Experiential Learning and 21st Century Skill Development
There is a lot of buzz these days about “21st Century Skills” and the need to redefine the goals of education. An important part of this discussion involves the tools we use to provide students with the right information, at the right time and in a format that will help them to be successful in the world in which we live.
On February 13th, President Obama offered an $8 billion proposal to encourage colleges and businesses to work together to train 2 million workers in high-growth industries. The initiative’s goal is to bend the education to the student rather than the other way around. It will depend on a mix of traditional education along with hands on experience.
It’s common sense that experience is where the rubber meets the road in turning information into a usable skill. The Community College Initiative relies heavily on partnerships with businesses that will allow students to get this experience ‘baked in’ as part of their education.
For all the rampant unemployment among the young, there are jobs in specific segments that the President noted such as Healthcare, Information Technology (especially Cyber Security) and others. But every program of this type has limitations. There can be no guarantee that every student can be served or that the proper number of partnerships with business can be arranged to provide the important experiential element.
We must create scalable degree and certificate programs with multi-modal approaches to learning that allow everyone to get information in the way that is most effective for them. And we must make sure they get the hands on experience that burnishes the lesson into their minds in an applicable, real world fashion.
Traditionally, a student is educated and graduated. Through a mix of grit, determination and connections they or their family may have, they land an entry level job and begin acquiring training and experience in hopes of advancing within that company or moving on to better jobs elsewhere as their skills, experience and judgment become such that they are a high performing member of the workforce.
Between today’s economic pressures to reduce unemployment and be more competitive in the international markets, experiential learning offers a chance to enrich the student experience and shorten the time to that end goal of being a high performing individual.
Toolwire’s products such as Scenarios and Toolwire Learnscapes, which put students in the middle of real life situations while teaching and assessing performance, are at the very confluence of 21st Century Learning and the goals of the Community College Initiative.
It is the digital element of experiential learning solutions that allow us not only to scale them efficiently but also to add-on and improve them in this fast moving world where whole industries reinvent themselves every few years.
All of the tools and materials are available, and they’re getting better all the time. There is a whole workforce out there that depends on educators, industry and government agencies to use them imaginatively and to get this one right.
Immersive Experiential Learning: It’s Like Riding a Bike
Do you remember your first bicycle? I do, it was brown with a banana seat and a customized license plate on the back with my name. I loved that bike – LOVED it – not because it was the greatest bike on my street or because of its gleaming brown coat of paint. I loved that bike because it was a “two-wheeler”. That’s right, this was my graduation bike – no more training wheels for me and that felt AWESOME!
OK, full disclosure, it didn’t feel “awesome” at first. In fact, there were moments of terror, mixed with abject panic, with a little humiliation thrown in for good measure. After a lot of practice and several Power Ranger bandages for my skinned knees, however, I mastered how to ride my bike and this was an amazing feeling.
Learning by Doing
There is a valuable takeaway in this story that is closely related to my perspective on education and learning.
In mastering my two-wheeler, I had to face my fears and take action. I had to risk pain and potential humiliation from the older kids on my street and in order to get on that bike and ride. Before Nike ever coined the phrase “Just Do It!”, I innately knew this “learning by doing” approach was what I needed in order to be successful.
After all, everyone knows that one can’t learn to ride by reading a book. To LEARN I had to take action, I had to put the principles of motion and physics into practice and test the law of gravity a few times along the way.
Let’s apply this concept of “learning by doing” to a Higher Education setting. Some classes do a great job of preparing students to translate the lessons of the classroom into the real world, while other fall woefully short. How do we close the gap between those that succeed and those that don’t? Well, I think the answer is back there in the dust of the 1970’s on my old brown bike.
Virtual Worlds in Higher Education
Recently, I read an article by Rama Ramaswami entitled “Is There a Second Life for Virtual Worlds?”. In this, she cited Finnish scholar Eero Palomäki, who, in his 2009 thesis ”Applying 3D Virtual Worlds to Higher Education” examined the use of 3D virtual worlds as a classroom tool and concluded that their inclusion is not a task for the faint of heart.
The hurdles Palomäki lists are quite significant and include among other things, “bandwidth limitations; firewalls; intellectual property rights; technical competencies like scripting and building; subscription and maintenance costs; the costs of hardware, software and other equipment such as headsets; and the lack of interoperability with other technologies”.
