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In the report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg posit:

that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity to allow for a worldwide community and its endlessly myriad subsets to exchange ideas, to learn from one another in a way not previously available. We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution.

This argument is made on the presupposition that learning itself is the most dramatic medium of change and that technology is merely the conduit or catalyst that helps facilitate this change.

The report is part of a series published by MIT Press and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that examines the findings from current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. While the report is packed with valuable information, The Pillars of Institutional Pedagogy: Ten Principles for the Future of Learning section offers a summary of the challenges we face as we rethink the future of our learning institutions.

(The principles and corresponding quotes were extracted directly from their explanation of the principles.)

1. Self Learning

Self-learning has bloomed; discovering online possibilities is a skill now developed from early childhood through advanced adult life. . . It is not for nothing that the Internet is called the “Web,” sometimes resembling a maze but more often than not serving as a productive if complex and challenging switchboard.

2. Horizontal Structures

Given the range and volume of information available and the ubiquity of access to information sources and resources, learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to judgment concerning reliable information, from memorizing information to how to find reliable sources. In short, from learning that to learning how, from content to process.

3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility

Learning is shifting from issues of authoritativeness to issues of credibility. A major part of the future of learning is in developing methods, often communal, for distinguishing good knowledge sources from those that are questionable . . . We find ourselves increasingly being moved to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge-creating and learning environments in order to address objects of analysis and research problems that are multidimensional and complex, and the resolution of which cannot be fashioned by any single discipline. . . If older, more traditional learning environments were about trusting knowledge authorities or certified experts, that model can no longer withstand the growing complexities—the relational constitution of knowledge domains and the problems they pose.

4. A De-Centered Pedagogy

In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference. This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledge-making, global phenomenon of epic proportions. To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education.

5. Networked Learning

Socially networked collaborative learning extends some of the most established practices, virtues, and dispositional habits of individualized learning. . .The power of ten working interactively will almost invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

6. Open Source Education

Networked learning is predicated on and deeply interwoven into the fabric of open source culture. Open source culture seeks to share openly and freely in the creation of culture, in its production processes, and in its product, its content. It looks to have its processes and products improved through the contributions of others by being made freely available to all. If individualized learning is largely tethered to a social regime of copyright-protected intellectual property and privatized ownership, networked learning is committed in the end to an open source and open content social regime. Individualized learning tends overwhelmingly to be hierarchical: one learns from the teacher or expert, on the basis overwhelmingly of copyright-protected publications bearing the current status of knowledge. Networked learning is at least peer-to-peer and more robustly many-to-many.

7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity

The connectivities and interactivities made possible by digitally enabled social networking in its best outcomes produce learning ensembles in which the members both support and sustain, elicit from and expand on each other’s learning inputs, contributions, and products. Challenges are not simply individually faced frustrations, Promethean mountains to climb alone, but mutually shared, to be redefined, solved, resolved, or worked around—together.

8. Lifelong Learning

It has become obvious that from the point of view of participatory learning there is no finality. Learning is lifelong. . .But what is certain is that the pedagogical changes we have enumerated have radically changed how we know how we know.

9. Learning Institutions as Mobilizing Networks

Traditionally, institutions have been thought about in terms of rules, regulations, norms governing interactivity, production, and distribution within the institutional structure. Network culture and associated learning practices and arrangements suggest that we think of institutions, especially those promoting learning, as mobilizing networks. The networks enable a mobilizing that stresses flexibility, interactivity, and outcome.

10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation

Networked learning both facilitates and must remain open to various scales of learning possibility, from the small and local to the widest and most far-reaching constituencies capable of productively contributing to a domain, subject matter, knowledge formation and creation. New technologies allow for small groups whose members are at physical distance to each other to learn collaboratively together and from each other; but they also enable larger, more anonymous yet equally productive interactions.

If this is the future of learning institutions then we need to ask — how do we build this? When I consider the task at hand I am reminded of two famous quotes from Einstein

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

While I am not certain what the journey will look like to this proposed future, I am certain that we can start the process of getting there IFF we have the courage to radically rethink our teaching and learning environments and IFF we change how we support these environments.

