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Independent practice in the online classroom is just as important as in the physical one. First and foremost, to confidently support independent practice, you must trust your students. Here are more ideas to help you make it work:
It can be challenging when students are disengaged from an online course. Making your presence felt, designing team projects, encouraging peer review and publishing students’ work are just four ways to stimulate online learner engagement.
It is easy to forget, amid the near mania associated with college admissions and acceptance, that many students do not have the aptitude or indeed funding to attend college, and will need to work directly after 12th grade. It is rewarding to know that when focusing on developing workplace skills like teamwork and problem solving we are not only creating employees, but ultimately well-rounded adults.
So you’ve decided to make the leap and convert your face-to-face (F2F) class into an online course. A daunting job, even for the most tech-literate and motivated of teachers. Breaking down this project into smaller steps, and following each one with patience and tenacity will yield a great e-learning course, which will stand you — and your students — in good stead for many semesters to come.
“Self-directed learning” is a major catch-phrase of 21st Century educationalists, and undeniably a critical skill in the labor markets of the future. However, the classroom culture we have created and inherited is not designed around self-direction, and tends more towards compliant consumption. But there are ways to support self-directed learning in the classroom.
Student assessment should be based not only on their knowledge (which could be acquired through rote learning and bound to be forgotten), but also on the skills students learn and how they apply what they know in the context of practical tasks. The role of rubrics in performance-based education is to help teachers create assessment that is both student-centered and standards driven.
Lauded as the 21st century’s “critical skills”, communication, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity have become buzzwords among educators, and it is quite easy to see why. Educators have turned their focus not only to imparting facts to their students, but also to developing the critical intellectual skills that denote and also inspire deeper more productive learning, self-motivation and other such values.
The PROs and CONs of competency-based education is pretty balanced. Making the transition to this kind of approach to education raises quite some challenges to all major stakeholders. But the advantages that promise to come along are also luring. While some are afraid of the many things that can go wrong, others are convinced that competency-based education will eventually become the norm.
Going to college and getting a degree seems almost impossible for students who also have work and family commitments. Competency-based education puts more control in these students’ hands by moving away from the time-to-class standard measurement of learning, focusing on the actual mastery of new skills and allowing an incredible degree of flexibility.
In order to succeed in deep learning, students have to understand the class material and they have to know why it is important for them to learn all the information and how it will aid them later on in their lives and their careers. To further improve this, special attention needs to be paid both to the content itself and the teaching method.
