Consider this vignette: during the COVID-19 pandemic a family are living in a big city where access to stable digital streams and affordable data bundles is not a problem. Confined to long periods of school learning now moved online, one of the parents asked their daughter about her experience. She says:
It is boring and I learn almost nothing. Teachers give a lot of instructions with little explanation.
What can we do to resolve this? What research might be undertaken?
https://theconversation.com/in-a-world-of-digital-bystanders-the-challenge-is-for-all-of-us-to-design-engaging-online-education-147195
Hi, Stephen
I would have loved to write a longer answer to your question, but i think others have already written a better one, so take a look here.
https://georgiastatesignal.com/digital-bystanders-are-a-modern-day-issue/
Stephen Dobson
This a great question and amplifies a number of issues. First, even in this short vignette, there are several takeaways. Let’s grant that the daughter’s description was as accurate. Inherent in her answer is that there are more exciting activities competing with her attention. She is satisfied with being complacent, not learning, and not asking for additional explanation. As educators, we have to find ways to access this kind of audience with realistic resources.
Educators increasingly witness the inability to discern heuristics of content. Metacognition benefits have to be explicitly stated because they cannot be discerned by the learner. Put another way, if you continually Google what things mean, your ability to self-discern may be suffering from a degree of atrophy. What makes it worse is that the instructors may not see it. The connections are so obvious that they do not need an explanation.
Since students tend to be drawn from competing interests, they often become bystanders because this is a quicker course to be able to engage in the alternatives. The beauty of this approach is that it sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy of the value of the curriculum. I suspect we are going to have to reinvent learning to deal with this circular reasoning justification.
I really like your article's contention of putting together a consortium for class design, but most of the teachers that I know neither have the time nor the resources for such an endeavor. Even if they did, the students who would contribute to creating a class are not the same profile as the students who are not engaging. This might make their input as contaminated as those of their well-intentioned instructors.
So, what to do? We may have to borrow time from our typical class curriculum to reeducate students with the realization that they may be deficient in prerequisite learning skills. Critical thinking may have a significant role to play here. However, CT assignments will only be motivating if they are connected to issues of importance. This means multiple attempts and relevant rewards at the end. While grades may help, contribution to significant issues, respect of peers, increased efficiency in task completion may be superior in terms of their ability to be able to motivate.
tēnã koe J.D.
Thanks for you measured reply. Your answer suggests the importance of the connection between motivation and critical thinking to engage. This is close to a topic I have explored for a long time - namely the role of feedback in what I and colleagues have called feedback in the short, medium and longer time cycle. The first mentioned to support immediate quick fix solutions and feedforward and the last mentioned to support deep more identity connected concerns of the individual or class/group.
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