UFM TALKS: The Fundamentals of Learning

Estefanía Campos  | 26 de junio de 2020  | Vistas: 94

Rachel Davidson Humphries, an educator with more than 10 years of experience in nontraditional education and master in learning design and technology, discussed The Fundamentals of Learning, a topic sometimes forgotten in the classroom when trying to innovate with new tools and technologies, due to the challenges that the pandemic has brought to education. This UFM Talk was organized by Formación Continua and the conversation was moderated by Carmen Rodríguez, director of this department at UFM.

Humphries shares her opinion on how to introduce technologies in the classroom that facilitate certain processes and tools that technology can offer so that the time spent with students is more efficient. She also recommends the book Should robots replace teachers by Neil Selwyn that talks about the subject and gives examples on how to apply some methodologies, such as to surface students' questions before the discussion starts in class.

So, how do we take what technology can do (...) and then leave the things that are essentially human learning experiences, to the experiences that we have.” — Rachel Davidson Humphries

Both educators mentioned the types of course design; in particular about threshold education, which is developing the class around certain concepts you want the students to learn. As you are designing your online course, Rachel recommends fostering a campus-like community environment, promote dialogue within students, and also balance the amount of time students stay connected.

There are all these stressors that are different in the online environment, so how do we mitigate that? One of the best ways to do that is to limit the synchronous time.” — Rachel Davidson Humphries

They comment on how to design asynchronous learning experiences, techniques, ideas for lecture-based and reading-based courses. Rachel advises on a better way to use Zoom features and breakout rooms, how to introduce new activities that engage students to maintain their attention as well as receiving their feedback on the course to improve the experience.

What we can do is we can be really careful about the choices we make and think about what is the internal transformation that this activity can do or how it does something that other content wouldn’t do.” — Rachel Davidson Humphries

The participants of the UFM Talk had the opportunity to ask questions to Rachel about the topic. The conversation was geared towards discussing practices to promote hands-on activities in online learning, the fundamental changes professors need to make to transition, how to deal with students who don’t turn their camera on and how to promote student's intrinsic motivation through projects.

Don’t miss Humphries's best book recommendations for educators!