a new breed of learner

Has the surge in online courses in colleges created a new breed of learners. So much of our time is spent with the new learners to online courses, we are forgetting about some of the “seasoned” students. Consider some of our goals in digital education...
Create an environment that encourages lifelong learning. If we are successful, we are creating a generation of people that have an incredible ability to acquire knowledge. We really can take little credit for their ability actually, most of them have had it since the 3rd grade. These people will end up being the researchers of tomorrow, so it is our responsibilities to take a close look at how they are acquiring the knowledge, embrace it, understand it, and thereby create a generation of learners that can apply these abilities in ways we can only imagine.
Create an environment that encourages social interaction. Social skills as defined in the last millennium are far different than they are in this. We cannot keep measuring peoples ability to communicate with standards that are founded in archaic models. As I write this, I have three monitors open in front of me. One is dedicated to IM/CHAT, this one is content creation the other is email. I am under-utilizing my resources! But the technology is only the start. As many educators do, lets look at the one room school house, again. The teacher ended up doing very little teaching. He/she was a facilitator, and passed the knowledge down through older students, who then “trickled down” the knowledge to the younger. This constant reinforcement of the content created a group of learners that were used to interacting and sharing the knowledge. There is a very important job that our current online teachers need to learn. It involves facilitating this social based knowledge transfer to make sure that it is both correct and delivered in a way that encourages and inspires. This is huge. What happens to this model when the students are constantly in and out of the paradigm? What if the previous instructor didn’t use the model? We then get a group of experienced students that are empowered to teach, dominate, discourage the younger students in a way that would discourage the newer learners from ever taking a course online again.
Encourage “anywhere, anytime” learning. Anywhere, anytime learning is effective, only if it is able to be transferred to real life, real time learning. In our efforts to make these students embrace our learning paradigm, are we able to help them understand that what we are doing is still applicable to their lives? We invade their world through Facebook, My Space and the internet in general, crossing the barrier into their living rooms where we get to be “in their face” 24/7. How will that effect these people down the road? Will their jobs be the same? Well, data shows that 80% of jobs will be telecommuted in the future. They will be working with people in may different countries throughout the course of their careers. So, yes. It would seem that invading the living room may be a good thing.

That’s enough for one post. I am sure I have gotten off track from my original idea, which is “what happens if we are right” thoughts. I will pontificate more on this...