The mission statement of my institution, Baylor University, is “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community” (Mission Statement, n.d.).  Although, “to educate” seems like an action verb in which instructors are doing something to the students to force learning, the “by integrating” statement shifts that focus back to the environment in which learning actually occurs. In other words, our mission is to create a student-centered, significant learning environment within a specific framework or boundary – the context in which learning happens.

One of the key tenets in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change is that learning should be viewed in terms of the holistic environment where “the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, the teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 35).  Information is readily available to students, and instructors are no longer the primary context in which students receive or synthesize information. Educators attempting to create significant learning environments with their students must be willing to change their existing models, give up some of their historic control, and engage with their students in entirely new ways.  Learners need to be actively engaged in a learning collective and community where they learn from each other.

Understanding My Environment

At Baylor, my role as Assistant Director of Learning Systems is to help provide the technological resources needed by our faculty to create learning environments with their students. Specific systems, like our learning management system, really focus on the teacher and the teaching-driven approach to education and don’t lend themselves to the student-centered model very well.  Other systems we provide, like our web publishing platforms, lend themselves quite easily to the student-centered model.  In my readings this week, one of the key points that really hit home is that most of the existing learning systems use the classroom as a model.  However, the new culture that was described by Thomas and Brown, talks about the whole context being viewed as the learning environment in which the students operate.

The classroom as a model is replaced by learning environments in which digital media provide access to a rich source of information and play, and the processes that occur within those environments are integral to the results (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 37-38).

That fundamental idea caused me to think about my own Innovation Plan and how that plan can shape my own learning environment.  My proposal is to introduce a comprehensive ePortfolio initiative at Baylor University.  This plan certainly isn’t to eliminate the structure provided by our LMS, but instead to open up entirely new ways for learners to engage with content, interact with their peers, and share their own learning with the world.  When Thomas and Brown discuss the idea of a learning collective, they talk about how important it is to allow students to contribute their own knowledge back into the collective.

Teachers no longer need to scramble to provide the latest up-to-date information to students because the students themselves are taking an active role in helping to create and mold it, particularly in areas of social information (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 52).

Challenges

One of the main challenges of this learning approach is the potential for students to overshare.  Already, students post almost every aspect of their lives online through Instagram photos, TikTok videos, and whatever sort of swiping app comes out next.  Without focus, bringing these types of social applications into the learning environment could easily become a sea of chaos and distraction.  Instructors who open the door to online publishing through WordPress and ePortfolios, as I propose in my plan, need to help students work through the challenge of separating identity and agency.  Students who actively participate in the learning collective need to be aware of the boundaries that are established by both the institution and their instructors.  Even now at Baylor, I have been having conversations with our administration about opening up our WordPress platform to students, and that conversation has largely discussed those boundaries as defined in our Website Publishing Policy.

Encountering boundaries spurs the imagination to become more active in figuring out novel solutions within the constraints of the situation or context (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 35).

One of the other challenges will be building diversity into the learning environments.  If every student is required to write the same type of blog post on the same topic every semester, are students really able to exercise any agency and showcase their own diversity?  Thomas and Brown look at this from an online gaming standpoint, and state that “the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities” (2011, p. 87).  Without varied viewpoints – sometimes clashing with others in the course or even the instructor – it hinders cognitive exploration or play.  Creating a truly significant learning environment will involve carefully balancing the boundaries put in place to focus the lesson objectives with encouraging diversity among student ideas.

Personal and Organizational Impact

By helping learners use online publishing resources, students utilize the connections between knowing, making, and playing (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 115).  As a personal example, my own ePortfolio has been an amazing tool for demonstrating knowledge and sharing information.  By writing and publishing blog posts in each of these courses, I am combining the concepts of knowing and making. Making these posts is forcing me to revisit the course materials a second (or sometimes third) time which builds my knowledge of the information.  Yet, the most exciting part has been…  play.  Even with something as trivial as playing with different options to display the book jacket or block quotes in this post, the aspect of play has allowed me to really shape my understanding of ePortfolios and take ownership of my learning.  As another personal example, I learned how to use Zotero through play and discovery – not because it was a learning objective for this or any other course – but because I saw someone else using it, and I thought it could help me organize my resources and help me create proper citations.

Enabling the faculty at my institution to create opportunities for students like the ones I’ve had will have a huge impact in student learning.  Allowing students to create their own learning opportunities will flip the traditional hierarchy of teaching and learning. Implementing various ePortfolio solutions can help the institution support faculty who are engaging in blended learning activities or are looking for more authentic ways to measure student learning.  Thomas and Brown framed it like this:

We believe that, instead of posing questions to find answers, it is essential to use answers to find increasingly better questions (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 117)

Holistic Perspective and Influence

For any student-centered learning environment to be significant, it will require effort from both the instructors and the learners. In my case, it will take a system administrator to help champion this type of change at the institutional level to both campus administrators and faculty. Instructors will need to rethink how they evaluate students and measure success.  Courses may have to be intentional about creating opportunities for students to explore, play, and learn. Assessments have to take into consideration that evidence of learning will not look the same from student to student. Communication and collaboration will almost certainly occur in social environments and online platforms outside of the walls of the traditional classroom. Traditional boundaries set by institutional policies and procedures may need to be expanded or changed entirely.

Likewise, students who participate in these types of learning environments will have to take on greater responsibility for their own learning.  Students will need to become the owners of their learning, ask the better questions, and use technology resources to demonstrate mastery of content. Learners will need to learn-from and contribute-to their learning collective through rich interactions with their peers.  Only when all of these pieces fit together can we achieve the mission of Baylor University.

References