Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Authentic tasks and assessments: the keys to effective e-learning in HE

Stuart picked this one cos of the "A" word in the title - but it was mainly about the other "A" word in the title - authentic. This was a bit of an overview of the pedagogy of e-learning, authenticity and educational research. It wasn't anything really new but Tom Reeves is a major name in this area, so if someone is going to explain this stuff, it might as well be him. Again slides will be online soon so I'll just pick out some random highlights.

Firstly, recommended reading - I don't think any of these will be news to you, you've probably read some or all of these, but just in case you haven't here they are again:
Friedman - The World is Flat
Bain - What the best college teachers do
Tallent-Runnels (2006) - Teaching Course Online: A Review of Research (In the Review of Ed Research - I think??)
Twenge - Generation Me
Cuban - Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom

I liked the fact he challenged the Howe and Strauss Net Gen stuff - it doesn't take much scratching of the surface, also the pyramid of learning some of you may be familiar with this (nothing significant in choosing this particular link just first available one I came across) - there is some significant debate about whether this model was just completely made up and the debate rages on - DF anyone?

National Survey of Student Engagement - staff expect students to learn 10-15 hrs in class with 25-30 hrs self study per week - not unreasonable? US students estimated their work time (20% <5hrs,>30hrs)

Lots about his work with Jan Herrington and Ron Oliver at http://www.authentictasks.uow.edu.au/

2 comments:

Susannah said...

You think we've most of those? Back to school for me - I've a bit of catching up to do :)

Andrew Middleton said...

Quite - the pyramid of learning is interesting and not particularly surprising. I'll have to find out more on this for starters.