Session 14—Learning Objects

To be honest, after reading first two articles of the assigned readings, I was still confused about the meaning of “learning object” and the purpose of discussing about it in this course. But after reading a couple more, I found that I always know what the “learning object” is, I just don’t know what it is called. Learning object can be anything used to help people learn something. It could be a picture, video, text, audio, module… anything! I especially LOVE Bonk’s article! I enjoyed reading all the concepts about learning objects in it and amazed that there are so many wonderful resources out there on the Web but I didn’t know at all. Now, I feel so grateful to be a teacher in this age that I could provide my students interesting lessons including resources of all sorts. With the assistance of learning objects, learning doesn’t have to be boring anymore! Meeting students’ different needs and learning styles become much easier than a decade ago. I think the point is “variety!”

Although it is easy to get learning objects on the Web through browsing and downloading, it is still difficult for teachers to first, come up with a lesson plan; second, put useful information from different resources together to present a meaningful lesson; third, provide guidance in a timely manner when needed. Some say that now we have these useful websites promoting self-learning, so we don’t need teachers anymore. I don’t agree with it! I think teachers become more important because they need to integrate all kinds of information into one lesson to make learning as effective as possible. I doubt that any learner would do so for his own learning. After all, there are too many resources to find the perfect ones, even teachers are struggling with them, let alone a individual learner.

Beside, I think that it is good to have so many resources out there, but sometimes it is hard to fit the outside resources into one’s own teaching context. (I don’t know if this is just because I didn’t search for the wonderful sites that Bonk recommended, this is just my own experience.) I can’t help wondering that when facing this kind of situation, should we change our context to use the good resources, or should we made our own learning objects to fit our context? Which is better? Which is more effective? More efficient?

I definitely will go checking those sites mentioned in the articles out! And will try to think the possibility of using the resources into my future teaching when reading them. I think before having any lesson plan in mind, it will be a great chance to see the resources with an open mind so that the exploration may create more possibilities for future instruction.

Session 13—Cognitive Flexibility Theory

I’m really glad that I could have a chance to really experience a CF project as a student. Although I had basic concepts from the readings of this week as well as last week; however, I was still not so sure about how to design a learning module based on this approach. After this experience, I realized how “cases” work in the module, and how the knowledge of a case could be applied to another related case.

In Jonassen et al.’s article, they talked about lots of instruction was oversimplified in order to teach beginners the basics, but the knowledge could not be used in the complex real-world situation. I cannot agree more about this “normal” phenomenon in language classrooms. After 20 years, when being asked in English, “How are you,” I can still hear kids in Taiwan answer confidently, “Fine, thank you, and you?” But how many American people say so? At least, from the very first day I was here, I have never heard it even once. The English textbook for beginners were oversimplified the greeting situation. That is why I didn’t know how to answer the questions of “What’s up?” and “What’s going on?” when just arriving here two years ago. Thus, I think learning language within a context is very important, for instance, students should learn vocabulary and grammar in the context of a conversation or a situation instead of reciting list of vocabulary or a list of sentence clause.

I really like this approach because it included so many cases in one project that students can gain lots of insights and/solutions from other people’s experiences. I think learning from other people is the fastest way to learn things. Besides, the way how students apply knowledge from A case to B case is exactly the way how people using their prior knowledge to deal with new problems in the real world. Students cannot only learn the subject matter from the course, but also how to solve real-world problems. Moreover, this approach encourages learners to find the information they need in different cases and/or different kinds of sources, which allows students to learn by doing as well as thinking. Through this approach, I believe that what they learned definitely not inert knowledge.

The biggest barrier of this approach, undoubtedly, is that teacher needs to find or create a huge amount of cases that are all interconnected for instruction. In addition, I think the explicit explanation of how to use the module is extremely important for this approach. Students may have never heard about this approach, so they feel lost easily when seeing the unfamiliar interface of the computer system. If there is no appropriate guidance of this module, you will lose students’ interests of the subject even you have great content and representative cases. But I think it takes time to make students be familiar with the module; however, it seems like there is always not enough time for teaching all course content.

It’s obvious from our activity for CF activity that it is possible to implement this approach online. I really think the document viewer is very very cool! But I have no idea where did it come from and how it works, I think this is my extra homework to figure it out.

Session 12—Case-Based Learning Methods and Case-Based Reasoning Environments

When I finished this week’s readings, I felt huge “flexibility” of this approach. Teachers can use cases as merely stories to tell students something they should know or as incentives to motivate students to find answers by themselves. The teachers can also design well-structured cases, ill-structured ones, or one represents anywhere between this two extremes, according to students’ abilities and needs. Moreover, they can decide to use this approach for the whole semester or just a part of a course. In my opinion, CBL is the most flexible approach so far in this course.

Because CBL includes so many theories that we have learned in ECI 517, I cannot help thinking it combines all those approaches advantages in it, such as allowing students to learn in an authentic context, which makes learning more engaging and more fun. Also, it also has the disadvantages of those theories such as huge workload for teachers to design a course. Besides, because of the characteristic of CBR is to help students to activate their prior experiences that similar to the problem in hand, the biggest challenge for me is to find ways to provide appropriate experiences when students don’t have any in their real lives. In my imagination, since this is the first time I’ve ever heard about this approach, I think I need to find a great amount of resources in different levels in order to meet different students’ understanding levels. Of course, I’m also thinking that if my students are old enough to conduct research by their own, I can shift this work to them. That way, not only they can learn more through the researching process, but also I can reduce my own work.

In addition, I really like CBR’s 4 REs and the idea of case library. I think if I could have my own case library for my courses, that would be awesome, but I feel a little bit pressure at the same time because it seems a lot of work. But you’ll never if you don’t try it out, so I think I’ll definitely give it a try in the near future. Like many context-based theories we have learned, I think many web tools can help design this approach. Maybe use simple web pages for case library and use multimedia can be used for story telling, maybe opposite! Since it’s flexible, I think I can be creative! ☺