How do you take your learning?

Posted on January 29, 2008 by Brian Douglas

We live in an age of choices. Just about any service or product on the market is expected to come with choices. Do you want 400 free minutes,150 text messages, and free calling within network, or 800 voice minutes, unlimited data and call your friends free on any network? Organic french roast decaf vs. a chai soy latte?

Now, I would argue that some of that is just silliness - do I really need 47 different brands of cereal available to me? Can I possibly understand my options with so many choices? In truth, though, some things should have flexible options. After all, we are not all alike in how we live, how we work, and in the case of what we do, how we learn.

As someone else once observed, there is no such thing as the average mind. Since we are an organization dedicated to student learning, shouldn’t we try to teach students in a manner that best fits each of them? That to me is what is so exciting about what is happening in e-learning technology.

Research in cognition and learning styles can now be matched with flexible technology to provide multiple learning paths for students. If you learn best by exploring and experimenting, rich learning objects can enable you to manipulate virtual representations of the subject material. Auditory learner - how about a podcast? Prefer group projects and discussion, we’ve got solutions for that too.

Some have questioned whether online learning measures up to face to face learning. I think the answer is most definitely yes (when done well), but the question should really be, what does academic technology enable us to do, either online or in the face to face setting, that we could not do before??