Having gained prominence in recent decades, the learning sciences represent themselves as a timely theoretical initiative in online education. What ideas are most important? How can we tell what is most effective in practice? Can the potential for application of the learning sciences strengthen the reputation of online teaching?
This session addresses a perennial problem in all forms of postsecondary teaching. What is the role of learning theory in designing and offering a course? Having gained prominence in recent decades, the learning sciences now represent themselves as indispensable, the newest theoretical initiative in online education. But this interdisciplinary and empirically oriented research enterprise is a vast one, leaving us to ask about the best approach to incorporating the learning sciences into course design and teaching. What ideas are most important? Where are the limits? How can we tell what is most effective in practice? How can attention to the learning sciences be coordinated with older theoretical initiatives, like Asynchronous Learning Networks and the Community of Inquiry, or the group of practices, borrowed from the face-to-face classroom, known as “active learning”? Can the potential for application of the learning sciences strengthen the reputation of online teaching?
Of course, we know the difficulty in introducing a demanding theory into educational practice. At Michigan State new faculty members are presented copies of an acclaimed account of the learning sciences (Susan Ambrose et al, How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching [2010]). But in a recent study of how young professors at MSU learn to teach, none acknowledged the book as a resource. Thus, the session also looks (via a recent study at another institution) at obstacles to adaptation and innovation in faculty work. In the end, with a discussion among participants, the goal of the session is to identify opportunities in the learning sciences while estimating how extensive their influence might be and with what benefits for course design and teaching.
Participants will: 1) encounter a two part framework--representing theory and application--for considering the role of the learning sciences in online course design and teaching; 2) learn of the experiences and views of professional colleagues in the application of a fast growing and increasingly influential body of knowledge; and 3) take initial steps in formulating plans for attention to work in the learning sciences and overcoming obstacles to incorporating it into course design and teaching.
The first half of the session identifies Michelle Miller’s Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (2014) as an exemplary resource for considering a role for the learning sciences in online education. Note: Miller also offers OLC sponsored workshops on this subject. Miller is mindful of the paradox in surveys of faculty attitudes toward technology and education. Thus, the first step in introducing the learning sciences into online education is altering such views. The online curriculum is now well established. But, as the surveys show, there is also a persistent lag in faculty enthusiasm for digital formats. A significant share of the faculty does not believe that technology necessarily contributes to student learning. Of course, proponents of educational technology can say that its effects are only as good as any professor’s knowledge of learning allows it to be.
To set a foundation for her case for the learning sciences Miller asks in the titles of early chapters of her book: “Is Online Learning Here to Stay?” and “Does it Work?” The answers to both are yes, reflecting student demand and the benefits of new technologies. And, for Miller at least, there is the faculty’s “drive to innovate,” despite what recent surveys report. By using technology informed by learning science she was “able to do things that [I] knew were beneficial to students, but had never managed to consistently carry out before.”
We are familiar with manifestos for academic transformation, institutional initiatives championing global change, and start-up driven models of automated teaching that depend on images of faculty work constrained by habit and indifference to theoretical and technological innovation. Proponents of an increased role for the learning sciences in online course design and teaching, like Miller, take a different view, focusing on what the operations of the brain mean for how we learn and how we can teach online. Such lessons have been codified in allied work on the learning sciences (e.g., Ambrose [as above] and Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (2014), focusing primarily on the conventional postsecondary classroom).
Miller brings such an approach—summarized for the session on a one page handout--to online education. In chapters on attention, memory, thinking, motivation, and the cognitive impact of multimedia, she explains the mental processes in each and how what we are learning about the brain’s structure and operations can guide us to effective online teaching. She sees the learning sciences and technology as natural allies but with admirable caution: “I don’t believe that instructional technology promotes learning by its mere presence. Nor does it let us evade some of the apparently immutable truths about how we learn—especially the fact that learning requires focused attention, effortful practice, and motivation. Rather, what technology allows us to do is amplify and expand the repertoire of techniques that effective teachers use to elicit the attention, effort, and engagement that are the bases of learning.” A detailed syllabus for one of her own online courses caps the argument.
For Miller the learning sciences offer permanent improvements in making the most out of educational technology: “With knowledge of which types of [scientific] approaches have proven effective in actual uses, you will be empowered to make more powerful design choices and to innovate after today’s learning management systems, applications, and gadgets du jour are long gone.” Miller presents herself as a scholar/teacher speaking to colleagues, conveying friendly classroom advice. The goal is “cognitive optimization.” She is decidedly practical and refrains from the postsecondary tranformationalism in the institutional initiatives from MIT and Carnegie Mellon, and the evangelical postsecondary discourse. Her aim is to dislodge common cognitive assumptions made by professors, or what is behind their instructional habits.
Still, we can ask about managing the introduction of the learning sciences into systems of postsecondary course design and teaching, particularly when the primary resource is work by cognitive scientists themselves with its specialized vocabulary.
The first half of the session also identifies questions of practice. Needless to say, Miller’s account of instructional strategies reflects her own commitment to the learning sciences. To what degree can we expect a similar approach outside psychology? If we know that scientific research about learning and technology can support faculty learning and development, then we also know how difficult it is across the disciplines to apply any theory with a rapidly increasing base in empirical research. Such was the chief finding of a two year study at Carnegie Mellon University, a national leader in the learning sciences (Joel Smith and Lauren Herckis, Understanding and Overcoming Institutional Roadblocks to the Adoption and Use of Technology-Enhanced Learning Resources in Higher Education [2018]). While CMU has been influential in codifying principles of the learning sciences for higher education, particularly in the fully automated courses making up its famed Online Learning Initiative, it acknowledged that its own faculty displayed considerable diffidence about applying them to the uses of technology in teaching.
The CMU study concludes that “Every effort to intentionally shape teaching and learning in postsecondary contexts consists of a sequence of distinct actions and decisions made throughout a behavioral chain which incorporates the many steps required to conceive, design, develop, adopt, adapt, and employ a technique or tool.” In particular, the “chain” reflects the fact that “the faculty frequently express skepticism about attempts to generalize principles of teaching and learning across disciplines.” Accordingly, efforts to make a place for the learning sciences means adapting its theoretical propositions as a partnership of course designers and instructors.
The second half the session will capitalize on the experiences and views of participants and what they can add to how we contemplate the role of the learning sciences in online course design and teaching, with what actions might be desirable and feasible. Questions like these will launch the discussion: What role do the learning sciences now have in online course design and teaching? What have been the consequences for learning and assessment? What have been the best ways to communicate knowledge from the learning sciences to online teachers?
Finally, with the intellectual vitality and academic reach of the multi-disciplinary learning sciences it is likely that many online courses, like face-to-face ones, already display at least implicit signs of their impact (e.g., Flower Darby with James Lang, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes [2019]). The goal of this session is to make relations between the learning sciences and online teaching more explicit, prompting attention in the second half to the question: How can faculty and designers determine together how much learning science is enough?