I thought that “pedagogy” was the word for how to teach and learn, but looking on the Internet for the meaning of “ped”, I found “pedal” which is the thingie you push with your foot. That’s not appropriate for dealing with students, so I settled on “pedagogy”—clearly related to “iPod”, one of the wonderful technology developments for assisting in teaching and learning via technology.
Our students, most of whom have iPods or other mobile thingies, increasingly include a new-ish group called “non-traditional students”. They are the ones who come back to us, rather than staying in the direct K-25 educational pipeline. It’s great to have them back, but it can be a bit unsettling. We need to adapt.
You see, they have more life experience outside the educational pipeline, and so need (demand?) different treatment. They want education to improve their lives and careers and they know that they want this. They aren’t going through our courses in the naive belief that their school work will be to their benefit – they already know it will. So they ask that their school work clearly support their goals. This calls for an alteration of our methodology. We need to adapt!
“Pedagogy”, oriented to children, isn’t sufficient to achieve this! We need to move to “Podagogy”—or, even better, all the way to “Andragogy”. We need to adapt!
Andragogy is a seismic shift in approach which has been described rather well by my late colleague Malcolm Knowles as “the art and science of helping adults learn”. Wikipedia sums it up well: “Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: ‘man-leading’) should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: ‘child-leading’).”
It’s obvious that adults and children differ in many ways.
One of big differences is motivation leading to self discipline. We already know from times past that adults can even learn from a book – and often did in “correspondence courses”—the precursor of online learning. Later they learned from lectures recorded on VHS cassettes and mailed to them – so they could get a Master’s degree while they were working and raising families.
This is important – because based on this behavior, we can see they are less affected by the lack of the socialization and social encouragement which is found in the face to face classroom. These social aspects are considerably more important to traditional students (“children”) who have an elevated failure to complete online courses satisfactorily.
A lot of effort is going into making online classes more fun and captivating—games, social media… and these are yielding better results with “children”. But our “adult” students don’t require this as much as they require solid and connected content and the flexibility to take classes intermingled with their adult life requirements. We need to make sure that our online classes meet these criteria! We need to adapt!
More reading on Andragogy can be found here.
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