Can We Teach an Old Tool New Tricks?

As we focus more on meeting the needs of the learner, it is important to note that the college learner’s intellectual curiosity, content knowledge, cultural biases and general educational ideologies are shaped well before they enter higher education.  One of the most influential entities shaping teaching and learning paradigms is the K-12 classroom. Therefore, it makes sense to find ways to collaborate with and support K-12 classrooms so that our college students are better prepared for the higher education classroom. How can we help shape a learning experience so that students can explore their interests prior to college and come to college prepared to make the most of their higher education experience? Can we create a partnership that benefits both K-12 and higher education?

University X is doing just that. The Course Design and Development team reached out to the Department of Gifted Education to create a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed specifically for K-12 gifted learners. Unlike many online courses geared towards the K-12 learner, this unique educational opportunity is not designed to help learners pass a test or earn credits. It encourages learning just to learn, a concept that appears to be being slowly squeezed out of the K-12 classroom due to a hyper focus on testing.

This mentality is affecting the learning environment of higher education. As experts in the education field, we hear more and more complaints about how learners are losing their ability to think critically and work together to solve problems. Today’s learners often just want the answer.

There are no easy solutions to these issues, and the increasing demand on the K-12 teacher’s time is forcing teachers to make tough decisions. Often teachers must choose between challenging bored students or assisting struggling students. However, it is important to challenge bored students so that they don’t become disillusioned with school in general. We need to reimagine a learning experience that will meet the needs of all learners, foster intellectual curiosity in students, and expose students to new ideas and cutting-edge content that is not typically provided in the K-12 classroom.

MOOCs, such as the one created through this partnership, can be used to supplement the K-12 curriculum and can provide an opportunity for K-12 students to negotiate their own educational goals so that they may pursue individual interests. MOOCs can be created in ways that appeal to different learning styles and encourage students to take control and responsibility for their own learning experiences. When students are allowed to pursue individual interests that relate to course goals, this creates better buy-in from students. This can also create an environment that minimizes cheating (since educational experiences will be different for everyone) and supports more authentic learning experiences. Unfortunately, most MOOCs are designed for adult learners.

In response to this challenge, University X designed a MOOC that would serve a wide age and ability group by creating multiple challenge levels within the course. It utilized an instructional designer to develop, build, and implement the course. The instructional designer paired with a local professor interested in the topic to help facilitate the course run. She also paired with graduate students in the Department of Gifted Education to design studies to help determine the effectiveness of the online platform versus a similar face-to-face version of the course. Additional graduate students were trained to update and facilitate future course runs to free up time for the instructional designer to create new courses. Through national conferences and outreach to local teachers, University X has provided support for K-12 teachers to use this MOOC as a tool to meet the needs of highly motivated, underserved students both inside and outside of the K-12 classroom.  It has also connected with outside entities willing to donate content in order to develop new MOOCs.

In this session we will explain how we are partnering with multiple stakeholders to provide a unique learning experience that can foster intellectual curiosity, provide advanced and very targeted content knowledge, encourage learners to recognize personal biases, and begin to view their education experience as a more personal journey over which they can have some control. We will also explain how we have used this experience to create other partnerships both within and outside of University X. We will discuss our lessons learned as well as the obstacles we’ve faced, and we will use our Q & A time to brainstorm ways that we might be able to partner with other entities and continue to grow this project.

By creating and aligning age-appropriate MOOCs into K-12 standards, we can:

• Create a more robust repository of open teaching and learning materials for K-12 teachers to use.
• Create opportunities to incorporate OERs into K-12 courses and create a blended learning environment that allows instructors to focus on mentoring and supporting struggling learners.
• Provide open resources that allow future college students explore interests in a fee-free, explorative environment. Students can make better decisions about career paths they might want to pursue in a higher education environment, saving them both money and time.
• Facilitate open classroom experiences and provide support for teachers who would not otherwise have the time and resources to provide such individualized learning opportunities for students.
• Use MOOCs as a recruitment tool to entice students to pursue careers in lesser-known fields.

Please join us as we share experiences, challenges, and opportunities for creating partnerships that can reshape the learning environment of the future.