Education Week –
The shift from print to digital is a profound transition in how human beings learn, it is more significant than the development of the printing press and its benefits are spreading much more quickly. Like the printing press six centuries ago, this transition is transforming formal education and spreading informal learning opportunities.
Digital learning is powering seven benefits that are changing the opportunity set for teachers. There are three additional benefits that are proving to be game changers for educators.
1. Personalized learning. The opportunity to help every student learn at the best pace and path for them is the most important benefit of digital learning. Hundreds of next generation schools are prototyping the benefits of customization.
A diverse group of 28 practitioners, advocates, and business and union leaders recently came together to reimagine education given the new opportunity of digital learning. They noted that personalized, relevant and contextualized learning can increasingly be tailored based on the learner’s own passions, strengths, needs, family, culture, and community.
One on one tutoring is a good example of personalized learning, but it is expensive. The shift to digital learning can approximate the benefits of tutoring while freeing up time for teachers to address individual and small group needs.
The opportunity to customize learning sequences for each student will make education more productive. Special needs will be more quickly diagnosed, learning gaps will be addressed, and progress will be accelerated.
2. Expanded learning opportunities. Digital learning is extending learning opportunities worldwide. Education Reimagined celebrates open-walled learning and acknowledges that, “learning happens at many times and in many places and intentionally leverages its expansive nature in the learner’s development of competencies. learners with authentic, rich, and diverse learning opportunities.”
Access to full and part-time online learning means that every student, state policy permitting, has access to many world languages, college preparatory curriculum, and advanced studies. It is remarkable that thousands of university courses by the best professors are available for free to anyone with a broadband connection.
3. High engagement learning. The shift to digital can boost student motivation. Anyone who has witnessed the engagement of game-based learning can appreciate the potential to create learning experiences that boost persistence.
Kristen DiCerbo , the lead at Pearson’s Center for Learning Science & Technology, is similarly passionate about the many possibilities that games offer education – better engagement, invisible assessment, deep learning,
High agency learning recognizes learners as active participants in their own learning and engages them in the design of their experiences and the realization of their learning outcomes in ways appropriate for their developmental level. Evidence that encouraging student agency will produce better learning outcomes is central to Most Likely to Succeed: A Film About What School Could Be.
In Getting Smart (2011), I argued that customization would lead to productivity (more learning per hour) and improved motivation would lead to more learning time each day and across each year. Next generation schools appear to be bearing out these predictions.
4. Competency-based learning. Students show what they know and progress based on demonstrated mastery. Competency-based learning is possible in paper and pencil (I saw it inChugach Alaska in 1999) but it is hard to monitor and manage an individual progress model at scale.
Flex blends support individual progress. Dynamic grouping, workshops, and project-based learning can add lots of collaborative learning to an individual progress model.
Because competency-based learning changes everything about school, the transition from age cohorts to individual progress models will take longer, this is a generational shift.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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