Self-reflections on engagement

I am participating to a course on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with the intent of finding new ways of motivating students to engage in their learning process. Here, for students I mean the more general category of people that commit to some training endeavour, including both academy and industry. As a matter of fact, a quite widespread problem with training is keeping students engaged in pursuing their studies. This is not a recent issue, it is enough to consider that many of the teaching and learning theories about learning styles have been investigated as a need of understanding why some students performed much better that others, regardless the topic and/or the teacher.

(Image found somewhere on the web)

I started reflecting more on my personal experiences as a "student", my driving motivations and faced difficulties affecting my engagement. One conclusion I can surely make is that the engagement has effectively worked each time I was the donkey in the middle of the figure, i.e., I was convinced the task was feasible. On the contrary, difficult times always emerged when the goal appeared as too far or too hard. So, probably an optimal way of teaching would be to propose short-term objectives the students consider as feasible, and on the base of those build-up the whole learning process. Then, an interesting question will be to find the sweet spot among people with different experiences, backgrounds, and also diverse levels of self-motivations in accomplishing a certain learning path.

Comments

Open Networked Learning: final reflections

When I registered for this course and expressed my expectations, I wrote that I was seeking for the holy grail of students' engagement. Moreover, in an internal workshop at my university (Mälardalen University, MDU), I told that my impression about ONL was about a meta-course, that is a course that teaches you about course design through a course. Now that we reached the end I can say that my expectations have been fulfilled, even though not in the way I was expecting. Indeed, I believe to have gotten at least a clearer picture and a plan about a possible way to engage more students in their learning process. In my opinion, the mean is learning communities: if I manage to create adequate learning communities and convince the students to actively contribute in their communities, this will on one hand engage everyone more in learning, and will also make course contents more interesting for the students. When it comes to the meta-course expectation, indeed ONL has been a meta-course

Could be Facebook a good tool for students' engagement?

Honestly, I have never taken into account Facebook as a potential tool for teaching and learning. I would never recommend to be friend with your students, and vice versa would never expect that students' would be friends with their teachers. Simply put, there are too many private aspects that it is good to keep separated between students and teachers. With my great surprise, I instead discovered a rich literature on the topic: it is at least 10 years that there exist empirical observations on the adoption and effects of Facebook in teaching and learning activities [1]. In particular, the typical way of working is to create groups for a course: with the right settings, group members are only students, possibly together with teachers, without the need of being friends on Facebook [2]. This indeed is a reasonable approach, that alleviates a lot of the doubts related to privacy, both for the teacher and the students: in fact, a group creates a kind of private island on Facebook where

Learning in communities: do our students know how it works?

After more than a month through the course on Open Networked Learning (ONL), the webinar on Learning Communities [1] and some of the suggested literature for the topic [2, 3] stimulated some reflections on courses organisation and current (frustrating) experiences with students and group assignments. These reflections start from my own experience with this ONL course: me, and with many of the members in my group (and so I guess it happened also for other groups), felt kind of disoriented with respect to the assignments and the way of working. We have been given some problem/context to work on, but apart from that we have been given freedom to self-organise and decide on what to concretely investigate. My personal opinion is that even ourselves, the teachers, are kind of unused to this type of advanced collaboration: not a simple cooperative work, where everyone is assigned a specific task, rather a real collaborative effort, where everyone contributes to the construction of group kno

Seeking the Holy Grail in learners' engagement

Search This Blog