Future of Learning Top Reads for week of Jan 25 2021
“Mastery, Creativity, Identity: What Students Can Teach Us About Redesigning School,” by Andy Housiaux, on the Global Online Academy blog
“In the spaces that teachers, students, and our own observations identified as the most compelling, students had opportunity to develop knowledge and skill (mastery), they came to see their core selves as vitally connected to what they were learning and doing (identity), and they had opportunities to enact their learning by producing something rather than simple receiving knowledge (creativity).”
“How might we design the Workshop so that the transformative experiences that students described above were central, durable features of a student’s experience in the Workshop? To do that well, we realized we needed to reimagine two fundamental aspects of schooling in particular: time and assessment.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
Mastery. Identity. Creativity.
To design for those dimensions of transformational learning, you will need to move two boulders: time and assessment.
And to move those two boulders, you may need to create different containers for learning experiences. Andover created “the Workshop,” a 10-week term during which students focus on only one theme, earn mastery-based credits, and take no other “regular” classes. For other schools, it may mean partnering with an outside organization.
Does the idea of creating new containers for learning evoke for you “evidence of impossibility”? Or does it make you think of designing better experiments?
That mindset is a choice.
…for a different take on designing the future of learning…
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“Enrollment May Be Down, But Some Established Online Providers Are Seeing a Surge,” by Goldie Blumenstyk, in “The Edge” blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education
“I track the progress of ventures like the fledgling Degrees of Freedom in Vermont, which is developing a hybrid online and face-to-face model that pledges to be ‘affordable, flexible, and inclusive.’ [The chief research officer at Eduventures] calls it ‘a sign of things to come,’ which it may well be in more ways than one. Not only is it hybrid, but it’s using the campus of a small, traditional, liberal-arts institution, Marlboro College, that recently went under.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
You can’t be everything to everyone. In a post-COVID world, are you placing a bet on being…
Affordable or Luxury?
Flexible or Prescriptive?
Inclusive or Exclusive?
Hybrid or Full Virtual? (There is no going back to fully physical presence.)
Of course there are other design principles. The point is to make intentional choices.
Because new entrants—that is to say, competitors—like Degrees of Freedom in Vermont aren’t going away.
…speaking of things that aren’t going away…
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Tweet by Washington Post Higher Education journalist Nick Anderson
“For those schools that decide to go test-optional three years in a row (like UVa just today), you wonder whether they'll ever go back.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
More schools going test optional (or better yet, test blind) would liberate some of students’ attention, energy, time, and money.
What will you want them to invest those resources in?
Better to figure that out now than to allow them to default to something.
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