More from Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks: Extending the classroom (eLearnspace) What is needed?
What is needed? We need to bring elements into the learning experience that allow for extension beyond classrooms…and integration with “real life”
We need to be able to “tap into” a means of staying current within our fields. Courses can’t serve this function when information is rapidly expanding.
We need to create a knowledge construct that is adaptive, self-sufficient, and permanent (at least until the learner not longer needs it).
And this:
In order for learning institutions to be relevant in an era of life-long learning, they must move past the concept of start/stop learning. Learning is fluid. It impacts other areas of work and life. It’s ongoing.
Courses are start/stop. As stated previously, a course is an artificial construct, erected at the start of the term, that assumes to provide learners with the information and knowledge they need…and is torn down twelve weeks later. A learner who has a knowledge need six months later doesn’t have access to the environment where he/she initially learned. After four years, the entire environment (i.e. the program) that awarded the degree is gone (inaccessible by the learner). A learner certainly still has the ability to contact Instructors after the program is finished, but the richness of the learning environment has largely faded. In this situation, not only the knowledge specific construct (course), but the entire ecology (program) is gone.
A better, more permanent, option is required.
I note that this is the same question that many of the papers at CPE addressed, the question of contexts for lifelong learning. Also: the picture presented in this quote of learning in time limited course structures is exactly what some people want. They want to be told exactly what to learn.
