William Cope
Wei Liu
Pinakini Shah
Greg Jack
Leah Goldberg
Nell C Rundle
Bahar AnahmiasNew Learning MOOC’s Updates
New Learning Community
Several years ago I started a "meetup" group. Its title was "Tea & Conversation". Idea was to bring people together once a week to drink several cups of hot tea while talking about spiritual experiences of the participants. That meeting became a book-reading meeting where we read a passage from a book together very slowly and share our own experiences, ideas or feelings about what we just read. It took 4 years of weekly meetings to finish 3 books.
Internet & it's power to find & connect people resulted in creation of a very diverse learning community. It is both very relaxed but also very structured. We come together for a purpose but find new purposes at every meeting. This has been a transformational experience for all of us.
This new ability to create community out of unexpected and unusual people based on desire to connect and grow seem to be the new way of learning.
Creating opportunities for such unexpacted people to come together is the new way of teaching.
Changes in the nature of Education: From the Lens of a Teacher
As a teacher having twenty-five years of teaching experience, what I noticed in the name of change is the change of books, curriculum, examination pattern, the attitude of students towards their teachers, ban of corporal punishments and the inculcation of ICT. New learning strongly advocates that education is learning by design and very negligible changes are seen in the updating process of the design. Sincere efforts are not being taken to know students as learners. They are often labeled as “Unwilling to learn” or “Not taking sincere efforts to learn” etc. In order to solve the learning puzzle presented by each student, teachers are in a race to prove that the puzzle itself is invalid, a unique self-defense mechanism.
Even stakeholders and people in higher places in the hierarchy don’t provide enough space for teachers to breathe, rather pushes them in an environment where the above mentioned self-defense mechanism is the only option left to exercise.
Here I want to place on record my unique experience in this aspect. I was forced to work in two schools, that too as a full-time teacher for both the schools. I have to perform the work of a full-time teacher in each school and the only difference is that I have to complete all the teaching and nonteaching works scheduled for 6 days in just 3days only. In both the schools, I have to complete the whole syllabus assigned to my subject. In this arrangement, everything got collapsed and I was just working as a robot compromising my emotions as well as the emotional needs of the students. This situation takes to a point where I found myself not good enough for either of the schools, yet my higher authorities were least bothered. I was in this hopeless stage for near about one and a half years, which according to me were the worst period in my whole teaching career. I was like a Xerox machine reproducing something which even I don’t know whether it was good or bad. Anyhow, I was successful enough to get out from the situation after one and a half years, yet the memories of that period pinch me a lot for not justifying properly to the needs of the students. I strongly believe that this all happened because there was a lack of understanding of the aspect of the design of learning.