COTE NOTE
The Center for Online Teaching Excellence
What I know about Student-Determined Learning Environments Bill Pelz Bill Pelz is Professor of Psychology at Herkimer College / State University of New York. He joined the faculty in August of 1968, the second year the college was in operation. In addition to 46 years of full time teaching, Professor Pelz has served as Chair of the Humanities and Social Science Division, Coordinator of the Herkimer College Internet Academy, and currently as Instructional Designer for Online Learning. As the lead faculty trainer for the SUNY Learning Network from 1999 until 2010, Bill facilitated the development of over 2500 fully asynchronous college courses. In 1994 he was presented with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 2003 the Sloan-C Award for Excellence in Online Teaching, in 2006 the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and he was named a Sloan Consortium Fellow in 2013 and a SUNY COTE fellow in 2014. Bill has published an assortment of scholarly and academic articles, most recently focused on the area of student and faculty satisfaction with asynchronous teaching and learning. His current research interest is in isolating the pedagogical factors which influence student achievement in virtual learning environments. Since 1999 Bill’s full-time teaching responsibility has been entirely online, and he just completed a project to develop 8 online Advanced Placement courses for high school students under a Dept. of Education Race to the Top funded grant.
One such strategy – I call it “ “Student-Led Discussions” - has at its core a simple and logical three step approach to take advantage of each adult student’s propensity to pull learning from the environment: read / question / discuss.
I would like to share what I know about Student-Determined Learning Environments I would like to share the impact of one’s philosophy of education on course design and instruction. Learning is teacher-centered when the teacher acts like a pitcher and “pours” or pushes knowledge into her or his students (the glasses). I think this still happens in some college and university classrooms a lot, and I see it as pretty ineffective for many adult learners most of the time. Online classes in which the majority of the content is provided by the professor are the asynchronous close cousin to this classroom approach.
What is it Strategies for facilitating student-contributed content and learner-determined learning - in a word: heutagogy.
How it works Malcolm Knowles suggested back in the ‘70’s that adults learn best when they are selfdirected. Adult learning apparently thrives as a pull process – where the learner obtains relevant knowledge from the environment experientially. This is a student-centered philosophy. To the extent possible, shouldn’t professors offering online classes for adult learners adopt androgogically appropriate strategies to maximize their student’s learning opportunities?
What I did One such strategy – I call it “Student-Led Discussions” - has at its core a simple and logical three step approach to take advantage of each adult student’s propensity to pull learning from the environment: read / question / discuss. The ‘radical’ feature is that the students play the major role in deciding what to read, which questions to ask and answer, and then they, not the professor, facilitate the discussions.
How I did it Design and implement heutagogical learning activities such as: student-led discussion forums, metacognitive reflections, student-contributed learning content, collaborative research reports...
Why I did it “Education has traditionally been seen as a pedagogic relationship between the teacher and the learner. It was always the teacher who decided what the learner needed to know, and indeed, how the knowledge and skills should be taught. In the past thirty years or so there has been quite a revolution in education through research into how people learn, and resulting from that, further work on how teaching could and should be provided. While andragogy (Knowles, 1970) provided many useful approaches for improving educational methodology, and indeed has been accepted almost universally, it still has connotations
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The Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence
October 15, 2014 • Volume 2 • Issue 2