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April
23, 2003
Turning a traditional live classroom into a virtual — or
as we put it — wired
seminar is not a trivial task. Instructors are sometimes frustrated
that they cannot lecture, and we normally discourage PowerPoint
shows converted into webpages — that doesn't result in much
learning, either. So one has to find
new ways of engaging learners
separated
by distance and time. That's what we do.
The "we"
in the above paragraph consists of Frank Greenagel and Bill Woodall.
By getting to this website, you've probably spoken with one of
us, or
to someone who has. We're spending a lot of our time working
with organizations thinking about going online with their training.
To provide those organizations
with support and a rationale for our suggestions affecting the design
and operation of a virtual community of practice (which is, after
all,
what they are building), we felt we needed to put some of our
own resources and thinking online.
The site
was designed for seminar sponsors and developers, instructional designers,
and senior management in
training and development (in pretty much that order). We work with people
who want to emphasize the development of competencies. Our "space"
lies at the juncture of e-Learning and communities of practice, and our
emphasis is on the practical, not the theoretical or the speculative.
There'll be something new here every month, including pre-publication
of provocative white papers, so we invite you to join
us.
June
10, 2003
Our wired seminars did not grow out of a fascination with Internet
technologies, but from our experience and from research into learning
and learning communities. It has long been understood by most academics
that
the classroom
is simply
not very effective for teaching most students any real competencies,
whether those competencies lie in history, psychology, writing, or the
more precise disciplines of doing physics and math. The information transmission
model of instruction, exemplified by the lecture and, increasingly, the
PowerPoint show, has no theoretical basis nor any research to show it
is effective, but does have the virtue of tradition and scalability behind
it.
Recent research suggests
that perhaps as much as 80% of all workplace competencies are not learned
from formal instruction, but acquired gradually
by actually doing the work, conversing with co-workers, participating
in all the activities of the workplace — indeed, from shooting
the bull at the watercooler. This form of learning is called tacit
learning,
and most people don't realize they are acquiring it until they seem to
know stuff they never were taught. The closest models for a relatively
systematic approach to learning the tacit knowledge of a field are the
apprenticeship programs of the skilled trades, the internships of the
medical profession, and the lab assistantships in scientific research.
Guided Learning has developed an instructional design that borrows heavily
from those models, and uses the Internet to reach an audience widely
scattered and often unable to attend regular classes because of work
schedules. The communication and collaboration applications available
via the web provide enhanced ability to increase the interaction among
peers.
Our wired seminars are different from traditional seminars in several
respects:
• Organized around specific work-related
competencies, not topics
• Built upon work-related experiences and
activities, not lectures or readings
• Allow competencies to develop over an
extended period of time
• Seek to create and nurture learning communities
as an essential component
of the learning process,
just as practice and reinforcement are
• Often result in the emergence of a community
of practice, which provides
continuing interaction and support
that survives the end of the seminar
The tradeoff for
this approach is that our wired seminars are not scalable – there
is probably an upper limit of 30 participants per seminar, and the learning
cannot be crammed into an intensive, week-long “boot camp.” The
learning takes place largely asynchronously, but participants progress
through the activities of the apprenticeship as part of a learning cohort.
There is considerable individualization in the selection of projects
to work on, but also considerable structure to keep the cohort together.
The critical
skills in a wired seminar are those of the instructional designer
and the seminar moderator – the individual who participants
will interface with on a frequent basis by means of email, instant messaging,
threaded discussions and teleconferencing. That individual should have
solid web competencies as well as substantial subject matter expertise,
but is not an instructor in the traditional sense. Essentially all of
these instructional design principles might be applied with equal benefit
to a
live seminar or college classroom, but instructors have to accept that
their role is largely to create experiences and activities from which
participants
can construct
their own understanding and skills, and to coach and reinforce appropriate
participant behaviors. That's not a huge change for instructors in some
disciplines, but it's a cataclysmic one for most.
October
10, 2004
We've come to the realization that we've actually been spending more
time with community colleges than with for-profit seminar developers. Our
focus
has been at least as much on assisting college teachers to explore alternatives
to lecturing as on the use of web-based communication
and collaboration tools. Though the markets are different, there is a core competency
underlying both activities: success in getting teachers to really look
at
how
people learn.
We all know, of course, that not everyone learns
the
same way, and that different competencies are learned through different activities.
The challenge we put to every instructor might be stated thus: How would
you
teach this with your mouth shut? After the uproar dies down and the sputtering
objections are set aside for the moment, we get down to the serious business
of looking at the key determinants: prior knowledge, the competency,
what kind of practice you can provide, reinforcement, and measurement.
There is no single learning model we try to direct instructors towards
— we assist them in considering alternatives to lecturing and reading assignments
and in devising ways of evaluating learners' competencies.
January
24, 2009
MIT has
been using some elements of this approach to learning in its introductory
course on electricity and magnetism, according to an article in the
New
York Times. According
to that article
The
physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory
lecture
with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative
learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and
resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the
department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and
the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
There the emphasis is on collaboration and interactivity; our philosophy adds
to that as a central principle the idea of structuring learning around competencies
rather than topics.
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