Facilitating Online Discussion Board Issues

Our class’ conversations and readings this week about Facilitating Discussion Board Issues seemed to be the heart and soul of this whole course and could’ve been called Facilitating Learning Online. I thought we were learning online pedagogy, but that is an incorrect term. While even the American Heritage College Dictionary said pedagogy is the art or vocation of teaching, the word’s root meaning is child-centered education. Pedagogy is teacher-led education, whereas the term Andragogy better reflects the online learner’s responsibility, which is self-focused, self-directed learning.

The term Andragogy was popularized by Malcolm Knowles in 1968 to describe the art of education of adults. His beliefs about adult learners were:

1) As a human matures her self-concept moves from being dependent on another to
being self-directed.
2) As a human matures she accumulates a great well of personal experience that
becomes a resource for her learning.
3) As a human matures her duties and life-problems become motivation to learn.
4) As a human matures she worries less about subject matter and desires an immediate
way to apply her knowledge to life and problem-solving.
5) As a human matures her motivation to learn comes from internal desire and
curiosity.

And thus ‘The Art of the Question’ has broader implications, because the student is not answering to prove she knows something, but rather it is used as active inquiry – a way to keep the students inquisitive. I wonder if research has been done about success rates in online classes and age. Certainly it seems to me that based on these implied assumptions about successful online/adult learners it would be difficult for younger students to perform well simply because they lack the ability for self-direction and still need to take cues from an instructor. What might bridge this gap between answer-focused learning and critical thinking that is so important for online student success? Our instructor gave an important answer to this question, “higher level questioning and answering can be taught, and lead to critical thinking.”

In researching andragogy I found that the term may have been used as early as 1926 by Eduard Lindeman a philosopher of adult education and his colleague Martha Anderson. Lindeman said that “adult education is a cooperative venture in non-authoritarian, informal learning – the chief purpose of which is to discover the meaning of experience.”