When I was reading about MOOCS in the reading this week I was interested by the finding that students did better when there was an instructor who gave encouragement to the students. I think that’s big factor in student success no matter what type of course, but it might be even more important online. I work with elementary students and they love getting encouragement and it usually seems to help them push a little harder in their learning. I’m designing my course for 2nd grade students and I want to make sure that they can still get that encouragement. I see it when they play some of the online learning games and they encourage the kids to keep trying. This little boost can make a big difference in their effort.
All of this reminds me of a study done by Sugata Mitra and his hole in the wall experiment. All he did was take an old computer and put it in a whole in a wall in the middle of a slum in India. He connected it to the internet and then left it there. He monitored it from his office at a university. Eventually some kids found it and they started exploring. Theses were kids who had never had any formal education and knew no English. These kids taught them selves English because they wanted to learn who the computer worked. I believe in one of his experiments he asked someone to just encourage the students as they learned a really hard concept and he found that it increased their learning potential. I think that encouragements can play a huge role and is probably even more important online.
Bates, A.W. (2015) Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning (Chapters 5-7). Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
Kids can teach themselves (20:69)
Published by: Tedx Talks Added:08.27.2008
The Invisible Teacher 