One Way Or Another, I’m Gonna Learn Ya
Oppia is a community for learners and creators. Our mission is to bring engaging and educational lessons to the community as a means of an extra resource through lessons made by people just like you. We like to showcase our amazing people from time to time and we wanted to showcase Kristin, an Oppia contributor who is doing work behind the scenes to make code happen.
Kristin is also newer to coding, and Oppia was one of her first big opportunities to put to work her newly acquired skills. Learning is never easy, but Kristin gives us some insight into her learning curve through an excerpt of her blog below. Kristin shows us that learning is a process, and turning that progress into accomplishment takes time and effort:
Open Book, or Looking it Up isn’t Cheating
So, as you may or may not know, I’m a beginner JavaScript developer and I’ve been increasingly proud of the (struggling) headway I’ve made, though I know there’s still a ton to learn. But man, I got started on this project, which is using the Angular JS framework, and even my beginner project was a struggle. So you know what I did? I Googled things. I looked up stuff on Stack Overflow. I asked a few questions on Stack Overflow. I asked questions within the project. And now, I’m on my fourth or fifth assignment and submitting PRs (pull requests) like a (featherweight) champ. And I never once got accused of cheating or lost points off my grade!
In the higher ed environment I’m in now (and even in the professional development environment I was in previously), there remains this idea that multiple choice tests rule, that every student should be able to answer these questions with all the knowledge they should have memorized from the course presentations. But the bottom line (which all my colleagues are very passionate about) is that the real world doesn’t work that way.
There may be some things that you need to own in your own head, but many times, declarative-type knowledge is stored away in other forms (notebooks, note-taking apps, documents and documentation, job aids, etc.). The piece the humans have to get good at is synthesizing knowledge from various sources, collaborating with a variety of other people not like them, and solving problems. In other words, not multiple choice test stuff. Of course multiple choice is easy to grade; I can certainly see the appeal in that. But it’s generally super inauthentic and your learners know it.
Whenever possible, we should opt for authentic assessments that allow people to apply their new knowledge. In academia, that could look like making every test an open book test and/or collaborative test, because the questions students have to answer can’t be found by looking it up in the book. Or it might look like creating assignments that have students putting work out into the world (for example, writing and or editing Wikipedia articles and going through their peer review process or contributing to open efforts to transcribe historical letter — both actual assignments created at my former institution, the University of Texas,, by the way!).
Showcasing this is important to us not only because it was a way for us to show off Kristin’s great work, but it speaks to something larger that Oppia and its explorations address: There is no singular way to learn something for everyone. We’re all different. Maybe you learn best from flash cards, or from watching interactive videos, or maybe even just from simply reading a book about it.
On Oppia, if the lesson doesn’t help the learner, they can tell the creator. This is incredibly powerful because education is no longer in the hands of the “teacher” but rather the student. It re-creates the 1–1 tutoring feel, and gives students that chance to learn something in a way that hasn’t been presented to them before, much like how Kristin was able to find stuff on coding in places that weren’t just the classroom.
Oppia is that opportunity for collaboration between teachers, learners, creators, and hobbyists as a way to share their knowledge and build upon it. You don’t have to be afraid to look beyond the textbook to find the answers, you may just find what you’re looking for on Google, on a free course online, or even on Oppia. And if you can’t find it, tell someone! That’s how you find out who may know what you’re looking for and go beyond the textbook to learn what you need :).
Oppia wants to be your resource for lessons and things that you want to learn. Have a request for something you haven’t seen yet? Post on the forum! Think you have something to add to a lesson you’ve found? Sign-up and collaborate with the person who posted the lesson. We’re happy to have you join!
We’re excited to bring you new and fresh content soon so stay tuned, stay learning, and happy exploring!
-Oppia
