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What is learning presence? Okay, we are trying now to reflect the most
recent beliefs of learning researchers that it is the learner that is the center of this
equation; not the teacher. We use to have a slogan, “You have to morph away from the
sage who is on the stage to the guy on the side”. So we started talking a lot about
student centered learning. Student centered learning is still kind of teacher directed
in many instances, but we are looking at ways to increase the learners role in directing
the learning activities, so that’s where we talk about learner presence. Making the
learner aware of their responsibility and giving them the tools and the freedom to make
decisions to make decisions that are in fact meaningful in directing their learning activities.
Explain the difference between discussion and lecture.
Well that’s one way you can do it; to allow students to ask questions of what they are
reading, rather than answer questions you are asking. So that is heutagogical in nature
and learner-centered. But you can also certainly, as many teachers do, let them choose the issues
they would like to do their term research paper on. Let them decide which conversations
in a thread of discussion they want to participate in as an active participant. So that they
can more or less customize their learning path based upon their own interests and career
goals and so forth. And one further thing, and that’s about
the assessment issue, that plagues a lot of new online teachers. How do they do their
best to get valid and reliable assessments of learning, and one of the things I like
to mention there Is that when you assess using the daily work that you are assigning to your
students, which is primarily discussions and perhaps frequent small assignments, it is
less likely the student will get assistance from others in that frequent daily activity
than if you limit your assessment to 2-3 high stakes assessments throughout the semester.
Additionally, if your assessments are customized for each individual learner, for example I
like to use a reflective blog assessment, where they have to reflect upon what they
have been learning and expound about how what they are learning impacts them in a personal
way; how they think, how they feel, how they act, and it is very difficult to have someone
write that for you, so that would be another way to make sure the person who is getting
assessed is the person who is enrolled in the class.