5

Learning Environments in Academic Contexts

Faculty and course designers in higher education are also being urged to think beyond the context of a fixed course or curriculum. In many fields, the knowledge base and skill set needed to be effective in practice is advancing at a brisk pace. Faculty recognize that they need to prepare students for continuously developing and updating their skills, even as they are in the process of learning foundations and current practices.

A number of other influences are driving faculty to rethink traditional approaches. Many desire to have a long-term influence on the professional lives of their students. They strive to create what Dee Fink (2013) calls “significant learning experiences” that linger with students and ignite their ongoing desire to immerse themselves in a field or area of practice. Experiences with the MOOC (massive open online course) phenomenon have underscored the value of a learning community—and that is true whether students are in traditional programs or cobbling together formal credits on a quest of their own (see, for example, Funnell 2014). Faculty who have embraced the idea of connected learning, open education, and connectivist MOOCs are continuing to explore ways to build students’ 21st-century learning skills—helping them learn how to leverage the value of the web and build their networks in ways that will both support their learning and put them in a position to co-create the knowledge and skills necessary for the future.

For all of these reasons, faculty members are looking for ways to give learners access to reference materials, help them build long-term professional connections, and support the development of web-based lifelong learning skills. Learning environments can be a way to achieve these ends.

ACADEMIC APPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

As in the corporate environment, there are a number of ways that learning environments can be conceived. Chapter 1 touched on blended learning hubs, knowledge exchanges, learning portals, and collaboratories. These can be adapted for use in an academic context (see Table 5-1), although they may be better conceptualized at the department level than at the course level to include a wider array of materials and a larger potential learner group.

TABLE 5-1. ACADEMIC INTERPRETATIONS OF LEARNING ENVIRONMENT STRATEGIES

Learning environment design concepts can also be applied to other emerging strategies in higher education as described in the following sections.

Connected Course

A learning environment might be a way to organize a learner-centered constructivist course. Its purpose would be to give learners access to a wide range of materials and activities on a topic, and to connect learners and experts as a way of creating a rich environment for learner-driven exploration and discussion. Learners themselves define and fine-tune their learning objectives and determine which activities they want to engage. Some MOOC structures achieve the same ends (notably those based on connectivist or constructivist principles). Connected courses are held online, and often include people who are not taking the course for credit; these may be interested learners and leading thinkers or practitioners in the field at hand.

The faculty and course designers for a connected course start by curating resources in a variety of formats that can be the foundation of an exploration of a given topic or skill. They set up systems that connect learners to one another, and suggest a variety of hands-on activities that challenge learners to share their knowledge and skill for others to comment on and leverage for their own learning. They also invite thought leaders and authors to share their perspectives in open conversations. Gartner Campbell (2014) has described the approach as focusing “joint attention” on a particular topic. The learners and facilitators bring resources and ideas to the table, and then each member of the group uses those that are relatable and helpful.

Grading in such courses (when necessary) is frequently based on materials that the students produce—either through a presentation showing what they’ve learned, or projects that apply the learning to a particular practice problem.

Workforce Development Site

Some academic programs are developed for the express purpose of preparing students for a specific job or job family. A college or university might launch a workforce development site for a specific initiative to support students in their preparation beyond completing a defined curriculum. The site might be designed to increase interest in the program, enrich the student experience, or encourage ongoing learning and skill development. Connecting students to one another and to potential employers may also be an important aspect of the success of the workforce development effort.

Knowledge Resource Site

The role of a scholar is to deepen our knowledge in a particular arena, and faculty members can sometimes be disappointed in the reach of their work. While one of their goals may be to disseminate knowledge, the work they do is often available only to their own students, readers of academic journals, and fellow researchers. To affect practice, and to continue to enrich the knowledge and practice of students who cross their paths, faculty can also design websites that serve as learning environments for their knowledge base and research.

On a personal site, or a site dedicated to the topic of interest, faculty members can curate a range of resources and activities for peers, students, and other interested individuals. Content-rich webpages, reference lists, articles, curated links, multimedia materials, blog posts, and Twitter feeds can all be collated into a valuable resource. Faculty might also hold old-fashioned “salons,” new-fangled “hangouts,” or webinars to have more open conversations about their work and interests. Collaborating on such a site with fellow scholars might be a rewarding and impactful endeavor.

Open Wiki

Faculty members can also encourage students to contribute to and continuously update a learning environment about a particular topic or skill. This could be housed on a wiki site or a website maintained by faculty and students on an ongoing basis. Similar to the knowledge website application, a wiki would serve as an ongoing resource—but it would be built by students and constantly updated by successive classes so that it becomes a favorite reference for those interested in the topic.

Student Services Site

In addition to learning environments tied to the content and skills related to various academic disciplines, learning environments may also be useful for academic support services and student development resources. Sites might be imagined for study skills, career planning and job search skills, student leadership development, first-year orientation, “one book” programs, academic advising, and more. These environments may have online and offline components that generate interest, bring people together, and provide resources.

