Self Learning

Below is an outcome of discussions with a friend, Gautham Jegadeesan, and from tricklings imbibed from the School of ThinQ.

A small preamble: We all have been talking about goals of education, but as the Mohanans in the School of ThinQ, put it, it is important flesh it out in great detail. Below is an attempt on one strand of what we think education ought to do. 

A. A set of questions is given to students. The resources that will help the student find answer to  these questions are also provided. The students have to go through the resources and find the answer to the questions.  (Here, the student is expected to develop the ability to go through a given resource, assimilate the information provided in the resource and apply the knowledge to answer the questions provided. The outcomes these questions could test could include identification of the right resources, application, critical understanding etc.)

B. Questions are given to students. Resources not given, students have to find the resources and learn from them. (In addition to the outcomes of (A), here, the ability to identify relevant resources and learn from it is targeted.)

C. No resources or questions given – students identify resources by themselves and learn from it themselves and revise their understanding by themselves or from interactions with others.

While A & B can be called as guided self-learning, C may be called as independent learning.

(C) above is an ideal quality that we aspire for in any educated individual. However, the pre-requisite to undertaking (3) is

i.   Ability to identify and formulate clearly what one wants to learn

ii.  The mindset to persist and learn and

iii. Ability to engage in reflection and the mindset to revise/change understanding when presented with arguments/evidences to the contrary.

When we say the ability to learn, we may refer to it at various levels:

1. Familiarity of terminologies

2. Understanding of the concept that the terminologies denote (ability to identify counterexamples is an important in conceptual understanding)

3. Piecing together various concepts to make a big picture

4. Applying the concepts to unknown situations (this could simply be identifying the right formula for a given problem and able to do the relevant mathematical calculations)

5. Critical understanding of a phenomenon (e.g., How do we know that liquids at surfaces have zero velocity?)

6. Design thought/real experiments to test understanding.

I would presume, in the context of a BTech curriculum, we should aspire for at least (B) in the higher semesters.

Suppose we agree that (B) is a desired outcome for our graduates and the above are broadly the various strands/levels that go into self-learning, we then need to ask ourselves, which of the topics in our courses will lend itself easily to inculcate this ability. Needless to say, there are two assumptions that underlie this:

1. We believe all students can be helped to become self-learners

2. Students are willing to become self-learners.

Some challenges

Challenge – 1

One of the challenges that I faced when I tried to attempt at inculcating self-learning through some activities was that students don’t spend time for this.

This was partially because they are victims of an educational system that hasn’t focused on this ability (B) so far. Therefore, they find it daunting or anxious. Or, this is because they don’t have time to invest. Or, because they don’t have the patience to engage in a process for long time (this is supplemented with the distractions in the form of smart phones).

To overcome these, I started giving time within the class hours. This seemed to have some effect and at least some of them started to engage in the process seriously.

The above understanding is based on what I have done over the last semester for only one batch of students. Needless to say, there must be more challenges and solutions that would come out upon subsequent implementation to different batches.

I am also pretty sure that most of us are trying something of this sort in our classes. Would like to invite you to share your experiences and strategies you adopted with the goal that this would eventually enhance our collective teaching process.

Challenge – 2

One of the other challenges that can be foreseen is ‘covering’ the portion when a significant number of class hours are spent for activities of self-learning. Luckily, the syllabus I had was just enough to be covered within the prescribed time. However, I can easily see the difficulty for other courses that will require a full 60 hours. The only solution at this point of time that I can think of is to tailor at least one or two courses per semester (whichever is possible) to adopt this mode, of course, with the instructor’s willingness.