Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: What is the role of learning environment design in teaching practices?

By: Michael Feldstein

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James writes,

For some educators, LAMS helps to make explicit and conscious a process that is often just below consciousness - the process of planning educational activities (if you've never formally studied teaching and learning, ie, most university faculty, you tend to teach based on past experiences and gut feel - hence the sense of educational planning as being just below consciousness)....I suspect that some faculty find this challenging because it may draw attention to the pedagogical limitations of their current teaching methods ("if all I do is lecture and then give essays/exams, then what are all the other tools down the side of the authoring window for?").

This raises a critical question: What role should the learning environment have in shaping teaching practices? I can imagine several possible answers:

1. No role. The learning environment is a neutral container. (One might call this the empty room hypothesis.)
2. The learning environment should be customizeable to support the teaching practices of individual instructors. (Call this the situated software hypothesis.)
3. The learning environment should help teachers articulate and define their individual teaching practices. (Let's call this the process externalization hypothesis.)
4. There exist objective best teaching practices and those practices should be encoded into the learning evironment. (I'm struggling for a name for this one. Call it the architecture of practice hypothesis for the moment.)

One could imagine applying any of these hypotheses at the tool level or the system level. One could also imagine that the hypotheses (and therefore software) favored by an institution reflect the relationships between the IT and academic sides of the house.

What I hear you saying, James, is that the flowchart metaphor in LAMS embodies the process visualization hypothesis. I'd be curious to hear how members of the Sakai community would characterize their positions on the issue, both as tool developers and as adopting institutions.

Posted by Michael Feldstein