If one is somehow able to fight through this veritable fortress of technologies, one is still left with the simple question, “Was it worth it?”. Palomäki goes on to explain, “Two challenges have been identified. First, determining situations in which virtual world learning presents value beyond what traditional education can provide. Second, determining how to effectively utilize and adapt these worlds to support learning.”
Palomäki cites a number of virtual worlds available in the market today that have fallen short of their promise. What were the shortcomings of these environments?
The Real World vs. Virtual Worlds
Many virtual environments are not structured for educational uses, and while many have tried, few have truly succeeded in doing more than replicating the classroom experience.
If we are going to look beyond the classroom to technology to bridge the gap between theory and practice, I would argue that we should not look to “virtual worlds” where navigation can be cumbersome, implementation a time sink, and avatars – don’t even get me started about those. Instead, I think the challenge for education is to bring the Real World into the classroom, rather than create an alternate reality.
Placing students in realistic situations, where they can interact from a first person perspective with other people (i.e. not blue faced avatars…) has tremendous value. Another equally important trick involves letting the technology fade to the background while the scenario and the decisions students are called on to make, takes center stage. This is what we have accomplished with Toolwire’s Learnscapes.
Toolwire Learnscapes
In these first-person immersive learning experiences, students can integrate information gleaned from a variety of realistic situations, and synthesize this into actionable responses, just as they would in the real world. By creating an experience where students can take their own metaphorical bike out for a spin, scraped knees and all, we can develop learners who are better equipped to succeed in the real world, no matter what their future may hold.
Of course, this is no small task and, at Toolwire, we realize that bringing innovation to the classroom requires a combination of knowledge, yours, and ours. Through a well-choreographed collaborative effort, we work with clients to bring their vision to life for the classroom. Together with our clients, we have created meaningful realistic learning experiences for students in such diverse curricula as humanities to engineering, law to healthcare, and business to education.
Join me at the Sloan C International Conference on Online Learning
If you too agree that there is value in hands-on learning and believe that experience is perhaps the best teacher of all, then I hope that you will join me for my presentation, “Turning Knowledge into Action – Contextual Learning and Natural Assessment” at the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, on November 9th. If you will not be attending in person, a streaming version can be accessed here. And of course, if you are interested in continuing this discussion of the value of experience in education and innovative uses of technology to help learns achieve at higher levels, I invite you to follow me on twitter @michaelwwatkins or email me at mwatkins@toolwire.com.
Fail Safe
by Cameron D. Crowe, Toolwire EVP Sales and Marketing
Like it or not, we’re in an age when any Twitter post or viral video can be picked up by news organizations and become the lead story. Opinions and ancillary information quickly become accepted as fact. The current economic downturn has led recent college graduates to question the value of having invested time and money into a degree that, so far, has not led to the career track they felt they were promised. Their Tweets and youtube.com videos are front and center in various news reports.
So, what is the Return-on-Investment (ROI) of a Higher Education? This was the question Jeff Selingo, editorial director of The Chronicle of Higher Education, posed in a recent article.
As the research in his article bears out, Higher Education is unquestionably linked to greater long term financial success in life. But as the economic landscape shifts, those in Higher Education understand that to continue offering degrees that provide graduates the expected value, instructional methods must adapt with the times.
What is it that prepares graduates for the ‘real world’ they face upon graduation? What can schools offer to give them every possible advantage? Simply stated, one of the greatest potential takeaways from a Higher Education experience is the opportunity to “fail” in a “safe” environment. This is best accomplished via real-life contextual situations through the use of immersive learning environments.
It is a commonly held understanding that many of life’s greatest lessons are the product of mistakes. But here’s the problem: In many situations in the real world, mistakes can be extremely costly and there is no second chance.
At Toolwire, we have been developing immersive learning environments for several years across a wide range of subjects including Business, Health Care, Engineering, and Humanities to name a few. These immersive learning environments provide students opportunities to develop critical thinking and decision making skills in safe, low-stakes environments. Our latest learning solution, Toolwire Learnscapes, are rich media instructional tools combining course content and learning objectives with engaging storylines that unfold within photo-realistic worlds.
Toolwire recently had a discussion with a business school interested in Learnscapes and how the school could better prepare graduates for today’s job market. During this meeting we discussed how interviewing is one of the essential skills students need in order to translate the value of their education into a desirable full-time job. The resume and degree open the door, but it is still up to the graduate to perform in a stressful and unfamiliar situation.