COMPONENTS IN ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENTS

The learning environment design framework describes six categories of components: resources, people, training and education, development practices, experiential learning practices, and learner motivation and self-direction. These component categories are still a useful design framework in the academic context, although they play out a bit differently.

Learner Motivation and Self-Direction

Learner motivation and self-direction underpin the success of a learning environment. Students often come to academic programs more motivated to achieve a credential than to necessarily learn specific knowledge bases and skills developed in particular courses. And, despite the fact that we are several decades into the digital revolution, they are often still anticipating traditional educational approaches in which their learning approach is structured by a teacher. Faculty and course designers who want to use a learning environment approach (or some hybrid thereof) must incorporate materials and activities specifically designed to promote learner motivation. And they should use the approach as a way to scaffold, teaching students how to manage their own learning processes.

People are motivated to learn when they understand how the learning will be applied and they value the potential outcomes. Contextualizing learning is critical, and no more so than when you are working with students who may have little experience on which to base their understanding of application possibilities. It’s often very valuable, then, to invite those who do the work to share their experiences and inspire students. Videos, guest speaking engagements, and careful selection of readings may provide this kind of spark for students.

Once students are interested, they may be expecting the professor to tell them what they need to know and give clear directions and criteria for learning. To develop 21st-century learning skills and the ability to continuously learn for a lifetime of rapid change, faculty can devise strategies that scaffold learners through a process that can be engaged later as a self-directed strategy. Suggesting learning paths, giving loose structures, providing examples, and facilitating students’ co-creation of outputs and collaboration on quality criteria are just a few of the scaffolding strategies that might be imagined.

Resources

Finding the resources to enrich student learning is probably easy; faculty often leave out many potential reading assignments when they put together course plans. But curating those resources is critical—identifying those that are most readable and relatable, those that spark interest and debate, and those that you would want people to access if they could only access a few. It’s also important that you look beyond academic sources to locate additional resources; practitioner-focused journals, recorded webinars, and blog posts can often fire up students and young professionals more than academic material can. Students want multimedia material, so it is a good idea to diversify the kinds of resources you curate for your environment.

Imagine the threads that students may want to follow in exploring a topic and try to give a variety of options for digging deeper. Provide links to other portals that offer resources in your subject area (and closely related areas) to help students see what is available. Annotating and categorizing the resources will also help students find what they are looking for to extend their learning along particular lines.

People

Promoting the growth of professional networks is often a critical piece of the ongoing learning and development picture. You can identify the people learners should follow and provide social media links for experts who have an online presence; these give students a real opportunity to get connected to current conversations in the field. You may also be able to provide a platform through which learners can connect with one another even beyond their years of schooling. Opportunities for working with others on projects and interning with particular experts would provide valuable connections for your students.

Training and Education

It is certainly appropriate to highlight courses that you and your colleagues teach. For extended study, you might recommend a course in another college or university, or free courses structured as MOOCs. You may also be aware of seminars and workshops that are offered by experts in the field. In the case of academic support services and student development, you may include training and education programs as part of the overall effort.

Development Practices

In corporate environments, the development practices category refers to programs and activities that are initiated and led by managers in the company. In an academic context, you might consider listing opportunities you can offer that will help develop students’ knowledge and skills. Working on a research project, engaging in book discussions, participating in internships with faculty coaching and supervision, gathering students socially for networking, and the like would fall under this umbrella. Requiring or supporting students in creating an e-portfolio is another way of helping them bridge the space between academic study and practice.

Experiential Learning Practices

Problem-based learning, real-world capstone projects, and other hands-on work can give students real experience that solidifies their learning. Students often report that these are among the most valuable activities they engage in while at college. In addition to offering experiences, though, help students to make meaning of those experiences by reflecting on and processing what they learned and how they can apply that to future endeavors. Be sure to offer the means by which students can begin to evaluate their own success in enacting the practices of their profession. Quality checklists, self-monitoring processes and forms, observation guides, and other supports give learners a way of checking themselves in their attempts to implement what they have learned.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

There are many predictions and suggestions about where higher education practices are heading, and it is clear that reinvention may be in order. There is some consensus around wanting graduates to be better prepared for lifelong learning and productivity—to learn effective communication (in the digital age), critical thinking, ethical decision making, research, and self-directed learning skills as much if not more than a body of knowledge and set of specific professional skills. These may be best developed through course structures that provide more application activities than knowledge testing. Rather than having a grade point average as evidence of learning in the college setting, students and employers may instead want to see outcome portfolios and evidence of deep skill development.

In addition to the ways that faculty adopt and fine-tune active teaching practices, a strategy that supports continued learning and the development of a network of experts and colleagues would be welcome. Learning environment design is one such strategy that can be conceived and implemented by individual faculty members (or a small group of colleagues) without waiting for a complete change in the way higher education is packaged and delivered.