Abstract
Education is successful only when it balances both teaching design and the learning outcome. The role of an educational system is to empower students and make them life-long learners. There are various forms of innovative pedagogy to boost learner-centric teaching and learning in an educational system. This enables the students to become active learners in the classroom. The performance of a student in terms of learning outcome is required at the end of a course. This chapter will address various problems when using traditional teaching techniques in diverse learner environments and approaches to enable learner-centric teaching to reach the learning outcomes of a student.
TopIntroduction
The traditional lecture method is teacher-controlled and information-centered. There are some characteristics of traditional teaching. The instructor talks and students listen with minimal interruptions (Ernst, 1994). Student concentration can be observed to drop after 10-15 minutes and the student-to-student talk is discouraged (Dansereau, 1978). Students listen and take notes independently. Student comprehension during the lecture is not monitored explicitly. Student absenteeism often is quite high (Mann, & Robinson, 2009).
The recent teaching methodology follows various instructional design solutions. Instruction is the external events designed by the teacher to support the internal process of learning. A plan of teaching and learning activities that motivates the students to learn (Reeve, 2012). Instruction Design (ID) is the process of designing external events (instructional events) for the students to learn better (Morrison et al., 2019). Dr. David M. Merrill proposed a solution called “First Principles of Instruction” (2002) and it is Task-centered (Merrill, 2012). He proposed a “Pebble-in-the-Pond” Instructional model for Design (2006) - Designing a progression of problems and solving problems (Merrill, 2007). Finally, he developed a Task-centered instructional strategy (2007) called “Tell-Show”, “Tell-Show-Do” (Merrill, 2007).
Figure 1.
Task-centered/problem-centered
Figure 2.
Pebble-in-the-pond instructional model (Merrill, 2012)
Figure 3.
Tell-show/tell-show-do (Merrill, 2012)
The next solution is given by Dr. David Perkins, who is a founding member of Project Zero (Research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) (Perkins, 2010). This investigates human symbolic capacities and their development. The “Project Zero” developed “Teaching for Understanding framework” that defines four elements of planning and instruction. Four Central Questions About Teaching are:
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What shall we teach?
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What is worth understanding?
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How shall we teach for understanding?
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How can students and teacher know what students understand and how students can develop deeper understanding?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): The process of delivering the learning content through online.
Course Outcome (CO): Statements describe the institutional learning outcomes. It is used to assess the success of the course upon completion of the course.
Instruction Design (ID): The process of practicing the development and delivery of content with learning activities. It is helpful in teaching-learning process.
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL): It is an initiative of Government of India that provides high-quality education and learning resources to students and teachers.
Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL): It is a technology used in education that helps students and teachers.
Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM): It is an initiative of Government of India that provides high-quality education and learning resources to students and teachers.