Are We Lazy about Learning, or Simply Learning Wrong?
Education Expert — Dawn Casey Rowe
“Only about half of those who registered for a course ever viewed a lecture, and only about 4 percent completed the courses,” stated a recent article in Infoworld outlining the worst tech predictions of 2013.
I know. I’m one of those people. I love the idea of learning. I love to learn about everything—things I need, things I may use, and things I’ll never use all top my list of interests at any given time. It’s not that I have a short attention span—it’s just that I’m in that transitional generation that remembers what it was like to have to go to the library and sit there with a book. I wasn’t less curious in the good old days. I was less fortunate. I appreciate the convenience of high-tech learning coming right to me, and I want to learn it all.
To finish a research paper in the day we had to con someone’s parent into driving to either the Eastern Connecticut State University or the University of Connecticut library, and we had to sit there and read the book. We couldn’t check the book out without an ID. This meant that we went through a stack of index cards taking half-assed notes, and we had to rush to read in less than the couple hours it would take before someone’s mom ran errands and came back for us.
There was no computer on which to write a draft, because they really hadn’t been invented yet, and when we were bored, there was no one to text, because that wasn’t around yet either. We had to sit there pulling a hundred books off the shelves to see if we might find one or two relevant pieces of information on some topic that bored us to tears.
I had a method to my madness. I’d go to the stacks. For those of the digital generation who haven’t been to “the stacks,” it is the area of the library where people are required to shut up and stare at numbers on bindings of books. Each number corresponds to a subject in the Library of Congress system. So, basically, a history nerd like me knows that if I go to the D’s and E’s, I’ll be close to where I need to be. By memorizing the general categories of topics, I could go to the right area immediately, and simply choose the topic that had the most books. That way, I couldn’t go wrong. Every librarian reading this is getting ready to throw a brick through my window, I’m sure.
The good news is that I’ve learned to research, a skill I didn’t master until graduate school. High school students copied in libraries, undergrads slept, but grad students researched. I can find nearly anything, up to and including once-classified documents buried deep in archives. I’ve learned to translate, dust off, infer, and quote. I can write a mean precis or thesis about things the world loves or topics only six academics in the universe will care about during the opening act to a Star Trek convention.
But learning has changed. We have so much information available at beck and call of our smartphones that the library comes to us. My smartphone, I recently marveled, is about six times bigger than the first laptop I ever owned, which was a super huge 10G at the time.
So, is it any wonder we don’t finish our MOOCs? I’ve signed up for a couple learning opportunities this year. The first was Google Analytics, and the second another MOOC.
I finished my Google Analytics class proudly, but did not get to the end of the other MOOC. There were distinct difference in the way the learning was laid out. The assignments in the MOOC were time-dated. I couldn’t work around the MOOC schedule. I got behind. Then, I was doomed to fail. I never bonded enough in the forums to make the MOOC a true social learning experience, though the content was top-knotch.
Google, conversely, created a cult of intrinsic learning. I needed the skills. They knew this. They set up encouragement—sending me little reminders and emails along the way. They made the certificate feel so valuable that when the early finishers finished, they posted their achievement all over social media. This gave me the urgency to finish so I could post mine, too. Finally, they created an organic discussion group where people discussed the course and helped each other, even if it was just offering a high-five.
I learned valuable information from the course itself, but more than that, I learned how to structure elements of digital learning in my own class, and how, eventually, to better structure a full digital learning experience. Digital learning must be fun, accessible 24 hours a day, and chunked up in efficient “we’re all busy” segments. It must have the resources readily accessible and easy to locate, and the social learning discussions must be authentic, substantial and directed toward learning and encouragement. MOOCs are great—I’m going to try taking another—but they’re a commitment. This is why they haven’t replaced real teachers, and why the completion rate is so low.
Learnist takes learning to another level—while it started with the idea of learning in schools, it’s morphed to another level, because learning is lifelong and continual. It is a conversation where we share our best in our own time, and it can be about anything.
Thanks to Vicki Davis, aka @coolcatteacher for the link to the article that sparked this commentary.
