Building a Convergent Learning Community That Transcends Traditional College Lectures
By Gene Levinson, PhD
Summary
The global pandemic threatens the very existence of colleges throughout the world, yet here is a partial solution and good reason for hope. We are launching a groundbreaking approach to safe, online courses that bring out the best in both professors and students.
I've asked my team to make this scalable technology widely available and user-friendly, so that legacy courses can be rapidly migrated to the new system, in time for the Fall semester.
Here are just three of many reasons this article will interest you now:
- If you are a decision-maker at a college or university, we present a rational solution to both online and hybrid college courses, both during the pandemic and after a safe vaccine becomes widely available.
- If you are a college student, this safe online learning experience is unlike anything you have seen before, and you can personalize your journey and gain both breadth and depth of understanding of the topics of interest.
- If you are a professor, you can easily migrate your own courses, which reflect your own insights into the subject matter as well as your brilliance as a teacher, and continuously and creatively improve your courses in the future.
How Does It Work? What's Novel About this Invention?
Traditional lectures are thoroughly transformed into interactive, personalized, on-demand journeys of discovery. How does that work?
With the new method, professors use our self-guided toolkit plus their own creativity to quickly migrate their legacy courses to the new system.
Briefly, starting with the sequential narrative topics of a lecture, reliable, curated information is brought together from a variety of sources, to a single screen. The interactive lesson flow is then personalized by each student according to their own interests and learning styles. Lessons may include any number of proven exercises and deliverables that promote critical thinking, long-term retention and problem-solving.
A typical approach might be to distill the narrative of a 90 minute lecture to a shorter, 15 minute version. Each topic becomes a segment that is defined by a question. Each question defines a universe of relevant resources. Using our patented Convergent Media technology, curated and reliable resources are brought together on a single screen in a unique, interactive, highly-effective personalized learning experience.
Lesson flow can take many forms, depending on the passion and creativity of both professors and students. Most prefer this approach to passive, traditional lectures, one-size-fits-all textbooks, and rote memorization.
How Does This New Method Encourage Communication, Collaboration, and Individual Success?
Perhaps Sir Ken Robinson said it best: “Teaching is a creative profession, not a delivery system... Great teachers mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage.”
With our Convergent Media platform, both professors and students are able to track individual success and to communicate asynchronously.
The design of both lesson content and lesson flow can be enhanced by collaboration between professors and students in many locations. This gives rise to an entirely new kind of global Convergent Learning Community.
As innovative strategies for effective activities and lesson flow are explored and shared, best practices will become evident, and the entire way that we approach course design and delivery will evolve.
In addition, the cloud-based platform opens up an opportunity for numerous students and graduates to be employed by professors and universities as remote teaching assistants.
No learning technology or invention, however powerful, should attempt to replace the human touch. The most effective systems are those that bring out the best in the people who use them. We believe that all genuine learning begins with mutual respect, admiration, and is driven by the desire for mastery on the part of the student, and by best wishes for success on the part of the professor.
For more information, please visit smartnoter.com
Thanks for your time and interest.
Copyright (c) 2020 by Gene Levinson, PhD, founder of SmartNoter Inc. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to share this complete article in its entire, unmodified form, for educational purposes, with proper attribution that includes the original link.