Alberto Cañas

• The use of technology in education
• Software tools in education

What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education?

1)       Fostering knowledge modeling to support learning both for evaluation and collaboration between students.  Having some kind of a medium by which students can express what they know about a topic and share it with others.

2)       Using the Internet as means for collaboration, as opposed to a means of just posting content for the students to browse.  Having students be knowledge constructors instead of just information consumers.  One of the problems that I have seen is the lack of tools that are developed open environments for collaboration or knowledge construction (both at K-12 and higher education).

What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research?  

Departments.  One problem we have with the universities is that departments are very compartmentalized and many departments teach their courses and don’t really care that much about the service courses they teach.  You have a course in one topic that a department teaches and it has nothing to do with the other courses from other departments.  This makes it very difficult to create any kind of interdisciplinary programs.  It makes it difficult to take advantage of content from different departments and put together courses.

Lectures.  Another problem is that a number of students can’t seem to get away from the professor standing up and lecturing.  Most professors love to stand up and lecture.  They assume that the students that sit down in the class will learn from the professor lecturing and getting away from this style of teaching will be somewhat difficult.

 Linearity of the Courses.  Sometimes when I have a lot of students in my class, it is hard to get away from the textbook.  You have the linear sequence that the textbooks gives you and you really cannot teach things in another order, mainly because you cannot really base your teaching on articles, change the order of the chapters, and because textbooks are written in a linear way.  Technology can help us if we use it wisely.  In most cases we are taking the technology to just put core courses on the network.  The problem is that every university is coming up with its own courses.  How many psychology 101 courses are we going to put on the Internet before we find out that most of them are pretty bad?  We are going back to what happened many years ago when every university had to create their own textbooks because nobody was willing to use somebody else’s textbook, until we found out that most of the textbooks were useless.  Then we started to share textbooks and now it is common to use somebody else’s textbook.  The online content will get to the point where we will be able to pull online content from different places and create our own courses the way we want them.

Lack of Software in Education.  There is very little software to support any type of collaboration or open environments for learning.  Most of the tools that we use mostly come from the business area.  We do not really develop many tools that foster a learning environment.  We need software that allows students to create and construct a model or a simulation of something. 

What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied (?

We do a good job at the two extremes of education.  Kindergarten is a good example because kids go and work on their own and do research and there is somebody that supervises what they are doing, but they are not into a very tight curriculum.  Teachers make sure that the students get a balanced education.  Students work in groups and collaborate.  We do a very good job at the masters and PhD level, where there is a supervisor that makes sure that the student gets a balanced education and gets some research in some topic.  Graduate seminars are not linear in the sense that you have a textbook and it is followed, rather you have discussions and you read and present articles.  It is somewhere in the middle where we have large lectures that we have a big problem.  Technology can help us.  We can take advantage of technology to make the content of the courses available in a modular way.

Like I said I work more with K-12 schools.  There is one school that I work with in Brazil that really broke down the curriculum.  They do not have textbooks, math, science, or English classes, but they have tried to integrate all the courses into projects.  It is probably quite an extreme and we may not get to that, but it shows some of the interesting aspects of what happens when you are trying to integrate different areas (e.g., science, math, and history together).  Using this method with these kids it has been very effective, although there are some areas (e.g., algebra) that cannot be integrate it as well as others.

There is a very interesting course that is taking place down at Brazil by a colleague.  She is training, through distance learning, 500 teachers (or support personnel) throughout the whole country.  The distance learning is not putting all of the content of the course on the web, but rather it involves having each of the support personnel contact a teacher that has established a group and have them come up with a project.  The project is the basis of the course.  One of the interesting things is that they did not know what all these teachers were going to come up with as their projects.  So two weeks before the course begins, they don’t really know what the real topics that are going to be covered are, but they had 50 people to support each the 500 teachers.  Most of what they would do is collaboration and exchange through email and other tools.  What I found interesting was that the ratio of instructor to student was 10 to 1, which is completely the opposite of what you find with distance learning courses.  The ratio of most distance learning classes is much larger because you assume that a single instructor can carry on many students.  I like the approach that they were doing because they have access to many people while they are teaching.  

What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

The major barrier is that the universities tend to be the most conservative organizations in terms of change.  The other problem is the faculty.  We are going to have to get the faculty to change.  Faculty are used to the lecture modality and they will lecture as well. 

What additional questions should we be asking?

I think one question we should ask is how do we evaluate whether people have learned or not.  One of the problems I have with higher-level education is that a lot times classes only have one midterm and one final and that takes up the majority of the grade.  This approach assumes those tests are a good way to evaluate whether people have learned or not and not everyone is a good test takers and they don’t have a different opportunity to show us what they have really learned. 

What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)?

The main way to get change is to implement and show the results.  You can write as much as you want, but it is not until you can show it that you can achieve change.