Learning the right way?
What are the best methods of learning and teaching? Educators have discussed this question for centuries, if not for millenniums, without tangible results. Instructional methods have changed, from Socratic dialogues to the education of the cane, from drill and practice to group work and open learning. Still, if you ask three or four teachers/trainers today about the ideal form of teaching, you will receive three or four different replies.
These days, multimedia, the internet and eLearning have opened up an additional angle in this discussion. Is eLearning better than "traditional" education? For a while, in the mid and late 90s, many educational institutions and educators subscribed to this view. eLearning was THE hip way out of boring and dusty seminar- and classrooms, and into the entertaining, interactive, multi-media world of learning. A great way of saving time and money, reducing institutional budgets and trainer costs. As it seemed.
But the hype is long gone. A lot of educational institutions (public, private and corporate) have taken up eLearning activities - and dropped them again. They have discovered that eLearning is costly to produce, and takes a lot of effort, energy, support and strategic planning. eLearning does not work by itself - and it is certainly not an easy way to fix instructional problems.
Today, talk is mostly about combining methods in an instructionally sensible and useful way. Combining eLearning with face to face. Combining group work with individual support. Combining online with offline. Finding different ways to blend methods of learning together. And here we go: a new educational term was born. "Blended Learning". Blended Learning is about picking out the best of all worlds. It is about finding the most suitable forms of learning for a particular target group and topic area.
Today, we can be quite certain: in training and education, there are few "rights" and "wrongs", but there is a lot of "suitable" and "unsuitable". And it's the task of instructional designers and educational strategists to find out what's suitable where and when. So, let’s face it: there is no right way of learning (or teaching)! But today, we have more opportunities than ever to make learning interesting, fun, challenging, useful. eLearning is (only?) one of them.
These days, multimedia, the internet and eLearning have opened up an additional angle in this discussion. Is eLearning better than "traditional" education? For a while, in the mid and late 90s, many educational institutions and educators subscribed to this view. eLearning was THE hip way out of boring and dusty seminar- and classrooms, and into the entertaining, interactive, multi-media world of learning. A great way of saving time and money, reducing institutional budgets and trainer costs. As it seemed.
But the hype is long gone. A lot of educational institutions (public, private and corporate) have taken up eLearning activities - and dropped them again. They have discovered that eLearning is costly to produce, and takes a lot of effort, energy, support and strategic planning. eLearning does not work by itself - and it is certainly not an easy way to fix instructional problems.
Today, talk is mostly about combining methods in an instructionally sensible and useful way. Combining eLearning with face to face. Combining group work with individual support. Combining online with offline. Finding different ways to blend methods of learning together. And here we go: a new educational term was born. "Blended Learning". Blended Learning is about picking out the best of all worlds. It is about finding the most suitable forms of learning for a particular target group and topic area.
Today, we can be quite certain: in training and education, there are few "rights" and "wrongs", but there is a lot of "suitable" and "unsuitable". And it's the task of instructional designers and educational strategists to find out what's suitable where and when. So, let’s face it: there is no right way of learning (or teaching)! But today, we have more opportunities than ever to make learning interesting, fun, challenging, useful. eLearning is (only?) one of them.
Arndt Bubenzer, common sense
posted by eJournal editorial team @ 4/20/2006
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home