#ocTEL MOOC (week 3 A33) Learning forward, designing backward

The third activity for this week 3 on Designing active learning is to design an activity and to review a learning activity. I didn't design one specifically for this MOOC, but I am happy to share one which I designed for a Doctoral school a few years ago, it was about the design of learning game, starting by inviting students to play a game...

About learning games and the design of learning spaces

The idea is simple: invite students to play a game first alone against the teacher who manages to sometimes loose, sometime win. This the time to acquire the rules. Then the students play against each other, first alone, then in team with a spokesperson who will play the strategy of the team. There are two levels of debriefing, the first one specific to the game as such, the second to understand the structure and the function of the game as a learning situation. Eventually, students are invited to analyse a simulation game in epidemiology. The sequence closes with a more theoretical analysis of the role of games in learning.

The lesson learned from this exercise is that while learning goes forward from action to articulated knowledge, the design of a learning situation must go backward from the targeted learning outcome back to the optimal situation to engage learner in the process. This situation could be a game but not necessarily, it must essentially be a situation which allows learners to mobilise what they know, whatever it is, in order to make the first step towards the target. The sequence of situation is a journey allowing the construction of the required mental constructs, then language, then means to evaluate and give ground to the piece of knowledge which has emerged.  This is a quick summary, but the essential is there.

It is with this in mind that I reviewed two activities proposed by (@James Kerr), History of Educational Technology-A Collaborative Timeline Project, and (@ElizabethECharl), Webquest – a hunting we will go. In both cases, the difficulty is to figure out precisely what will be the learning outcome and how the situations are appropriate for this objective. Kerr activity is interesting as such, it could stimulate conversations on the history of educational technology and beyond on the role of technology in education. It is an open situation which could give ground to several different learning objective. Elizabeth activity is more focussed on information search on the net. It is a starter, and actually presented as such, which fruitfulness will depend on the follow up either by new situations or by the teacher -- here a librarian. As a learner, I am now in standby in both cases...

#ocTEL MOOC (week 1 A12) Snapshot on our approach and practice

The second part of the activity of this week focus on our pedagogical approach and our practice. I must say that I have no teaching duty since 1988, when I got a Senior Scientist position at the CNRS. However, I still continued to teach PhD courses and to a certain extent this is not that different from teaching undergraduate. So, let see how I can achieve this A12 task of week 1) From a learner perspective ("My Approach"), we are invited to locate ourself in the following space:

First, I would very much like to balance directivity which would allow me to know where I am going as a learner and whether I am not too far out of the track, and autonomy which would  allow me to experience knowledge and build my own understanding. I imagine that this opinion is very common.

Although important, the social dimension was not the main thing, apart from the joy of collectively arguing. Actually it depends on the content at stake. In mathematics and natural sciences learning collaboratively is quite productive thanks to the fact that the disciplines clearly gives the rules to solve conflict. In literature and several other topics, this is more difficult and the benefit of social interaction is less clear; indeed it brings the context to shape arguments and learn how to manage contradictions. It is a case where "reflective communication with the instructor" is really beneficial.

Hence, I would not fill one graph, but one for each discipline.

From a teacher perspective ("My course"), my first concern once I know what I want to teach is to find a way to pass to students the understanding that there is somewhere a problem and that the knowledge I claim to bring to them is the optimal one (possibly the not the only one) to solve this problem. For this, I start by a situation which allow students to express views, opinion, conceptions about a situation which later on will appear to be problematic in the sense I need in order to teach. If this is successful, for example (A11) having shaped a variety of evidence based opinions on behaviourism, I would stimulate the formulation of the problem(s) which will be the best to justify the knowledge I target, for example (A11) the problem of nature of the meaning built at an outcome come of the learning situation and the problem of its assessment. We understand that these situations blend individual, social and with-the-teacher situations.

Actually, this view is substantiated by the Theory of Didactical Situation, which provides the tools to assess continuously the relations between the activity, the situation and knowledge (to be learned, as it were).