Work @ TAFE

I’ve been trialling different methods lately to enable the web-design students to learn at their own pace… but combined with 8 hours of web-design on a Tuesday, it’s progressing at the cost of a headache each week! (For me and the students!)

I think, within a social constructivist framework, it is inevitable that all learners will be at different points of the course… If someone misses a week, I don’t think it’s valid to say, “well, you’ll just have to catch up!”, and expect them to construct this weeks new learning activities on top of a hole where the previous weeks foundation should be. And in and adult learning environment, it is inevitable that participants will be away for substantial amounts of time.

For this reason I’ve been keeping individual progress sheets for the students in class, and setting individual learning contracts. This seems to be working well so far. Most learners are grouped together with one other person who is doing the same activity, and people work well together in these small groups.

Yet this also means that it is more difficult to have activities where we are all together. I’ve been trying to use the forums a little for this purpose (as people can contribute at different points in time without a problem), but I don’t feel this can replace actually working together as a class on some activity or game or discussion etc. I’m instead trying to disperse a few interesting “break activities” that give people a break from the activities that they are working on at their own pace, and to come together to discuss/try/play with something useful but not necessary. For example, yesterday as a break activity, we all had a go at downloading the Web Developers extension for FireFox, played with it for a while, and then talked about the features that we found really useful.

So, all-in-all, it seems to be going well. Students seem positive about the work they are doing and amazingly managed (yesterday) to work well for the whole day (9-5). Everyone is progressing without feeling too overwhelmed. I’m able to keep up with where everyone is up to (using the individual progress sheets) so we don’t waste time trying to work that out each week. But at the end of the day, it is a long day for everyone!