Personalized Learning:
The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths article, posted by my classmate Jill Motyka, caught my attention this week. All during this MHE622 course this topic has been rattling around in the back of my mind. I predict, in the near future, we are going to see more analysis of and course building revolving around what Peter Smith calls ‘personalized learning’ and ‘connected learning’. With all the resources, people, content, etc. available I believe the next natural step is to ‘allow technology’ to bring these together to further the learning for the student -any type of student- and especially college-aged student and adult learners.
Bay Path University’s American Women’s College [TAWC] has their SOUL system of personalizing online learning for their contingency of undergraduate learners and I believe this is one ‘approach to personalized learning.’ However, I think the future will show more approaches that will see more ‘wrangling and curating’ of personalized approaches to learning. I believe these new approaches will even further augment the type of personalized learning TAWC is currently doing.
The wrangling and curating of learning I envision will tap into social networking, big data, and other knowledge bases using the Internet and other technologies. The result of this gathering as Smith concludes will allow us to, “…be able to scale those personalized learning paths—to millions of learners in the coming era.” I also predict that mobile devices and other mobile technologies will aid in distributing this new ‘personalized learning’ to the student.
Working with Adult Learners:
Being a life-long learner and involved, daily, in supporting faculty with delivery of their content to adult learners, the article Six Ways to Support Adult Online Learners, posted by classmate Carol Dykas, seemed interesting and the fact that bullet-pointed articles always attract me. This brief article holds wonderful reminders.
Kelly actually cites Natlaie Peeterse’s findings, “adult learners need to become more aware of how they learn.” Because adult learners come to ‘their learning’ with some prior knowledge adult learners, with some guidance, can become more self-aware and learn how-to learn better. These six tips offer great ideas that I can use when working with online faculty-to remind them to use these ideas with their students and I can use these ideas as I help teach faculty to become better online teachers- it’s a win-win.
- Build on previous learning
- Require critical reflection
- Provide structured feedback
- Use check-in quizzes
- Monitor students’ participation
- Pick up the phone
Concluding reflections & thoughts about what I have learned overall in the course.
As I reflect back over these very swift moving eight weeks, I feel I have learned much and confirmed much of what I already knew about online learning. Eight weeks ago my initial questions and hopes for this course were to examine current trends in the field and evaluate the impact these trends may have on the future of online education.
I feel especially better able to evaluate the effectiveness of various models of online education and more prepared to articulate the use of a variety of ‘disruptive technologies’ in online learning-and most specifically mobile learning. Many of my questions pertaining to the future, of online pedagogies, still go unanswered, which is normal-who can predict the future. However, having taken this MHE622 course, I feel more confident in articulating my ideas for the future of online education and learning.
References:
Kelly, R. (2012, March 2). Six Ways to Support Adult Online Learners. Faculty Focus. Retrieved December 8, 2014 from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/six-ways-to-support-adult-online-learners/
Smith, P. (2014, November 10). The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/coming-era-personalized-learning-paths
Wiseman, M. (2014. October 22). Greetings to My MHE622 Colleagues. [weblog comment]. Retrieved from: http://mwisemanmhe.com/greetings-to-my-mhe622-colleagues/
