Lessons learned from the 30th annual conference on Distance Teaching & Learning

Recently, I attended and presented a part of my work at the 30th annual conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in Madison, Wisconsin. I had a great time at the conference, met some great new colleagues, and heard some excellent talks. One of my favorite quick talks was a very brief (about 15 minute) remote Skype talk from Elliot Masie. Masie is very popular in the world of online learning, in particular corporate learning, and it is easy to see why. He is energetic, and brings lots of great ideas to his talks.

Quick aside, my first interaction with Masie and his consortium occurred while I was working as a summer intern for Humana back in 2009.  On a webinar, Masie spoke about how the elearning world had done themselves a huge disfavor by having a lot of early online learning work focus solely on things like Sarbanes-Oxley training or other certifications that simply needed a check box to show to management that a satisfactory completion rate had been achieved. Because of this, so much early online training was dull, boring, unimaginative, and lacking in engagement for employees.  He issued a call to designers of the consortium to think of ways to bring back learning that was innovative and engaging for corporate learners. To demonstrate his points, he paralleled video game designers. He was not calling for ‘gamification,’ ‘serious gaming,’ any of the other trendy words used to describe video game research, rather he used some principles of games and why they are fun, such as difficulty (no one wants to play a game that is super easy), failure (the ability to fail frequently and restart), and other concepts that I thought were very insightful and potentially very useful for instructional designers. He suggested that if instructional designers were to design learning materials that were difficult, engaging, and had the option to not be afraid of failure, that these trainings could be very useful.

Now back to Masie’s recent talk. His key point that he spoke about (and later blogged about here was a notion that he calls Learning Interruptus. His view of current learning is that as opposed to a prior view of Learning Completus, where the assumption is that a learner completes an assignment, class or project from start to finish. Yet now learning has become much more interrupted, or interruptus. People may join a class or MOOC just to glean bits of information without intending to finish the course.  Learners will get distracted by other online resources while working on projects. Learners can often hit pause on their learning and them come back to it later. Learners have many choices and if we can accommodate and encourage constant learning, we can achieve greater success in keeping the learners active. In Masie’s words, “the learner of the future is not a prisoner.”

Another session that provided some good insight, was Chris Dede’s session about developing massive technology-based models for use in education. In this session, Dede spoke about the highlights of a recent project/simulation that has been developed at Harvard. The simulation is a pond ecosystem that can be used by students to learn about pond ecosystems and can also be ramped up to be used by advanced college students with the right development. While I am not very familiar with existing research about simulations, the point that I thought was most interesting occurred during the question and answer. One skeptic in the audience raised the issue that this was just a single simulation environment, in this case a pond, and it may not be feasible for many universities to have the ability to develop such an environment only to be used for that project. Dede’s response was clear, that yes, you need some initial funding to build the environment, in the same way a movie company has to spend money to build a western town set for films. However, the thing that was exciting to Dede is that this environment can be scaled, modified and used in myriad ways for learning, not just a single study that was going on now, with minimal requirement of maintenance and resources. Continuing with the Western town set metaphor, he said, “Once you build a western town set, you can film 30 different movies. We are building sets to use for a variety of purposes in the future.” This idea touches on open access learning and other concepts that I find very intriguing.

Finally, I learned that Madison, Wisconsin is as beautiful in the summer as everyone said it was. I actually camped at a small campground just outside of town on Mendota Lake, and the conference center, Menona Terrace, had spectacular view of Menona Lake. Taqueria Guadalajara had some of the best Mexican food I have had in years (try the sopes!) and overall the weather was great. It is easy to see why so many people love Madison.

Thanks UW Madison for putting on an excellent conference and I look forward to coming back next year.

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Transformation of knowledge vs transfer of knowledge. Are they the same?

Q. What does transformation of knowledge mean to you? Is it equivalent to “transfer of knowledge”? How does Virtual Choir participation require the transformation of knowledge? Do you see participation in the project as automatically resulting in some kind of learning?

I don’t see transformation of knowledge and transfer of knowledge as the same thing.  Transfer deals with issues of how can learning from one context be applied to another context.  My future research studies seek to investigate this as I become more familiar with other examples of online informal learning and the complexities that go along with transfer of knowledge.  I am not very familiar with the term transformation of knowledge, but to me it would mean gaining knowledge that alters or transforms your existing schema.  Kind of a constructivist or sociocultural way of learning, where knowledge is not just some object to be gained, but is constructed.  The virtual choir was not designed to be an ‘instructional’ or ‘learning’ environment.  But learning is occurring. I don’t think that everyone would claim that they learned something by participating, but examples from my study have shown themes like, “I learned a new piece of music,” while other mentioned that they learned video recording techniques.  The learning was personal for each participant because of the flexibility of the environment, but certainly not automatic.