Diana Laurillard's paper, The Changing University, is very timely, at least from my perspective. Two weeks ago, I spoke at a conference at the US Air Force Academy called Education in the Information Age, and just this past weekend I accompanied a hundred of my faculty colleagues to a mountain retreat to grapple with what teaching (plus research and service) should be like at The University of Georgia in the year 2010. Few people other than Dr. Laurillard have articulated a sound, feasible approach to transforming teaching and learning in higher education, and I wish she had been a keynote speaker at both events.
[quoting Laurillard's paper] The "interactive level" is the level of practice, representing the way the student acts in the world, or at least in a world constructed by the teacher such that their interactive activities will give them experience of the theory in action. Here the teacher sets a task, the student acts, the world responds to their action, and the student can modify their action in order to better achieve the goal of the task. This represents the field trip, or the laboratory experiment, or any situation where the teacher sets an exercise and gives feedback that enables the student to improve their performance.
In my opinion, too many of us in higher education employ tasks that are overly academic, when tasks or assignments can and should be designed to be much more "authentic." A "task orientation" dimension can be conceptualized that has academic tasks at one end of the continuum and authentic tasks at the other. Consider the design of tasks or assignments within the context of an environmental literacy course. An academic approach to task design would probably result in having learners complete traditional assignments such as writing a term paper about the importance of environmental literacy in the 21st Century. The instructor might refer students to the World Wide Web to find the latest information about the environment, and a really "avant-garde" professor might even allow students to create multimedia or Web-based reports. However, as Laurillard notes, this is using the WWW as it is today, simply a vast reservoir of information.
By contrast, an authentic design would engage learners in some "real world" activity such as conducting environmental research in a local habitat. Two of my colleagues, Jim Affolter and C.P. Lo, and I (in collaboration with several Ecology professors and a great team of graduate students) are trying to do something like that here at The University of Georgia by engaging students in stream and forest ecology experiments at the State Botanical Gardens near our campus. We are designing a WWW site to support these authentic learning tasks. As an information resource, the site will provide an orientation to the need for environmental research as well as guidance on how to define research problems, construct hypotheses, collect field data, etc. As an interactive laboratory, the site will include statistical applications (or "applets" in the parlance of Java) into which students will enter their data, and graphing applets to generate visual displays to help students reflect upon the meaning of their data vis a vis their research hypotheses. The WWW site will also include report generation "applets" to enable students to generate and post their research reports on the Web for critical review by their teachers, peers, and researchers around the globe. (We have thus far prototyped these tools in Authorware Professional, and are testing them with a second cohort of undergrads this quarter.) Our ultimate goal is to go beyond the information resources aspects of the WWW (important as they are) to create a dynamic electronic performance support system for authentic learning (Collis & Verwijs, 1995; Laffey, 1995). (This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.)
I don't think we can underestimate the importance of task authenticity, especially if we are primarily interested in higher order outcomes such as problem-solving, metacognitive skills, and transfer to life-long learning and performance. After all, a major concern in education is the degree to which classroom learning transfers to "real life" (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1992). Cognitive learning theory indicates that the way in which knowledge, skills, and attitudes are initially learned plays a major role in the degree to which these abilities can be used in other contexts. If knowledge, skills, and attitudes are learned in a context of use, they will be used in that and similar contexts. With tasks that are primarily academic in nature, it is largely left up to the student to generate connections between conditions (e.g., a problem) and actions (e.g. the use of knowledge as a tool to solve the problem). As noted by Bransford, Sherwood, Hasselbring, Kinzer, and Williams (1990), students who are quite adept at "regurgitating" memorized information (learned via academic tasks) rarely retrieve that same information when confronted with novel conditions that warrant its application. This is at least partially a result of the separation between task completion and feedback that Laurillard points out as a major weakness of contemporary academic practices.
Personally, I do not have as much faith as some in our field seem to have in our ability to design multimedia that consistently engage students in high levels of interactivity in the format of tutorial or simulations. (There are notable exceptions, e.g., the gripping medical simulations created by Joe Henderson at Dartmouth Medical School in the USA or the powerful ecology learning environments designed by John Hedberg and Barry Harper at Wollongong University in Australia.) I have much greater faith in the ability of faculty and students to define challenging, authentic tasks that will serve as the focus for higher order learning, and that we in the field of instructional design and technology can design electronic resources and tools to enable these tasks to be done with the required degrees of authenticity and efficiency. As Laurillard concludes, the latter approach "should (a) give students more opportunities to engage with the practice of their subject; and (b) give them more opportunities to discuss and articulate their ideas." And in the end, the most important goals of higher education will be realized.
Bransford, J.D., Sherwood, R.D., Hasselbring, T.S., Kinzer, C.K., & Williams, S.M. (1990). Anchored instruction: Why we need it and how technology can help. In D. Nix & R. Spiro (Eds.), Cognition, education, and multimedia: Exploring ideas in high technology (pp. 115-141). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1992). The Jasper experiment: An exploration of issues in learning and instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 40(1), 65-80.
Collis, B.A., & Verwijs, C. (1995). A human approach to electronic performance and learning support systems: Hybrid EPSSs. Educational Technology, 35(1), 5-21.
Laffey, J. (1995). Dynamism in electronic performance support systems. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 8(1), 31-46.