Week 5 Discussion: Where’s the Social in Self-Paced Instruction?

Week 5 Discussion: Where’s the Social in Self-Paced Instruction?

What was the discussion about?

In the world of eLearning (in corporate settings, in particular), a lot of our instructional design work is in the service of creating self-paced instruction. Think back to your original stories of great learning experiences that you shared...were any of them self-paced? No. But, that doesn't get us off the hook when determining how we can achieve the common values -- especially the Social value -- when there are no (or limited) learner-to-learner or learner-to-instructor interactions. How should we reconcile our need to create self-paced instruction with our need to reflect the common values in our designs? Or, do we need to reconcile? What strategies do you have for addressing the values in self-paced instruction (or in learning from computers instruction, in general)?

General Overview

This discussion was interesting because it made us probe into the Common Instructional Values. We focused on the Social Instructional Value by pondering how we should reconcile our need to create self-paced instruction with our need to reflect the common values in our designs.

Most students agreed that including self-paced learning is valuable since is adds spice to the blandness of self-pace learning. To “kick-it up a notch,” self-paced learning need to be learner-centered, authentic, engaging, but it also needs to include social instructional values—collaboration, debate, conversation, team work, cooperation, discourse, discussion…ect. One example of how social interaction contributed to self-paced learning was seen in an Audio car forum. The Audio forum didn’t meet the needs of all involved, so the dissatisfied members left the forum to create their own Audio forum. This forum grew into a national forum beckoning members to travel the county to meet face-to-face, in the kitchen no less! They had a different take of things, and quenched their needs by building a new forum using social interaction.

But not everyone agreed that social interaction is fabulous. Some saw value in learning on their own as a way to learn the most since figuring things out and learning by mistake makes a more memorable learning experience.

Most valuable contribution to the discussion

My most “fab” contribution on to the discussion was how self-paced learning is going to revolutionize learning. No more are we going to think of learning as being one-directional: it is not going to come from the hierarchy of expert to student, e.g. author to student, teacher to student. We are going to be using on our own creativity and ingenuity to aide us in our own learning process, and, in addition, we are equally going to us our peers as teachers/mentors/coaches.

Why was this a great contribution?

It reformed the way I view “feedback” from peers. Now, I really see the value social interaction and how I can grow from learning from my peers. I used to take suggestions from my peers as a knock against me/my ideas. But now, I see how their point of view as a way to broaden the way I understand ideas, thus making me a well rounded individual.