Profound changes created by the Internet over the past 20 years have affected knowledge workers more than any other group. While having ubiquitous information at one's fingertips provides many advantages, it also fundamentally alters the way we learn and perform.
Simply put, Knowledge is no longer power. Today, the new power is the ability to turn Knowledge into Action...and results.
CONTEXT
Historically, education has been guided by an overarching assumption that its primary role was to instil citizens with a pre-defined body of knowledge. This is changing.
In a survey of several thousand knowledge workers over the past 20 years, Robert Kelley at Carnegie-Mellon University asked a simple question: "What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?" In 1986, the average percentage was 75%. In 2008, 10 years after the rise of the Internet, that percentage dropped to 8-10%. This means that 90% of the skills needed by today's knowledge workers are experiential.
This shift has serious implications. Education's new role is shifting towards producing graduates capable of performing meaningful tasks in the real world. As a result of these shifting priorities, traditional assessment techniques, while adequate under different historical situations, do not fully meet the needs of the classroom today.
A NEW APPROACH TO EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT
In response to these changes, education must increasingly move towards more authentic forms of education and assessment. As part of this, courses must increasingly provide learners with experiential learning opportunities. The problem is that delivering instructionally sound experiential learning is hard. Replicating "real life" experiences in an authentic way can be time consuming, hard to assess, tough to scale, and expensive.
Fortunately, two new learning platforms are opening doors previously unimaginable to educators: Scenarios and Learnscapes. Scenarios are graphical "Day-in-the-Life" learning experiences using engaging story lines, virtual characters and authentic digital locations. Learnscapes - the latest in learning technologies - engage students with audio and photorealistic environments combining video interaction.
These immersive learning solutions are an essential component of a sound blended-learning experience. Typically, courses embed 4 to 6 of these 15-30 minute activities into a semester-long course in order to help students catalyze key concepts and experience course content in "Day-in-the-Life" situations, or "Virtual Internships", that bring learning to life. Often these immersive learning environments are developed as "episodes" with plots that unfold for students over the course of an entire semester.
"NATURAL ASSESSMENT"
The foundation of these experiential learning technologies is a new instructional design approach known as "Natural Assessment". This approach moves beyond current methodologies to embody what might best be described as enhanced, authentic assessments.
The "Natural Assessment" instructional design methodology follows a higher order structure merging course content and objectives with the digital media and the art of storytelling.
Within each module, the Opening Interaction sets the context for the story. As the story unfolds, Supporting Interactions provide information and context for the learning objectives using engaging video characters and interactive onscreen responders. During Primary Interactions, students meet with Virtual Mentors and video characters to gather key information. Along the way, Signposts gauge a learner's acquisition of knowledge in subtle ways and provide branching opportunities to either remediation or assessment. If the learner is struggling with the material, Remediations provide reinforcement of key concepts naturally using approaches intended to build the learner's confidence.
Once learners demonstrate a sufficient grasp of key course objectives, they move on to primary Assessment. This "Natural Assessment" approach is about much more than testing mastery of a small piece of information. Instead, the goal of this "Natural Assessment" approach is to develop learners' ability to synthesize and apply what they have learned in a contextual, real world setting.
THE 3 C'S: CONTENT, CONTEXT, AND CONVERSATION
The power of "Natural Assessment" is how this approach merges the three C's: Content, Context, and Conversation.
- Content - Identifying course content and objectives is an important first step in developing these immersive environments; however, it is important to acknowledge that exposing learners to knowledge is only a small part of the learning process. What is critical is how the content is presented and delivered to the learner - hence, the other two C's.
- Context - In contrast to traditional assessments, which are often disconnected to the learning process, "natural assessments" are embedded directly into the learning process. "Natural Assessments" keep students "in the moment" while they complete assessment elements mirroring the various tasks encountered in the everyday workplace such as developing a marketing plan for a gaming company, writing an executive brief for a CEO, or delivering the final arguments to a Magistrate during sentencing.
- Conversation - Instead of treating assessments as a chore, which often leads to stress and anxiety, "natural assessments" engage students in ways that spark the quest for knowledge. An essential element of the instructional design process is finding creative ways to engage learners in an ongoing dialogue. These conversations might involve live meetings with colleagues or speaking with friends via video phones, email, and social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr etc.
This "Natural Assessment" approach to education and training is now in use across a broad spectrum of content areas including: Business, Composition, Customer Service, Critical and Creative Thinking, Engineering, Healthcare, IT, Legal Practice, Media & American Culture, Personal Finance, and University Orientation.
RESULTS
Learnscapes built on this groundbreaking "Natural Assessment" instructional design have experienced significant adoption in a relatively short period of time. In 2010, Learnscapes were delivered across multiple universities and content disciplines to over 100,000 unique students who accessed these learning solutions over 1 million times. In 2011, Learnscapes are expected to reach over 2.5 million accesses by 300,000 students across an expanding number of clients. Without a question, these early indicators are just the tip of the iceberg for Learnscapes and this new approach to learning and assessment
