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EducausE
r e v i e w
Jnry/Febrry 2008
If access to higher education is a nec-essary element in expanding economicprosperity and improving the quality oflife, then we need to address the problemof the growing global demand for educa-tion, as identified by Sir John Daniel.
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Compounding this challenge of demandfrom college-age students is the fact thatthe world is changing at an ever-fasterpace. Few of us today will have a fixed,single career; instead, we are likely tofollow a trajectory that encompassesmultiple careers. As we move from ca-reer to career, much of what we will needto know will not be what we learned inschool decades earlier. We are entering aworld in which we all will have to acquirenew knowledge and skills on an almostcontinuous basis.It is unlikely that sufficient resourceswill be available to build enough new campuses to meet the growing global de-mand for higher education—at least notthe sort of campuses that we have tradi-tionally built for colleges and universities.Nor is it likely that the current methods ofteaching and learning will suffice to pre-pare students for the lives that they willlead in the twenty-first century.
The Brewing Perfect Stormof Opportunity
Fortunately, various initiatives launchedover the past few years have createda series of building blocks that couldprovide the means for transforming theways in which we provide education andsupport learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by thegrowth and evolution of the Internet,which has created a global “platform”that has vastly expanded access to allsorts of resources, including formal andinformal educational materials. The In-ternet has also fostered a new culture ofsharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs. Arguably, the most visible impact ofthe Internet on education to date hasbeen the Open Educational Resources(OER) movement, which has providedfree access to a wide range of coursesand other educational materials toanyone who wants to use them. Themovement began in 2001 when the Wil-liam and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly fundedMIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initia-tive, which today provides open accessto undergraduate- and graduate-levelmaterials and modules from more than1,700 courses (covering virtually all ofMIT’s curriculum). MIT’s initiative hasinspired hundreds of other collegesand universities in the United Statesand abroad to join the movement andcontribute their own open educationalresources.
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The Internet has also beenused to provide students with directaccess to high-quality (and thereforescarce and expensive) tools like tele-scopes, scanning electron microscopes,and supercomputer simulation models,allowing students to engage personally in research.The latest evolution of the Internet,the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred theline between producers and consumersof content and has shifted attention fromaccess to information toward access toother people. New kinds of online re-sources—such as social networking sites,blogs, wikis, and virtual communities—have allowed people with common in-terests to meet, share ideas, and collabo-rate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting mul-tiple modes of learning.
Social Learning
The most profound impact of the Inter-net, an impact that has yet to be fully real-ized, is its ability to support and expandthe various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”?Perhaps the simplest way to explain thisconcept is to note that social learning isbased on the premise that our
understand-ing
of content is socially constructedthrough conversations about that con-tent and through grounded interactions,especially with others, around problemsor actions. The focus is not so much on
what
we are learning but on
how
we arelearning.
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Compelling evidence for the im-portance of social interaction to learn-ing comes from the landmark study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard GraduateSchool of Education, of students’ college/university experience. Light discoveredthat one of the strongest determinants ofstudents’ success in higher education—more important than the details of theirinstructors’ teaching styles—was theirability to form or participate in smallstudy groups. Students who studied ingroups, even only once a week, weremore engaged in their studies, were betterprepared for class, and learned signifi-cantly more than students who workedon their own.
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The emphasis on social learning standsin sharp contrast to the traditional Carte-sian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for overone hundred years. The Cartesian per-spective assumes that knowledge is a kindof substance and that pedagogy concernsthe best way to transfer this substance fromteachers to students. By contrast, instead ofstarting from the Cartesian premise of
“I think, therefore I am,”
and from the assump-tion that knowledge is something that istransferred to the student via various peda-gogical strategies, the social view of learn-ing says,
“We participate, therefore we are.”
This perspective shifts the focus ofour attention from the content of a sub-ject to the learning activities and humaninteractions around which that contentis situated. This perspective also helpsto explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp ofthe material by hearing the answers toquestions from fellow students, and per-haps most powerfully, can take on the roleof teacher to help other group membersbenefit from their understanding (one ofthe best ways to learn something is, afterall, to teach it to others).
The most profound impact of the Internet is its ability to support andexpand the various aspects of social learning.
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