The problem is that teaching students how to interview within a classroom setting only goes so far. Interviewing is a skill best learned from practice and experience. Think about how valuable it would be if business schools were able to provide students real-time access to immersive learning environments designed to help them practice their interviewing skills.
Toolwire Learnscapes employ an innovative Instructional Design known as “Natural Assessment”. Designed according to pre-defined learning objectives, these multi-path virtual scenarios subtly provide course concepts to students in contextual situations. Students who demonstrate mastery of core concepts progress the story; however, students who struggle are subtly remediated to new scenes that provide additional information in order to reinforce key course concepts. Typically, a 15 – 30 minute Learnscape contains 1 or 2 primary learning objectives. At the end of each module, student assessments are saved and forwarded to instructors, thus allowing them to follow-up with an additional round of student feedback and guidance, if necessary.
Consider how costly it is for students who fail to secure their dream job because they haven’t had enough interviewing practice. In his article, Selingo says schools are increasingly at risk of becoming “punching bags” by those jobless students who blame their alma maters for not doing enough to prepare them for a successful transition from the classroom to the workforce.
As institutions seek ways to leverage new technologies to deliver value to students, Toolwire Learnscapes offer students a compelling way to experience the real world so that once out in that world, students have the competitive edge that only experience and confidence can bring.
Immersion is the New Engagement
by David James Clarke IV, Toolwire VP of Learning Solutions
When was the last time you needed a factoid and were unable to find it? Years? A decade? In this day and age, there is no shortage of content available at your fingertips … via Internet search … via social media … via mobile devices.
The same is true in higher education. We are awash in a sea of content. There are books, lectures and instructional aids on any and every subject. Instructional design has been challenged to find a winning recipe to serve up the right mix of content in just the right way at the right time.
While content is as important as it ever was, somewhere along the line, the acquisition of content has become the easiest part of the task. The true value of education is adding context to content and presenting it in a meaningful way to the student. Students want to be engaged. But is engagement enough? Every year, the bar is set higher and higher in determining what ‘engagement’ is.
Engagement has been replaced by immersion.
Immersion is placing students inside scenarios to bring the content to life. Is this a simple reaction to gaming, television and movies? On the face of it, the answer is yes. However, if there is one thing I have learned over the years, the world of education is never as simple as it appears on the surface.
The idea of a higher education is to take the facts you’ve accumulated over 12 years of primary education, and use them as a base for more advanced critical thinking. The goal is to train your mind for the “real world”. Bottom Line: immersion gives the content context and context is what enables students to put their education to real use.
What Toolwire strives to do in all of our products is to use technology to put students in the middle of scenarios so they can succeed or fail as they would in real life. In our Learnscapes, for example, we capture the assessment information so that students can understand if they’ve focused on the correct concepts and can apply them as they will someday for an employer.
All of our working lives, we’re put in situations where our knowledge must be used contextually to achieve goals and solve problems. In short, we are assessed every single day in the real world. Toolwire labs give students a safe place to embrace this and to do so with the mentorship of an instructor who understands what it takes to succeeding in life.
Innovation Matters
by Brian Boyd, Toolwire Director of Learning Advocacy
Innovation matters. In engineering, innovation involves introducing new products and services that could, quite possibly, change the world. Silicon Valley has dominated this type of innovation for decades. For all of the hue and cry about the US economy becoming a ‘service economy’, I don’t see the same urgency to bring innovation to service.What a great time to innovate service! Smartphones, Social Media, virtualization and so many other technologies are being applied to service but we’re just scratching the surface as far as tying them to the human element that is always present in a service ‘transaction’.
The people and products at Toolwire are great and the attitude is unique and infectious. The ability to meld art and science make Toolwire a very special place. In my role creating and running the Learner Advocacy group, I have the opportunity to shape the experiences of hundreds of thousands of learners as Toolwire quite literally changes the face of online education for our customers. I’ll have the chance to work with a fiercely dedicated team to remake customer support and Quality Assurance as well as establish Usability Labs and Accessibility Labs so that our products can be enjoyed by everyone regardless of physical ability.
Toolwire has long been involved in that melding of art and science going back to the work of our co-founders and earliest employees. Our Learner Advocacy team looks to take that same attitude along with these newer tools to create something special for those using our products that goes beyond mere customer support. With the tremendous growth the company has enjoyed, we’re working on scaling our basic support to meet the growing demand for our products and the transformational impact it has on learning. But the day we move on to more innovative things in Learner Advocacy is fast approaching.
I look forward to sharing that journey with you.
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