What do we want our learners to learn and how are they motivated? Having a universal design for learning insures that the focus is set on goals and meeting those goals should be accomplished through personalization. It’s important to develop clear goals and objectives that are tailored to students’ individual needs in order promote self-directed learners. Curriculum should be interesting for our students and should allow them to use as a foundation to build upon. The constructivist theory is one method that lends itself to foundational building. Constructivism builds learning from prior knowledge and the big idea is that learning is an active and constructive process. Students need to learn as they learn (Hien, 1991).

Let’s talk Lecture. 👩‍🏫

Is there still a need to lecture in a digital age or are we just creating passive learners? Let’s think about what kind of students we are teaching. Today’s student has never lived in a world without Internet. They want learning to be relevant to their goals and seek to find information on their own. So how should we teach these types of learners? I believe it’s not through hour long lectures. Learning should be active and organic. Students should be a part of the process and be able to create their own pathways to learning. I’m not implying that lecture should be completely thrown out of classroom but I do believe a transformation is needed. Lectures can be distributed in multiple ways and the approach can vary. It’s not just about a teacher standing in front of the class delivering information. Lectures can be blended, flipped or broken down into mini-lessons. The first step in providing an alternate lecture is securing a learning management system (LMS) . An LMS is a great tool to house instructor videos, articles, and assessments. Teachers can use the flipped approach to put out video lessons days before the class actually meets and use the in class time for deeper discussions. The blended learning model can be utilized to transport lecture in class to station rotation models using an LMS system and traditional face-to-face instruction. I believe that lectures should be conveyed in chunks using a variety of models. Perhaps we can create active learners instead of passive ones using these techniques.