Week #1 - Expectations from the course

Based on your experience as a learner, what do you think you will be able to get out of this course? And what ideas do you already have about the future of education?

Having been brought up in the primary, secondary and tertiary education of the 80s and 90s, and now delivering undergraduate programmes to a generation that is so much different from my environment, especially due to its constant connectivity with the outside world and peers, I think this course will help me open my mind to new ways of education that take advantage of, rather than shy away from or attempt to ignore, the skills of the new generation. Rather than trying to fit the old ways into the new, we need to explore new inroads into education from the ground up within the norms of the new society.

Indeed, I foresee the future of education as taking away the teachers from the centre of attraction and placing them by the side of the students as they explore, explain to each other, and discuss the learning they are to undertake. The social networks that students are members of, that they carry with them throughout their daily lives, including through lectures, are training them to be participatory and contributive at an equal level – and these skills need to be built upon and taken advantage of in providing a learning context that promotes individual efforts to contribute to the social knowledge of the group.

My previous learning experiences..

My learning experiences include my mandatory schooling learning, my tertiary education learning, my corporate training learning, my learning for undergraduate lecturing as well as my postgraduate learning. In each stage the material being learned was different, from generic topics to specific topics to hands-on topics but my way of learning has been mostly through reading and explaining what I have understood. I have to make a big effort to focus on someone explaining verbally but find it easier to understand when graphical explanations are used. I need to understand what I need to learn and will move away from learning by heart.

A particularly successful learning experience has been the recent postgraduate learning experience that involves weekly Skype tutorials wherein I can explain what I have understood and discuss the topic further with my tutor. Discussions tend to make me think further later and infer further learning from the discussion.

An unsuccessful learning experience was when I joined a course on Network Queuing Theory, being attracted by the Networking aspect, only to find that it consisted of about fifty mathematical theorems that need to be learnt by heart. This shut me away and I failed the subject by deliberately not sitting for the exam...