I found out that my dad was not a great teacher the hard way: through painful friction burns on my backside.
This requires context, because I can see this first sentence being grossly misinterpreted. The story involves my first day skiing, not any kind of corporal punishment.
I was 17, and our high school class had a ski trip planned. Never having skied before, I asked my dad to take me skiing ahead of time so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of my friends. He agreed, so off we went. We started on the bunny hill, and my dad told me to watch what he did as he went down the hill. He kept his skis parallel and swooshed back and forth effortlessly down the slope. I attempted to imitate him and immediately fell on my butt.
I tried again. I fell again. I got five feet farther, then fell again. Within about half an hour, I had fallen so many times that I had literal burns on my backside in spite of the fact that I was wearing four layers of clothing. My dad’s instructions were not working. I was frustrated with myself, frustrated with my dad, and ready to pack it in for the day. Maybe I would pretend to be sick instead of going skiing with my class.
Then I saw a bunch of kids — maybe six or seven years old — whipping down the mountain under the guidance of a professional ski instructor. They didn’t have their skis parallel — they were pointed inward at an angle. I thought to myself, “I’m going to try that.” So, ignoring my dad’s instructions, I put my skis at a snowplow angle, leaned back and forth, and made it all the way down the hill on my next attempt. By the end of the day, I was successfully skiing much more difficult runs and falling far less often.
The lesson I learned that day? “Never listen to your father.” No, I’m kidding. The lesson I learned that day was this:
Learning is complex, so as teachers, we need to adapt to the learner, not force the learner to adapt to us.
I think this has profound implications for how we structure digital learning experiences, particularly given some of the trends that we are seeing in our students. Here are a couple of things that are concerning to me as an educator:
- For several decades, reading scores have been declining in the United States. Students are reading less for pleasure, and 21% of American adults are functionally illiterate.
- At the same time, attention spans are decreasing, with attention span for specific tasks averaging about 47 seconds.
- Gen Z is the first generation since we began measuring such things to score lower on IQ tests than their parents’ generation, with some hypothesizing that screens and access to fragmented information may be a cause of this decline.
As we build our digital curriculum, we want to be aware of these realities. How can we best construct online courses for students with potentially low literacy and limited attention spans? How can we build literacy skills as students are learning without putting these students at a disadvantage? How can we be sure that we are part of the solution, not exacerbating the problem, when it comes to these trends?
Delivery Method
Every day at StudyForge, our curriculum team and instructional designers are making choices about how to deliver content. We have a number of tools in our arsenal, so we need to constantly ask questions about what the most effective tool will be for a particular skill or topic that we are trying to teach. This will vary from subject to subject and from topic to topic, but there are a number of overarching questions we need to ask ourselves as we make these choices:
- What is the most effective way to deliver this particular topic: in a video, a reading, a real-world experience, an interactive online experience, a game, or directed research?
- As educators, should we be forcing students to read more so that their literacy skills will improve, or should we, recognizing gaps in literacy, present information in other ways so that low literacy does not get in the way of knowledge acquisition in other areas?
- As educators, should we cater to low attention spans by keeping everything short and sweet, or should we be training students to have longer attention spans by requiring more of them?
Should we force students to keep their skis parallel or allow them to snowplow?
Like the answer to most good questions, I am convinced that the answer is, “It depends.” Or, maybe more precisely, “Both.” Online courses need multimedia content with multiple supports in place so that students can learn in ways that fit best for them.
What the Research Says About Multi-Modal Delivery
I recently saw an advertisement for credit recovery courses that boasted that they were all text-based, helping students who are doing their courses to develop their reading and comprehension skills. They contrasted this approach with passive learning that is done through videos. While I admire the sentiment and the desire to improve literacy skills, does the research back up this approach?
