Investigating Flexible Learning
For this activity I talked to a lecturer, who is in a similar role to myself, working in the Outdoor Leadership field but for another Polytechnic.
The students: 2nd year Outdoor Recreation students, aged between 18-29, all New Zealand European/Pakeha (no Maori, foreigners), 80% from the North island.
Time
He identified that time can be a real challenge in terms of work/life balance for both the students and the staff. Staff can often feel overloaded, struggle to manage with the systems and find it hard to stay organised and keep students in touch with what is going on. One reason for this is that they spend a lot of the time in the field outdoors. This can vary a lot from week to week but they will often leave to go quite early (around 6am) and generally get back sometime between 5-11.30pm.
He identified that time can be a real challenge in terms of work/life balance for both the students and the staff. Staff can often feel overloaded, struggle to manage with the systems and find it hard to stay organised and keep students in touch with what is going on. One reason for this is that they spend a lot of the time in the field outdoors. This can vary a lot from week to week but they will often leave to go quite early (around 6am) and generally get back sometime between 5-11.30pm.
As students this field time can also be a challenge and they need to priortise to self-manage as well as staying focused on when things are due.
Entry Requirements
Students need to have successfully completed a first year program in Outdoor Recreation. Some students get direct entry straight into 2nd year but this is not easily done and is determined from a solid base of logged prior practical outdoor experience.
Students need to have successfully completed a first year program in Outdoor Recreation. Some students get direct entry straight into 2nd year but this is not easily done and is determined from a solid base of logged prior practical outdoor experience.
Delivery and Logistics
Around 50% of this course is out in the field, 50% class time.
Outdoors
-Travel is by van or bus
- Location: they go all over the South Island depending on where is most suitable for what they are learning
- Rain or shine
Classrooms
- in about 15 different rooms and outside
- they use a variety of different mediums and technology to put across information including overheads, powerpoints, discussion, interaction, videos, whiteboards
- Students will work in varying group sizes (solo, pairs, small groups, larger group discussions)
- Small class sizes - 14-28
- Normal sessions are 2 hours with a break sometime in the middle
Content and Instructional Approaches
Lecturers try to cater to visual/audible/kinasethic learners both in the classroom and in the field.
Combination of face-to-face, DOING, listening and sharing ideas, reviewing, lectures, utilising resources, and receiving/giving feedback.
The course can often be perceived as something you would do to have a good time, to have fun. For some students it can be challenging to get them to be committed to the theory or assignments that go along with the practical assessments.
A lot of the learning is done through hands on experience - See Experiential Learning Cycle
Experiential Learning Cycle 3-stage models (Kolb, 1984)
Resources
For each course the students get given a hardcopy book, which they can use as a resource to add notes to or take away in the field.
They are also given a calender with all assessment dates for the year - and lecturers will inform them if there are any changes to this.
The timetable and course outlines can not be accessed online - instead the students are given a hardcopy of the timetable. The lecturer felt this system could be improved be make it more flexible as sometimes the students would lose this.
Students also have access to a climbing wall facility and library where can access information.
Hi Julie, this is an interesting and challenging course.
ReplyDeleteI like that the timetable and course outlines cannot be accessed online as that gives the lecturer flexibility to change if things need to and it keeps the students engaged in the learning process.
Kolb's learning process is very applicable for your learners.
What kind of leadership challenges do your students engage in?
Yes you are faced with the ultimate challenge - getting students who want to "do stuff" actually engaging with the theoretical side of the subject.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever thought of getting them to keep a scrapbook/journal where they keep a log of their activities? This could be purely a series of video, audio and images to document their pathway through the course - demonstrating what they are learning. The deal is they also have to write descriptions/reflections (yes I agree with Liz kolb's cycle would be good) to describe what was done and why.
It depends on whether the emphasis is on describing the process and critiquing it or on deeper reflection. The log of progress could be hard copy or online. If online web-based sites are used - sites such as Flickr or Vlog, a blog, you tube etc could all be used. Students can add short descriptions to images and video directly on the sites or use a blog and reflect on there with images and videos embedded. Is this a possibility?
Maybe if they can see the relevance for show casing their work with the intention of getting feedback, and also developing a method of showing prospective employers what they are capable of, they might get excited about 'the book work'. what do you think?