Creating Significant Learning Environments (CSLE) – An integrated approach to creating flexible, engaging and effective learning environments.

We design information systems, smart buildings, ecological friendly communities, learning spaces and so many aspects of our society but we, unfortunately, do not apply this holistic approach to designing learning environments. Apple has always designed excellent hardware but with their iPhone, iPad and the whole IOS ecosystem they have gone a step further and have designed a mobile communication or networking environment that just works. If we apply a similar purposeful design to our learning environments we also can create a significant learning environment that just works.

Whether we are purposeful in its design or we just allow the circumstances to dictate its development, educators at all levels are providing some form of learning environment. Rather than allow the environment to come together on its own and respond reactively to the learning dynamics that arise I suggest that educators become proactive and create significant learning environments. If we start with a student-centered approach and purposefully assemble all the key components of effective learning into a significant learning environment we can help our students to learn how to learn and grow into the people we all hope they will become.

The following mandala highlights the components that we need to consider when we are creating significant learning environments:

Creating Significant Learning Environment

Origin and Development

The development of the Creating Significant Learning Environments (CSLE) summer institute in the summer of 2010 was a response to Abilene Christian University’s (ACU) 21st Century Vision of educating global leaders who think critically, globally and missionally. To satisfy this vision ACU faculty and staff were required to create courses based on modern instructional design principles that incorporate significant, active and collaborative learning.

Elements of Dee Finks Creating Significant Learning Experiences were combined with the foundations of Inquisitivism and years of practical experience in developing significant learning environments to result in an approach that enabled faculty to design and build a significant learning environment that facilitated engaging, active and authentic student-centered learning.

Several 5 day workshop were run from May to December of 2010 resulting in the development or redevelopment of over 30 courses.

CSLE uses Finks taxonomy and backward design principles but moves well beyond Finks focus on the classroom experience to incorporates the following factors that make up the whole learning environment:

Student centred
Teaching roles – Presenter, Facilitator, Coach, Mentor
Ubiquitous Access & Social Networking
Instructional delivery formats – face2face, technology enhanced, blended, online
Instructional Design
Assessment & Evaluation
Academic Quality & Standards
Support & Infrastructure

CSLE evolves and the CSLE workshop are re-developed after an observation of an informal learning environment in 2012

An observation of my boys experience on a 2012 trip to Whistler and a visit to the Whistler Air Dome, commonly referred to as the foampit, reaffirmed the importance and power of formal and informal learning environments and caused me to take a more significant stand on the role that the environment and circumstances play in learning. I have been arguing since the mid 90’s that learning is dependent upon the creation of an effective learning environment and the immersion of the learner in that environment. A learning environment can be a classroom, an online course or anywhere for that matter where learning can take place. I have also argued that learning is the responsibility of the learner and that teachers are not able to make a student learn–the best that teachers can do is develop or establish the environment, immerse the student in that environment and then motivate and inspire the learner to take ownership of their learning. When learning takes place a teacher is really just the facilitator who helps the learner navigate the learning environment and process.

You can read about the informal learning environment that motivated me to formalize the CSLE approach and revise my workshops in the Significant Learning Environments post.

In 2013 and 2014 several CSLE two or four-day workshops have been conducted for the general faculty, School of Health Science and the School of Business faculty at British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). Because the CSLE approach is holistic it can incorporates a variety of Instructional Design approaches and can, therefore, be modified to suit a curriculum development process, general instruction and most recently a focus on blended and online learning.

Future of CSLE

Work on formalizing CSLE into an “official” approach has begun. I have presented the approach at several conferences, workshops and in seminars and will be working on a CSLE white paper and peer review publication. I will also be using the approach in EDLD 5313 Creating Significant Learning Environments which is a Masters level course I will be teaching as part of Lamar University’s MEd. in Digital Learning and Leadership.

Finally, I will continue to write about CSLE in my blog. You can view several previous posts that address components or aspects of the CSLE approach:

Links to the all the components of the CSLE+COVA framework:

Change in Focus
Why CSLE+COVA
CSLE
COVA
CSLE+COVA vs Traditional
Digital Learning & Leading
Research

Revised July 14, 2018