by Alan Nelson
I recently wrote a post which was something of a rant about facilitating learning rather than trying to teach remotely. Now I have had the time to sleep on what I said, and on reflection, far from wanting to tone it down a bit, I’d like to go a little further!
I said in my previous blog that I preferred learning experiences that allowed me to make choices about what and how I learn. What I didn’t say was how much I hate being taught in the traditional way. E-learning companies make great efforts to demonstrate that people will be happy to switch from face-to-face experiences to online, but they steer clear of pointing out that many traditional experiences are awful.
Take the idea of a lecture. Who else except a university lecturer would imagine you’d like to listen to them talk for an hour without saying anything yourself. Imagine you went to a social occasion and someone talked and talked and wasn’t interested in what you had to say. You’d think they were pretty rude. So why do we imagine that learners might like to be passive recipients of wisdom without contributing themselves?
We all have our heads full of knowledge – all the stuff we have accumulated over the years. When I listen to someone talk I am constantly comparing what they say to what I have heard before. Does this new piece of information match what I believe? Does it shed new light or offer an alternative perspective? This is of course how we make conversation. One person says something and then the other responds, asking for further information or adding something relevant of their own. If I am not allowed to say anything myself, I still make the connections (I can’t stop!). And as soon as I do I am not listening to next bit. So the only lecture I ever listen to all the way through is one where the lecturer has said nothing of any interest to me at all!
How much worse is this when the “lecture” is streamed over the internet? We publish a range of courses for accountants to complete their CPD. In that world we have come across a lot of streamed lectures. I don’t want to be rude, but these are not delivered by speakers who are that fascinating to start with – once you remove the fact that you are in the room with them live, I defy anyone to listen for any length of time.
In defence of this rant I should say that we have evangelised this gospel for the last nine years. We are not just saying it now because it chimes with the Web 2.0 philosophy of user created content. But I do sometimes feel as though we have been waiting for years for the web to move in our direction and now that it has I am going to use the new tools in as much of what we do as possible.
Death to video feeds; long live user created learning.
Comments