Ed in ETEC

My Four Prongs of Learning

Anderson’s article describes four different attributes in learning. According to him, “good” learning occurs when the learning is learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered. In my experience taking online courses both at the undergraduate and now at the graduate level, I notice that it is difficult for any particular course to be strong at all of the attributes. Some educators design courses in such a way that a certain attribute is noticeably stronger than another. While I would agree that a good online course should not be lacking in one of these attributes, I would also suggest that it is not necessarily a bad thing if one of these “prongs” of learning is significantly larger (or more emphasized) than the others, providing that this imbalance is intentional.

When I took a family counselling course online while doing my diploma in counselling guidance, the community of peer helpers was one of the key aspects in the learning that took place in the course. The instructor would post weekly topics onto the course’s discussion forum, and students would collaborate to discuss and come up with strategies to address each of these scenarios. Whether active learning could occur or not was determined significantly by the learner community. As the course progressed and people got to know each other better, the learning that took place became more in depth. Students who did not choose to participate in the discussion forum a lot often found themselves unable to understand course materials.

To probe into the prior knowledge of students entering the course, the instructor asked us to do a self-survey, as well as an introduction to ourselves. The introduction to self was very similar to some of my MET courses’ introduction, where students need to write a bio of himself/herself. By instructing the students to specific the prior knowledge and the expectations for the course, the instructor got a sense as to the people who he was working with.

In the above example, I could observe that the instructor appeared to have placed a much heavier emphasis on the Learner- and the community-centered approach. For a counselling course, I believe these two attributes can be viewed as marginally or noticeably “more important” than the other two attributes. Having said that, I do not disagree with Anderson’s notion of a four-attribute approach. As long as the other attributes are not ignored, and that the course design takes into the account the discrepancy that may occur, the four attributes need not to be emphasized in the same fashion.