0.1 Introduction

0.1 Introduction

How People Learn is a course about, well, how people learn. This fact means that, first and foremost, it is a course about people - different types of learners, all around the world, and their relationships to learning.

If we consider our course as a piece of fabric, woven together by many individual threads, then the topic of “How People Learn” at a global scale is both the warp and the weft of the course’s focus. While our globally interconnected society has made this topic worthy of study, it has simultaneously conspired to bring together a community of learning whose members’ journeys have taken them to HGSE from an incredibly diverse array of backgrounds. How People Learn is, of course, about these people, too, and how they learn - indeed, as individuals and as a community. The format of the course is a metaphor for the larger related field of education.

Indeed, in this courses’ woven metaphor, it is also the weavers who are the learners. The progenitors, managers, and ongoing providers of the course - the Harvard Teaching and Learning Lab - have arrived at the current design of the course via a long process of (what else?) learning. Implementing students’ ideas with learning design in mind, the TLL improves the course annually.

How People Learn was “born online,” meaning TLL never implemented it in an on-site format. This feature lent it a curious degree of continuity over the events of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, although it was also affected deeply by them. As the pandemic quickly made cross-geographic delivery and collaboration a necessity, students and staff alike struggled to adapt. The world continues to reel; we have only begun to respond. We were, and are, tasked with “building the raft as we are swimming”.

This community learned and bonded through a crisis; far from going to waste, the challenges also became opportunities to envision new possibilities throughout the field of education. In the end, we adapted and learned, as people always do, from one another. The story of HPL is the story of learners worldwide being more resilient together - as a community.