammy Bean calls clicky-clicky bling-bling, but to stick to using technology only when it either 1) truly adds something to the instructional event that a teacher alone cannot or 2) frees up the teacher to focus on doing what she does that a computer cannot replicate.

So I'm interested in hearing what other teachers think about the advantages of using technology in your teaching. Does my list represent the advantages you perceive, or have I missed something? And are there any cool tools that have helped you teach something that F2F interaction alone could not? Please share in the comments!