Friday, March 1, 2013

Learners must take ownership of their learning

This seems to be a bit of a buzz phrase and I hear it mentioned a lot with respect to 21st C learning skills and elearning. To often it means holding learners responsible for their failure to learn or more often blaming them for their failure to learn. I agree that taking ownership learning is essential but as educators how do we enable learners to actually accomplish this? One of the most important ways to actualize taking ownership of learning is to allow learners to use their own devices, in their own preferred online learning environments. This means BYOD instead of institutional computer labs and it means the learners using their own blog, wiki, or interactive web-page instead of an institutional content management system. It is no good to insist that learners take ownership of their learning and then force them to use technology owned by the institution. What is worse is to insist that people do their work inside a learning management system where all their effort will be filed away after the course is done and the tuition has ended. Most institutions keep digital archives for a legislated period but then just scrap them without anyone ever looking at them after the final grade has been recorded. Let people BYOD and let them decide where they want to do their learning and connecting.