Adult Learning in the Digital Age

Since Jenny and I were responsible for providing a synopsis for this chapter and presenting it in the module, I feel like I have explored the content in depth already! So for this blog post, I thought I would concentrate on the additional activities and resources section located at the end of the chapter. I watched the two videos on eLearning and technology and for those of you who prefer the Cliffs notes versions of the videos as opposed to watching them, I summarized each and commented on how they connected to what we read in Chapter 10.

What We’re Learning from Online Education

Daphne Koller

In this TED Talk Daphne Koller considers what we have learned about the effectiveness of online education by analyzing data including personal stories of students enrolled in Coursera programs. Coursera is an endeavor she co-created with Andrew Ng in order to offer the best courses from the best instructors from the best universities to anyone who wanted to take them, and all for free and online.

To engage online students and develop creativity and problem solving skills in them, courses should:

•  Involve students in active learning strategies;
• Break up material into modules or chunks to be digested in less than 20 min. segments;
• Offer supplementary material – remedial as well as enrichment in addition to the regular content
• Not consist only of lectures. If a lecture must be given use software that pauses the video after a given amount of time and poses a question to the student that they must answer correctly before proceeding.;
• Provide feedback and when possible, immediate feedback;
• Provide a space for informal communication such as study groups as well as a forum where students can ask questions that can be answered by the instructor or other students; and 
• Help students master a concept before moving on to others.

Let’s Use Video To Reinvent Education

In Salman Khan’s TED Talk, he gives an overview of what Khan Academy is and how it works. He then goes on to discuss how these educational videos are beneficial to students, and perhaps revolutionary for education. This talk was with mostly school-age children in traditional classrooms in mind, but many of these points are well-taken as best practices when it comes to online higher education as well.

The videos Khan created for a vast number of subjects, concepts, or topics:

• Allow students to pause or repeat a segment at their convenience;
• Offer a way for students who have progressed without learning a concept to go back and review this material they should have already learned so as not to fall behind even more;
• Present differentiated learning – an example he gave was a boy with autism who learned his decimals and fractions by way of the videos;
• Never get old – calculus is calculus now and 20 years from now;
• Can be used to flip the traditional classroom allowing time for student interaction and peer-to-peer tutoring;
• Encourage mastery of a concept or topic before moving on ; and
•  Are tracked for teachers in a spreadsheet so they can see  where the students are excelling, where they get stuck, where they need additional help, how many videos they watched, how many practice problems they did, where they paused the video, and much more.

So What?

At the heart of both of these videos is the idea that educators can take advantage of the Digital Age and online education to reach populations that were unreachable even 15 years ago and teach them in ways that are conducive to how they naturally learn. Khan talked about using technology to humanize the classroom meaning that instead of lecturing teachers can now spend time with their students answering questions and simply conversing – this is applicable to the online classroom too. Both speakers emphasized the idea of mastery as an integral part of learning and offered ways to achieve mastery through video.

References

Koller, D. (2012, June). What we’re learning from online education [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education?language=en/

Khan, S. (2011, March).  Let’s use video to reinvent education [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education?language=en/

Khan speaking at a TED conference in 2011 [Photograph]. (2011). Retrieved April 9, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Khan_%28educator%29/

Merriam, S. B. & Bierema, L. L. (2014). Adult learning: Linking theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[Untitled photograph of Daphne Koller]. Retrieved April 9, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Koller/

Note: originally appeared in the EDU 630 class blog The Adult Learner April 9, 2015