Friday Fragments - July 10th

The "cone of learning," inviting students to shape their own learning & giving students options, plus upcoming webinars.

What I’m reading/watching this week…

Critiques of the “cone of learning” myth (Blake Harvard’s post this week referenced this article by Work-Learning research) popped up for me this week, and I thought it was an interesting topic to share. Thinking about learning as a pyramid of increasing retention/increasing complexity is a fairly popular model to explain how learning works, but it isn’t backed up by science, as these authors explain.

Image: Google Image search of “cone of experience”

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Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis ask us: Trust your students to be active participants in their learning, explaining in their article in a Times Higher Education article that “Challenging students to collaborate on course content will help them learn better and develop essential skills.”

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The Higher Ed Community Forum Series is a collection of panel discussions on higher ed finance, student success, international students, affordability and other issues. See all the videos here.

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Christina Katopodis argues that Every Fall Syllabus Needs an "Or" Option to allow students much-needed flexibility in demonstrating content/skills mastery.

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Upcoming events…

• Next week is the Remote Faculty Summit - two full days of sessions on teaching in higher education, hosted by Arizona State University.

• In two weeks, I’ll be part of a panel on experiential learning & high impact practices (HIP) in the HyFlex/hybrid classroom with the Student Opportunity Center - July 29th at 2pm; there also a panel on July 21st at 2pm to talk about HIP in online learning.

Thanks for reading - please let me know if there’s a topic you’d like to hear more about in the future!