Most students are eager to learn. A school is a good place for that, because there are many lecturers who are eager to teach. Sounds like an ideal situation of actors who offer (lecturers) and demand (students) information, knowledge, experience and competences. But it isn’t.

Between those who demand (students) and offer (lecturers)  stands the same school that brought them together in the first place. This is a possible source for frustration on both sides. This works as follows.

Traditional schools teach according to the traditional communication-model of ‘sending and receiving’: lecturers lecture, students listen and write down what lecturers tell. But this traditional communication-model is obsolete and also this teaching-model is obsolete.

In communication & media ‘sending and receiving’ is replaced by ‘interaction’, and also in modern education ‘lecturing and listening’ is being replaced by ‘interaction’. Preparing students for a job is no longer the same as putting a lot of knowledge into their brains. Students have to be able to apply this knowledge. This means that there should be a shift from knowledge-focused education to competence-focused education: students have to proof that they are competent to perform the job that they study for.

Competence-focused education asks for input from the professional field: people who already perform the job inform school about what should be taught. Especially in the quickly changing world of communication & media it is vital to maintain the body of knowledge up to date. This helps to deliver people to the job-market that meet the requirements demanded on that job-market.

So, professionals have an influence on what information the school should offer. At the same time students have a say in how and when they want to learn this, because they are no longer ‘empty buckets’ passively waiting to be filled with whatever schools has in store for them. Our society demands students who are actively looking for new and useful information and competences. Actually every working professional should have this same attitude of life-long learning.

Now, the actual situation is still quite similar to the traditional (obsolete) situation. Therefore school often stands between lecturers who want to teach and students who want to learn, instead of facilitating this market of information. Schools stand between these willing actors because they are still organized for traditional teaching; also – not in the least – lecturers, managers and students still have the traditional paradigm in mind.

As a result schools force lecturers and students to come together in a fixed classroom and discuss fixed subjects, on fixed moments during a fixed period of time. If one of the actors is not there in time (physically or mentally) he or she can expect a punishment of some kind: bad marks, extra work, etc.

Outside this straitjacket lecturers and students can exchange information that is on their personal agenda. Therefore it often happens that students gain new insights during discussions after lessons or during meetings on the corridor. But most of all, students tend to learn a lot during their work-placement and during their graduation-project; often they learn much more than during the preceding years. Typically a work-placement or a graduation-project is not characterized by a fixed program.

Instead of forcing students and lecturers to be on a place and do programmed things, a school should facilitate the exchange of information between actors who demand (students) and offer (lecturers). The information-market should be made transparent: a student should be able to find the information that he wants (not by definition that the school wants) easily. This would transform a school into a rich learning-environment of both online and offline learning tools and methods. Then time and space would not be relevant; the medium would not be relevant, but the message. This would be truly crossmedia applied on education, this would be the ideal blended learning environment.

tagged with: information market, competence, sending and receiving, blended learning

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