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Category: Academagogy

Learning outcomes vs learning opportunities

Learning outcomes vs learning opportunities

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“You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink”. This sums up my discomfort with the terminology “learning outcomes” that underpin much curriculum development. Sure, it is usually preceded by the wordy catch-all “on successful completion of this course students will…”, but there seems to be a hot potato of responsibility for achievement sitting just below the surface. In our arguably justifiable discomfort with the traditional concept of the dominance of didactic delivery we are in danger…

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Authentic tasks

Authentic tasks

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Using ‘real world’ datasets is a great way to engage students by providing them with an authentic element to their learning experience, as well as familiarizing them with their future environment. The AIHW website stands for “authoritative information and statistics to promote better health and wellbeing” and provides links to all sorts of health-related databases. Like all good government websites I suspect this will suffer from link rot even before the blog is published. The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is a partnership led by…

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Evidence-based practice

Evidence-based practice

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Annotated bibliographies are things of beauty for anyone undertaking scholarly works. The Science of Learning – brought to you by the Deans for Impact, this short fact-filled document provides not only a summary of recent (to 2015) research in cognitive science but also packages it around six key questions all educators will find useful. They even pooh pooh some common misconceptions about how students learn and think, including the oft-cited ‘students have different learning styles’ trope. Should you add a talking head…

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Active learning

Active learning

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This is an excellent, compelling talk (“Student Engagement: Integrating Active-Learning into Health Science Courses”) by Dr Patrick Brown from ​East Tennessee State University. The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative is a multi-year project at The University of British Columbia aimed at dramatically improving undergraduate science education. Their website is full of useful resources for developing learning activities. There are a particularly useful set of videos about evidence-based activities. Quizlet – provides free, online tools such as flashcards to help students with memorising terms or short answers….

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Sharpen up your job application

Sharpen up your job application

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Jobscan – With a vision of helping you “land more interviews and job offers than ever before”, Jobscan offers many services including a freebie comparison of your resume with the job description of your choice. Simply cut and paste the relevant text and Jobscan will return a report noting how well matched they are, and showing you the key phrases that would be picked up by Applicant Tracking Systems, used by some employers to sift through applications. Regardless of whether or…

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ePortfolios

ePortfolios

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ePortfolios with Google Apps – Helen Barrett’s extensive guide to using Google sites to create your own personal online ePortfolio. You can also make your LinkedIn page your professional online presence (although you are then restricted to their design and control), or create your own website – Weebly has some portfolio themes and intuitive drag & drop tools.

Role playing

Role playing

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Online technology facilitates asynchronous and anonymous role play, should that be desirable in an educational context. Project Enrol – lists examples of the use of role play in education.

Academagogical frameworks and models

Academagogical frameworks and models

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All the learning theories on the Aussie Educator site – makes this blog article redundant really! :/ And if that’s all too texty, check out this fabulously comprehensive AND interactive image from Richard Millwood. 5E Instructional Model (5Es) – consists of the following phases: engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation. Community of Inquiry – This model situates the educational experience within three essential elements – social, cognitive and teaching presence. It acknowledges that a group of learners sharing their perspectives brings each of them closer to consensus…

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Working with groups

Working with groups

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Group work can be the source of considerable angst for students if they perceive they are being let down by their teammates. SPARKPLUS – SPARKPLUS is a web-based self and peer assessment kit. It enables students to confidentially rate their own and their peers’ contributions to a team task or individual submissions and improve their judgment through benchmarking exercises. The WebPA project (a peer assessment tool developed at the Centre for Engineering and Design Education at Loughborough) attempts to address this inequity by…

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