Designing courses for the next big (unknown) thing

The New Culture of Learning video brings up the idea of teacher choice. We talk so much about student choice, but what about when the teachers are the students? In my role in professional learning, our students are the teachers we support with professional development sessions we design. Reading a powerpoint and a canned presentation is one thing, but really taking into account what teachers want and what drives their passion makes the biggest difference. We have to be able to read the room and know our audience and truly prepare our students for what's to come in the real world/real application. Thomas (2012) also reminds us that learing should be fun and students need room to play and explore. If we delivered the same lessons in the same way, how would we truly prepare students for what's next? I'm a member of my college's alumni association board of directors. A few years back, while chatting with antoher member, I found out his profession was social media director for the Dallas Symphony. We laughed about how this wasn't even "a thing" when I was in school, but I was also proud to know we'd kept up with the times and helped our newer graduates have the necessary skills to thrive in this new environment.

This feeds into Dr. Harapnuik's (2015) mention of how we all want to change the world, but don't want to actually change. Being innovative is hard and can be risky when everyone wants things to stay status quo. Our professors had to understand the need for the next generation of learners and adjust classes and coursework, accordingly. This flows well with what Dr. Bates (2015) says about considering student diversity and differences. We can all agree that standardized testing is not the best way to go for evaluation, but allowing CSLE + COVA will produce much more genuine and authentic learning that can then be applied in the real world.

TEDx Talks. (2012, September 13). A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM80GXlyX0U

Dwayne Harapnuik. (2015, May 9). Creating significant learning Environments (CSLE) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ-c7rz7eT4

ChangSchool. (2015, December 14). Dr. Tony Bates on Building Effective Learning Environments [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xD_sLNGurA