WFE1 — Week 1 Post-lecture reflection
After the first week of lectures in What Future for Education, I am very excited to take this course! This is the first MOOC I have taken, and I think that its format will work well with my preferred methods of learning. Based on the first week, I can tell that the course designers are trying to practice what they preach by encouraging interaction between students and providing a range of options for students to use to digest the information presented in the course material. The discussion forums are truly a global classroom and a great opportunity to engage with a range of perspectives provided by students with different backgrounds (cultural, political, and geographical among others).
One of my goals for the course is to take advantage of all of the options provided and pay special attention to which ones work best for me (conscious development of my own learning style) while also thinking about the options that I do not prefer in the context of other peoples’ learning experience.
The first week of lessons has helped me to solidify my prior thoughts on the future of education, namely that the traditional classroom system has some major pitfalls that need to be corrected to provide the best education to the largest number of people. Even when the teachers mean well, an authoritarian atmosphere in the classroom can impede learning through fear or the requirement to “prove” knowledge in a limited way. While structure is important, teachers should respect the students’ authority to have a say in their learning experience. On the forums, I heard many educators bring up the technique of providing different options for a given assignment, or portfolios as a method of assessment. This flexibility helps in two ways: (1) the student is able to tailor their learning experience to their strengths and (2) the student will feel less coercion and/or fear which puts them in a better mental state for learning.
Often when I hear great ideas like this that involve changing the status quo, the cynic in me pipes up and says, “that sounds great, but it will never work in practice!” so I am pleased to hear that these techniques are being put to use in real classrooms. Another goal of mine throughout this course is to think about the implementation of non-traditional teaching methods, and how a teacher would go about putting into practice the theories that we are learning about in order to shape the future of education.
