Over the weekend, one of my colleagues posted a rant about MOOCs and critical thinking. And, largely, I think he was right. There’re several things we need, and MOOCs as they typically are constituted, aren’t going to deliver. As I talked about yesterday, I think we need a more refined pedagogy.
So the things we need, to me, are two things:
- meaningful learning, whereby we have individuals learning skills that are applicable in their lives, and
- meta-learning, or learning to learn, so that people can continue to develop their skills in the face of increasing change.
And I don’t think the typical ‘text on screen with a quiz’ that he was ranting about is going to do it. Even with hand-shot videos. (Though I disagree when he doesn’t like the word ‘engage’, as I obviously believe that we need engagement, but of both heart and mind, not just tarted up quizzes.) He wanted critical thinking skills, and I agree.
Hence the activity framework. Yes, it depends on your design skills, but when done right, focusing on having learners create products that resemble the outputs that they’ll need to generate in their lives (and this is strongly influenced by the story-centered curriculum/goal-based scenario work of Roger Schank) is fundamentally invoking the skills they need. And having them show the thinking behind it developing their ‘work out loud’ (“show your work”) skills that ideally will carry over.
Ideally, of course, they’re engaging with other learners, commenting on their thinking (so they internalize critiquing as part of their own self-improvement skill set) and even collaborating (as they’ll have to). And of course there are instructors involved to evaluate those critical skills.
As an aside, that’s why I have problems with AI. It’s not yet advanced enough yet, as far as I know, to practically be able to evaluate the underlying thinking and determine the best intervention. It may be great when we are there, but for now in this environment, people are better.
The other component is, of course, gradually handing off control of the learning design responsibility to the learners. They should start choosing what product, what reflection, what content, and ultimately what activity. This is part of developing their ability to take control of their learning as they go forward. And this means that we’ll have to be scrutable in our learning design, so they can look back, see how we’re choosing to design learning, so they can internalize that meta-level as well.
And we can largely use MOOC technologies (though we need to have sufficient mentors around, which has been a challenge with the ‘Massive’ part). The point though, is that we need curriculum design that focuses on meaningful skills, and then a pedagogical design that develops them and the associated learning skills. That’s what I think we should be trying to achieve. What am I missing?
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