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.