Personal Learning Preference Revisited

Week 7

After reading the materials for this course, I believe that how I view myself as a learner has not changed.  If I were developing a course for myself I would consult the assumptions and apply the principles associated with Andragogy as described by Conlan, Grabowski and Smith in Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology.

The five assumptions about adult learners attributed to Malcolm Knowles are:

• ·      Independent self-concept
• ·      Accumulation of life experiences
• ·      Learning needs related to changing social role
• ·      Is problem-centered and interested in immediate application
• ·      Internally motivated

These assumptions are reflected in the principles to apply in designing adult education with the addition that adults should be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.  These principles allow adult learners to engage in learning as described by cognitive constructivist learning theory models.

In Learning Theories and Instruction, the instructional designer is given these directives for the “active application of ideas to problems“ where “the learner elaborates and interprets the given information.”

The designer is instructed to :

• ·      instruct the student on how to construct meaning, effectively monitor, evaluate, and update their constructions;
• ·      align and design experiences so that authentic, relevant contexts can be experienced.

An apprenticeship model would add, “modeling and coaching by experts, each experience building on the previous”

Ertmer and Newby in Behaviorism, Cognitivism: Comparing Critical Features From an Instructional Design Perspective describe the facilitation of learning or transfer in constructivist learning, “Transfer is facilitated by involvement in authentic tasks anchored in meaningful contexts.  The goal of instruction is to accurately portray tasks, not to define the structure of learning required.”

My learning styles being visual and independent, but not those of an isolationist, fits well into the wellspring of technological resources that facilitate adult constructivist learning. The Netports System describes the use of technology that supports this type of learning, my type of learning.  The following information came from an article in the British Journal of Technology, July 2007, by Shu-Ling Wangand Sunny S. J Lin:

The NetPorts system thus includes: (1) a bulletin board function, allowing students to post messages, questions, arguments, responses and requests for help from teachers or classmates and (2) a chat room, allowing for structured group discussions among cooperative learning teams. With regards to the latter, teachers are able to create additional chat rooms for the exclusive use of a spe-cific group of students.

In addition, the NetPorts system allows teachers to either present learning materials in HTML format or design their own scaffolding activities to aid students in making use of the appropriate cognitive strategies. Moreover, the system enables teachers to assign students or groups to create web-based portfolios. During our examination of system functionality, students were found to successfully plan, monitor, sort and store information in their web-based portfolios. Furthermore, students regularly reviewed their online portfolios, exhibiting the metacognition necessary for the self-assessment of their learning processes.

Finally, we added a peer-assessment module in order to overcome one of the major stumbling blocks to a successful execution of portfolio-centred learning: the teachers’ inability to spend sufficient time evaluating and providing quality feedback. Peer feed-back is a far easier and far less time-consuming practice than a rigorous teacher-centred feedback. In a previous study (Lin, Yang, Liu & Yuan, 2001), we found that high school- level computer programming students were capable of offering quality feedback sup- ported by high-level cognitive strategies.

Walden University runs on a similar scale through Sylvan Live, a technological medium for the education of adults.