WomensLearningStudio

While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.

three-quarters of women use online communities to stay up to date with friends and family, and 68% use them to “connect with others like me.”

Women are online solving real-life issues.

They see the lecture, at its best, as a critical, thought-provoking discourse in which a seasoned expert shares knowledge, experience and insight3

1) Lectures provide focus and emphasis

2) Multimodality exposure reinforces learning

"The concept is simple enough - a lecturer stands in front of an often large group of students and delivers a monologue on his or her specialist topic. "Students take notes and then at some later point there is an examination, during which the students will try to recreate the lecturer's approach to the subject. If all of that works, the student gets a degree."

Lectures are not simple stand-alone options

They must be combined with small group classes such as seminars, tutorials, lab-based activities as these are often the best way for students to learn. Small group activities are much more resource-intensive than lectures, so universities need to increase their commitment and current levels of investment in staffing and teaching-related infrastructure to deliver more of these."

Key Findings of Study

rethink

Faculty are learning to make courses more active by seeding them with questions, ask-your-neighbor discussions and instant surveys.

“active learning.” Students are working experiments, solving problems, answering questions — or at least registering an opinion on an interactive “smartboard” with an electronic clicker.

Of course, lectures will only get you so far, and individual teaching by ‘apprenticeship’ supported by self-directed study remain necessary for learning specialized and high level skills.

In fact, the lecture-dominated course runs completely counter to what we know about the importance of formative assessment, high-level questioning and discussion, differentiation, and attention to metacognition – all at the highest levels of effect size in Hattie’s research.

If the goal is to help learners make meaning of and transfer content in the future, then they have to be coached in how to do so. Coaches lecture, of course. But for far briefer periods and not for most of the course.

This paper is so important because it combines 225 individual research studies through a technique called meta-analysis.

active approaches privilege “what the student does”. Courses built around active learning require students to spend class time engaged in meaningful tasks that lead to learning. These tasks might be online or face-to-face; solo or in a group; theoretical or applied. Most of our popular learning and teaching buzzwords at the moment are active approaches: peer instruction, problem-based learning, and flipping the classroom are all focused on students spending precious class time doing, not listening.