Actually, no. According to Richard E. Mayer’s research, people can achieve deeper learning when they learn from words and pictures than they can with words alone. Explanatory diagrams integrated into text helped people in various studies to improve retention and knowledge acquisition. In other words, if students can both read and see information, they learn better than if they just read information. The key to multimedia learning, though, is that images are explanative rather than decorative. An image of a leaf does not aid learning as much as an illustration that explains how a leaf is structured at a cellular level.
On the other hand, a recent MIT study showed that students who watched a video lecture did not score any differently than students who just read the same information along with diagrams. Students who were learning in their preferred style did better than those who did not, but the study did not show improved learning from either medium. Lecture videos and blogs with illustrated diagrams can be equally effective.
Animated videos are effective, but it is important to have images and narration that happen at the same time and correspond to each other. In other words, avoid having the narrator say one thing and having on-screen text say something different.
Also, active learning is preferable to passive learning. In other words, students need to do something while they are learning, not just consume information, in order to retain and integrate knowledge. The MIT study mentioned earlier showed that notetaking did help students in both the video lecture and illustrated blog test groups. Further, according to a study done by Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, repetition using active learning methods — such as e-learning modules with educational questions or hands-on experiments — leads to better information retention than passive learning methods without repetition.
Therefore, a brief review of the research shows that:
- Reading alone is less effective than reading accompanied by illustrations.
- Animated videos are more effective than reading alone.
- Video recordings of traditional lectures are about as effective as delivering the same content using an article with diagrams.
- Active learning is more effective than passive learning, regardless of the medium
- Repetition is key to long-term retention.
In summary, the way we teach online matters, so just throwing a bunch of text onto a web page and telling kids to read it is like telling a new skier to keep their skis parallel. Our own research and experience at StudyForge has backed this up, leading us to be very intentional about how we craft our instructional videos.
Information Acquisition VS. Knowledge Construction
An important follow-up question that we need to ask is this: How can we make sure our online pedagogy is centered around knowledge construction, not information acquisition? If our students are memorizing facts through rote learning, they are engaging in information acquisition; if they are learning to make sense of the world and engage with it, they are engaged in knowledge construction. Active learning leads to knowledge construction. Mayer says, “When people engage in deep learning, they work actively to make sense of the presented material — an approach that is inconsistent with the passive learner portrayed in the information acquisition view.”
What Richard E. Mayer recommends is a learner-centered approach. He says, in essence, that if we build an educational technology framework and then expect students to adapt to it, that will not work as well as if we take into account how people actually learn. He recommends asking, “How can I use this technology to support and enhance human learning?” The technology, he says, “must be adjusted to fit the needs of the learner,” not the other way around.
Use the technology to help students snow plow so that less of them will fall on their backsides.
Implications For Online Learning
These research findings should help to inform how we construct our online courses. Creating online pedagogy is difficult, but if we want students to acquire knowledge, not simply memorize information, we need to think carefully about our instructional design.
- A wall of text will not be as effective as text with relevant, explanatory illustrations.
- While most students may prefer videos, some do prefer readings, so a video-based course that provides readings, transcripts, or closed-captioning, can help both groups.
- Interactives, games, and real-world experiences are preferable to passive learning.
- Providing students with pencil-and-paper note-taking aids can improve retention.
- Repetition matters, so build courses in a way that allow students to access information multiple times and in multiple ways.
- Different subject areas (STEM, humanities) will require different types of pedagogy, so we need to be willing to adapt our methods depending on what we are trying to teach.
Conclusion
Learning is hard work. If we make things harder for students by creating tools that are not conducive to learning, it will be like trying to send them down the bunny hill with parallel skis: Some of them might be successful, but some will fall on their backsides multiple times, and when they do, they might just give up.
As online teachers and course designers, it is important to be student-centered and thoughtful when designing lessons. We want to make sure we take into account actual student needs, not our own memories of what we needed when we were in school. Students today might need something completely different than we did when we were their age.
If we are able to do this well, who knows? Maybe their successful trip down the metaphorical bunny hill will lead them to become the lifelong learners we all want them to be.
About the Author
Brian Oger, B.A., MDiv
Director of StudyForge
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