Goals are being met
I have been asking my students to fill in a little survey at the end of class. Questions on this survey include how the class was able to meet their goals.
Here is my process: When asking my students to introduce themselves at the beginning of class, I write down their stated goals. This is really important so I can cater class information to their specific needs and I can compare what they say against their final statements at the end of class.
Many of my students are indicating that their goals are being met and they are learning how to accomplish tasks important to job and personal technology success. You see, it is really important that technology educators meet the ever-increasing need of our students to improve technology skills. Adult learners must keep up with technology in order to succeed at the workplace and to succeed with personal technology at home.
For example, it is very difficult to buy an SLR camera anymore; we buy digital camers, instead. We then must use our computers to download our pictures and then we have “fix” our images for things like red eye and underexposure. Our adult learners are all stuck with learning technology if they are going to use the latest equipment such as cameras, microwaves, or cars.
But do adult learners really know their technology education goals?
In looking more closely at my students’ comments, I am seeing more and more comments about how they were so excited to learn about Photoshop’s smart filters or about something else the is really cool. I have to wonder: do our technology education students really know what their goals are? This is especially true with my novice, level one-students. They don’t know enough about the software to formulate goals.
Formulating final learning goals
Based on preliminary data from my student questionnaires, I believe we must not only ask our students about their learning goals but we must also stay current with our software skills so we can show our students what we see as learning goals they need to have. This takes us back to teaching our students how to learn: you must teach your technology education students HOW the software is being used currently and and how to use the software to stay current on their skills.
It is, therefore, very important that our technology education classes stay dynamic and reflect current practices. In other words, don’t just teach the latest software version, but you must also stay up with current methods of using software to accomplish students’ needs. This is exactly what our students expect from us, and learning current skills is a current goal throughout all of my students’ comments.
In summary, I think we need to concentrate on continuously updating our technology education classes to meet the goals of our students and of the user community for the specific software. This means we don’t have much rest between classes. We must stay aware and continuously practice our skills. This means that technology education not only creates complexity for our students, but it adds complexity to our teaching schedules and our time. This is what it takes to create a quality learning experience for our technology education students.
One Comment
What a super interesting entry in your blog!
As a novice adjunct professor from another century (1991 – 1999) I remember pondering these same issues while teaching adult learners the nuts and bolts of the technology of the day. Ability-wise, I think there is a difference between the students I taught then and the ones that you are teaching now. There is a technology-generational gap between the two and from that standpoint, it is a BIG one. Adult students now have had the benefit of having had a lot of computer/technology exposure in their elementary and subsequent school years. Many of my students had not. Of course, I didn’t have today’s problems either. Back then, none of my students were secretly texting somebody from class or sneaking emails out from behind the monitor where the instructor couldn’t see them. They were busy figuring out DOS commands and coding COBOL line by line. (Oy, that dates me!)
Regardless, the age old issue of teaching (inspiring) a wide variety of abilities in one classroom remains the same as it has always been. As a student of yours, I have MUCH appreciated (and said on evaluations) your abilities to keep an entire classroom of varied levels of experience going in a single direction at a decent speed. This is a truly a gift, I think, and one that Mothers often have. Gut instinct is the reason why Mothers (parents, actually) make incredibly good teachers. They look at the learner holistically because a wee one has forced them to learn how. I also admire your ability to read the class’s “energy” and then flex your teaching plan/style accordingly mid-stream.
But, I digress from the point of your entry. In the late 1990′s I was appointed by the Governor (Leavitt) to participate in a group formed to give the Governor recommendations on how to better Utah’s Technology reputation so as to attract more technology firms to the State of Utah. I was placed on the “Academics” committee because I was operating both at Academic and Corporate levels at the time. I knew already that technology graduates fresh out of college were graduating behind the curve in terms of what the corporate world was looking for. This was due in no small measure to the fact that, as you said, technology improves at the speed of light and the humans often lag behind. Academia, being the lagging, burdened, heavy beast that it is, (particularly the neanderthals in the parking department) simply cannot keep up with the ever changing environment of high-end technology. Of course, neither can the teaching staff. I admit that techno geeks *are* super human, but even then it is just too much to expect given today’s budget constraints and the fact that you have a small life outside the workplace that you keep up.
What we learned on behalf of the Governor those many years ago is that we need to always keep in mind that Universities are simply charged with graduating a student who has learned how to learn. It is not necessarily the knowledge they possess that is important to corporate America, but the ability to pick up the rolling balls and contribute in a new way, using tools that they have been taught to use in new and different ways.
It was actually an AHA at the time for most on the committee. It’s a good argument to make sure that Academia installs professors who know their subject matter but more importantly understand how their students are learning how to learn and grow new problem solving skills.
There’s my .02! Back to work —>