What are the new trends in elementary education?

What are new trends in Adult education in the modern world?

• Answer:

  One trend that might be a little obvious is that more and more adults are getting educated online. The bar chart here is from http://distanceadvising.com/2012/05/higher-education-in-a-digital-world/#.Utm39RDnbGJ and represents the percentage of higher education enrollment that is web-based according to a survey conducted by members of the Babson Survey Research Group. The chart shows the percentage rising from around 10 percent in 2002, to around 31 percent in 2010.  Some of this rise is due to people enrolling in universities that specialize in online learning, such as the University of Phoenix or the DeVry Institute, but more traditional universities and state institutions are getting into the space as well. These more traditional schools benefit from having students already enrolled, as well as an already established physical location. Online schools are more convenient for employed people, and there aren't as many barriers to entry, so they aren't going away any time soon, but the addition of traditional universities to the realm of online education has put pressure on the more specialized schools, which has led to some slightly odd consequences. Several of the online universities have  physical locations scattered around cities and towns so that there is a place to take exams or to hold classes that are part of a curriculum, but cannot be taught as easily online. Recently the University of Phoenix, where I work, has started to phase out some of its campuses in the surrounding areas, moving, for example, all of its Tennessee ground classes to the Nashville campus. This means a lot of administrative changes as well as making the university a little less accessible. Basically from my perspective, the trend has been that as on ground universities start to become more like online universities, online universities are starting to become more like on ground universities. The structure of an online class, or even the partially online ground classes that I teach, is much different than that of traditional class. One day a week for four hours is the usual set up, in order to allow facilitators (teachers) and students who have other jobs to go to class. The in-class time missing from this schedule has to be made up with work outside of class. Some of this is homework, but a lot of it is team assignments, some thing which isn't nearly as common in traditional universities. On the first day of class students join a team of 3-5 people and create a charter where they write down the rules for their team as well as their contact information. Then they are supposed to work together on the team assignments talking on online forums as well as in meetings. Recently the University of Phoenix has started to back off from requiring team assignments in each class. Part of this might be from studies such as those written about in Susan Cain's Quiet, which show that in many situations working in a group makes people perform worse rather than better, particularly if those people are introspective. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 written by Cain, goes over some of the information she includes in the book. Another reason why institutions might be backing off from teams is that there's a new darling of a education technique out there now called Adaptive Learning (although it might be called other things). The main idea of Adaptive Learning isn't all that new: observe how the student is learning and adapt the teaching methods to best benefit the student. But the internet offers tools that make this goal a little easier. http://khanacademy.org has an achievement system that lets learners go at their own pace, viewing the videos and other materials they need in order to learn a concept, and then taking a test to show that they've mastered it.  The University of Phoenix is doing something similar by using tools provided by http://www.carnegielearning.com/ which makes homework more interactive and responsive to the student. If a student gets a question wrong, the web software will give them more of that kind of question until they get the concept. When they complete a part of the assignment, a progress bar moves and they can see how much they've accomplished. Along the same lines, there are now apps such as http://www.polleverywhere.com , which can create questions and even multiple choice quizzes that students can answer with their cell phones during class, allowing the teacher to adapt to how the students are doing. Moving a little away from the internet, another tool that is showing up in a lot of classrooms is the interactive white board. There are several different kinds of these out there, and they're showing up in K-12 classes as well as in universities, but in most cases the adults will probably see them first. The basic idea here is that rather than use a marker (or, heaven forbid chalk) to mark on a surface, you use a stylus to digitally mark a display projected on to a screen. This is as far as most people go, and the benefit at this level is that you can save the markings to a file and give them to the students, and you can have several students come up to the board and write answers in different colors. More advanced uses are that you can use the computer to cover up parts of the display, or use the stylus as a mouse to click on buttons in some other program.  Personally, I see most of these as being a little too bundled and a bit dangerous. If your class depends on you having electricity, a working computer, a working powerpoint, a working projector, a working interactive whiteboard AND a working stylus...your class is probably going to be in trouble.  Still, they can be effective tools as long as they aren't relied upon too much. I've covered these trends mostly from the perspective of a teacher, but they affect students as well. In traditional universities, these trends aren't showing up as quickly, except perhaps in tech heavy institutions. For an adult student going into a non-traditional school though, these changes might seem overwhelming at first. This might be especially true if you're one of those people who have never really understood video games, or if you only ever use five buttons on your remote control and you're only really sure about two of them. Adaptive Learning is similar in some respects to Gameification, another trend in education, where lessons are structured as levels of a video game and quizzes are bosses that have to be defeated in order to continue.  Even if the the online class is fairly straightforward, every educational website has its quirks, and something is going to go wrong. If you have some one in your life who is more tech savvy than you are, it might be a good idea to know how to reach them. And just because you start a class online, doesn't mean you're being taught by a computer. There is always somebody behind the curtain operating everything. Find out their email and phone number, and be prepared to annoy them.