Hilgartner Open Learning

Curriculum, understand from its Latin origins, serves as a 'race course'. On this course, often as learners, the racers, we encounter a sequence of prescribed learning activities to dash through on our way to the finish line of improved skills, knowledge and attitudes. Our coach, the trainer, gives us advice and feedback. Our family and friends cheer us on. Our peers take the starting blocks along side us. The whistle blows. We race like mad. We turn the corners, our eyes aimed straight ahead. We sweep across the tape. Finally, At the end, we take our hard-earned place on the podium with our admission to the prestigious college or our new high-paying job at that major company. We have run the race.  It was clear what we had to do, so we did it.  On we go to the next race, the next staring line. This curriculum race approach offers many benefits for developers, trainers, and learners. The course or program scope and sequence, the race track, are clearly identifiable.  ...

Distributed learning, often used as a buzz-word, is more of a paradigm-shift forcing educators and learners to re-examine learning and act differently.  From an educator's point of view, distributed learning means providing the same level of educational resources and services to learners regardless of their individual "distances".  For learners, distributed learning means access to what, where, when and how they need to learn. Fellow professional educators, beware: there are more learners than there are educators. We need to listen.  We need to go where the learners already are as opposed to driving them to us.  We need to be learners ourselves.

Teaching is both an art and a science. It calls upon us to be good. It summons us to be kind as an act of giving.  It requires us to know the subject-matter, our students and ourselves. It has models and trends.  It cannot be done without ever vigilant learning.  It is an action that pulls and pushes us. It consumes us and fills us up. In teaching, we can shape learning but we cannot control it.  Learning will happen whether we are there or not.  Yet often, it cannot seem to take place without us.  When we teach, we start with objectives.  Students tow along working to choose and pursue their own learning goals and interests.  Learning can be vast and at the same time small.It is an act both formalized and institutionalized.  It happens at work among colleagues and at home with family and friends. Despite our attempts to organize it, learning is innately social, and very human. It occurs over distances and everywhere two people can be fo...