Higher Education Teaching and Learning

What skills do you wish your students had prior to taking your course? Most students could benefit from taking a course in learning how to learn.

Reflexivity, on the other hand, is to engage in the moment, to understand the thoughts and feelings of an experience while experiencing that experience.  As a self-reflexive professor, for example, I would evaluate my teaching as I’m teaching.  I wouldn’t wait until the end of a course to see how I’d done or to think about changing my pedagogical strategy.  I would ask some hard questions at the end of each lesson to help understand what I was doing and why I was doing it.  Similarly, when we encourage students to be self-reflexive, we are asking them to understand what they are learning as they are learning.  Additionally, self-reflexivity not only allows students to understand what they learned but why they learned it.

The inaugural issue of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the official publication of the International Society of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), is now available online and in print.

In all the discussion about learning management systems, open educational resources (OERs), massive open online courses (MOOCs), and the benefits and challenges of online learning, perhaps the most important issues concern how technology is changing the way we teach, and - more importantly - the way students learn. For want of a better term, we call this “pedagogy.”

What is clear is that major changes in the way we teach post-secondary students are being triggered by online learning and the new technologies that increase flexibility in, and access to, post-secondary education.

In a world driven by exponential accelerating technological and social change, globalization, and a push for more creative and context-driven innovations, how can we ensure the success of ourselves as individuals, communities, and the planet?

Knowmads are nomadic knowledge workers –creative, imaginative, and innovative people who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere. Industrial society is giving way to knowledge and innovation work. Whereas industrialization required people to settle in one place to perform a very specific role or function, the jobs associated with knowledge and information workers have become much less specific concerning task and place. Moreover, technologies allow for these new paradigm workers to work within a broader options of space, including “real,” virtual, or many blended. Knowmads can instantly reconfigure and recontextualize their work environments, and greater mobility is creating new opportunities.