"Intellectual skills, in contrast, have to do with a person's ways of reasoning, hypothesizing, exploring, understanding, and, in general, making sense of the world. Every child is, by nature, an intellectual being--a curious, sense-making person, who is continuously seeking to understand his or her physical and social environments. Each child is born with such skills and develops them further, in his or her own ways, through observing, exploring, playing, and questioning. Attempts to teach intellectual skills directly inevitably fail, because each child must develop them in his or her own way, through his or her own self-initiated activities. But adults can influence that development through the environments they provide. "
"Teaching at the university level is not a practice of communicating or transferring information but awakening in students a desire to think by revealing to them the questionability of things."
Participants overwhelmingly found smaller and more focused professional development opportunities were much more helpful than those offered on a broad level.
professional development sessions offered at the university level, while well intentioned, did not allow for tailoring to their specific or individual needs. The sessions were often too generic and provided too much information and often did not address the questions they had about content and structure.
ven more valuable than organized training sessions were informal small-group or one-on-one tutoring or mentoring sessions between inexperienced and experienced online instructors.
The general consensus was professional development and support should be offered through a variety of different channels.
participants agreed that professional development should focus on curriculum development and the pedagogy of online teaching, in addition to technology tools.
the development of informal networks and contacts helped participants learn to teach online, and also to continually improve their online teaching.
Opportunities for self-directed learning should be made available to instructors, as well.
Interesting idea . . . with some repercussions.
"Courses are bogus. You don't go to MIT for the courses (and every course that MIT teaches is online anyway). You go to MIT so that you can learn how learn stuff that they haven't yet started a class for.
"
Quoting Mr. Russell from the introduction to his book,
"These studies tell me that there is nothing inherent in the technologies that elicits improvements in learning. Having said that, let me reassure you that difference in outcomes can be made more positive by adapting the content to the technology. That is, in going through the process of redesigning a course to adapt the content to the technology, it can be improved."
This idea is reflected in the history of the No Significant Difference literature. Over the last 50 years, the question for media comparison studies (MCS) has evolved from, "Can students learn at a distance?" to "What is the effect of distance delivery on student outcomes?" Over the years, especially since the internet revolution, the conviction that distance delivery is necessarily inferior to face to face instruction has faded a bit. As we accept that it is not the technology itself, but the application of technology, that has the potential to affect learning, it is our hope that future research will strive to identify the instructional methods that best utilize technology attributes to improve student outcomes.
"Hey there! You've stumbled upon the What If Machine where anything is possible. Click on a particular topic and start wondering about anything and everything with our what-if-machine.
Disney"
"Think of yourself as someone who sells aspirin. And realize that the best customer for your aspirin is someone who is in pain. Not a lot of pain. Not a migraine. Just a little.
Piaget called that pain "disequilibrium." Neo-Piagetians call it "cognitive conflict." Guershon Harel calls it "intellectual need." I'm calling it a headache. I'm obviously not originating this idea but I'd like to advance it some more.
One of the worst things you can do is force people who don't feel pain to take your aspirin. They may oblige you if you have some particular kind of authority in their lives but that aspirin will feel pointless. It'll undermine their respect for medicine in general."
"Traditional courses have long focused on tools and techniques for the presentation of content. Traditional concerns from faculty focused on covering the material, getting through the book and meeting expectations so that faculty in other courses won't muse and wonder, "Didn't you learn these concepts from faculty X?" And "Didn't you study the work and contributions of ____ (Fill in your favorite who)"
A major drawback with designing for content as a priority is that it focuses attention on what the faculty member is doing, thinking and talking about and not on the interaction and engagement of students with the core concepts and skills of a course. The new focus on learners encourages a focus on learners as a priority. The new focus on the learner is to develop a habit of asking, what is going on inside the learner's head? How much of the content is being integrated into their knowledge base? How much of the content and the tools can he/she actually use? What are students thinking and how did they arrive at their respective positions?
Additionally, we are seeing a shift to looking at the student no only as an individual, but as an individual within the learning community. Other questions that we are now considering include: How is the learner supporting the community of learners and contributing to the overall growth of the group?
"
A Webquest is an online activity planned for the student to explore/investigate/synthesize multiple sources of information. Students are provided with a scenario or problem, and are given links to websites where they have to search for information to answer questions or complete a task. This is a great activity for online classes. I have used a webquest in an online course about veteran health care. The students were given a scenario about a homeless veteran they cared for in a clinic setting in their personal hometown. They had to research homelessness, the services offered in their home town, and the disease processes of their veteran. They had to develop either a speech to present the issue at a town hall meeting, develop a proposal to supply a service that was needed by the veteran or write an op-ed piece for their hometown newspaper.