@lemurph me too!!!!!!! #mscedc
— Eli's inane rambling (@Eli_App_D) March 13, 2017
Helen’s tweet about the lecture this week raised a smile as I was feeling just as excited abut the opportunity to participate in a lecture. Even though I know there is a raging debate about the benefits and drawbacks of our lecture based education system and how effective it may be, I thrive when there is an opportunity to listen instead of reading. Something that there has not been a lot of opportunities for in the ODL offerings I’ve experienced and so I was gleeful.
I wondered if Helen’s joy at a lecture was because it felt more like being an on-campus student and therefore a stronger connection to our assumptions about what it would be like to study at university, or if her joy was because like me she found listening or watching a better tool for her learning.
Whether or not you think learning styles are a real thing (which is a whole different educational conversation), people do have different strengths and weaknesses, different habits and different abilities. Reading and writing are such core values of the education system that they are the backbone of almost every course.
I raise this as an opportunity, with my classmates studying Digital Education with the intention of moving into a career in an educational setting, or indeed who already work in an individual setting – a chance to ask you to think about your course design and how it brings out the best in your students and gives them the best opportunity to learn and I wonder, how will a student with reading difficulties fair in your course? Is there an opportunity to use digital tools in a way that flips traditional teaching on its head, a way to level the opportunity to for all the student on your course?
If you were designing a new course for the Digital Education programme, how would you do it? What tools would you use? What would you keep from your experiences and what would you change?
Just some random food for thought.
‘I thrive when there is an opportunity to listen instead of reading. Something that there has not been a lot of opportunities for in the ODL offerings I’ve experienced and so I was gleeful.’
This is an interesting point. I think there has been a bit of a wholesale rejection of the lecture, especially amongst ‘online’ advocates. This was one of the reasons behind wanting to add video introductions to each week of this course. There is definitely productive things about listening (and video lectures), I say, and who says we can’t concentrate for long periods! 🙂
‘our assumptions about what it would be like to study at university, or if her joy was because like me she found listening or watching a better tool for her learning.’
This is an important distinction I think – video lectures are also about experiencing something of campus ‘space’ (and life).
‘how will a student with reading difficulties fair in your course? ‘
Yes, this is a really important one, but also really difficult! I think we are able to balance some of the less formal aspects of this course by the very fact of having academic readings (and sometimes some quite dense ones). It is really difficult to get away from writing in academia, especially at this level – we try to do that with some of the things in this course, but it is still very much expected that we engage with literature. Perhaps more accessibility tools for reading would be one way forward.