Group items tagged

Online learning should originate from everywhere on the globe, not just from the U.S. and other technologically advantaged countries.

The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs.

This can happen by building in apprenticeships, internships and real-world applications of online problem sets. Problem sets might be rooted in real-world dilemmas or comparative historical and cultural perspectives. (Examples might include: “Organizing Disaster Response and Relief for Hurricane Sandy” or “Women’s Rights, Rape, and Culture” or “Designing and Implementing Gun Control: A Global Perspective.”)

The artificial divisions of work, play and education cease to be relevant in the 21st century.

Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments. A wide variety of pedagogical approaches, learning tools, methods and practices should support students' diverse learning modes.

Experimentation should be an acknowledged affordance and benefit of online learning. Students should be able to try a course and drop it without incurring derogatory labels such as failure (for either the student or the institution offering the course).

Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning--in other words, encourage play. Play allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change--a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century. We must cultivate the imagination and the dispositions of questing, tinkering and connecting. We must remember that the best learning, above all, imparts the gift of curiosity, the wonder of accomplishment, and the passion to know and learn even more.

Learners within a global, digital commons have the right to work, network, and contribute to knowledge in public; to share their ideas and their learning in visible and connected ways if they so choose.

The best courses will be global in design and contribution, offering multiple and multinational perspectives.  

The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs.  

Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments.

Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning--in other words, encourage play.

The growing ability of technology to replace both unskilled and, increasingly, skilled labor is disrupting traditional thinking and practice about how best to prepare students for careers and is challenging the view that a college degree is a ticket to a middle-class existence.

Despite Bauerlein’s skepticism and a mountain of statistical doubt, today’s students can be inspired by technology to ponder, imagine, reflect, analyze, memorize, recite, and create—but only after we build a bridge between what they know about new tools and what we know about good teaching.

I . . . have heard quite enough about the 21st-century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in 3rd grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on.

Instead of recognizing that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who are intellectually adept—able to identify bias, manage huge volumes of information, persuade, create, and adapt—teachers and district technology leaders wrongly believe that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who know how to blog, use wikis, or create podcasts.

Verbs are the kinds of knowledge-driven, lifelong skills that teachers know matter: thinking critically, persuading peers, presenting information in an organized and convincing fashion. Nouns are the tools that students use to practice those skills.

In teaching, our focus needs to be on the verbs, which don’t change very much, and NOT on the nouns (i.e. the technologies) which change rapidly and which are only a means.

I've settled on five skills that I believe define the most successful individuals: The ability to communicate effectively, the ability to manage information, the ability to use the written word to persuade audiences, the ability to use images to persuade audiences, and the ability to solve problems collaboratively.