scholarly journals LIFELONG LEARNING: A SKILL NEEDED TODAY FOR THE ENGINEERS OF THE FUTURE

Author(s):  
Sadegh Babaii Kochekseraii ◽  
Libby Osgood

This paper will focus on our efforts to introduce the lifelong learning graduate attribute into the classroom environment required by CEAB for engineering accreditation. ENGN334: Intro to Mechatronics is a third year focus area elective course in the new engineering degree at UPEI. It gave the opportunity to develop a syllabus in which the students were encouraged to proactively participate in developing their own weekly learning goals based on the proposed list of topics. From their weekly submissions and subsequent reflections, we tried to answer if the students were setting realistic goals, assessed against SMART learning goals, and how the balance of the short and long term goals changed over the semester. It is therefore the objective of this paper to examine how effective it could be to promote realistic goal setting through professional skill development (PSD) intervention and proactive self-directed learning.

Huey Percy Newton (b. 1942–d. 1989) is a singular figure in African American history. Born in Monroe, Louisiana to Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, he joined the Great Migration as a child when his family relocated to Oakland, California. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959, but forever claimed that school failed him, notably in the fact that he graduated without learning to read. Alongside self-directed learning, he then studied at Merritt College in Oakland, one of the city’s hotbeds of political discussion and activism. After joining, and becoming disillusioned by, a sequence of campus organizations, in October 1966 he formed the Black Panther Party (BPP) with his friend and fellow student Bobby Seale, who credits Newton as the principal architect of the BPP’s political philosophy and the driving force behind its early activism. The BPP initially focused on protesting police brutality in Oakland, most importantly through a sequence of patrols of police officers, which involved armed Panthers observing police activities in Oakland, informing local citizens of their legal rights during any arrest procedure and ensuring that the police conducted their duties lawfully and respectfully; and the May 1967 protest at the California State Capitol, one of the central events of the 1960s (although Newton was absent from the latter due to probation restrictions). On 28 October 1967 he was charged with the murder of Oakland police officer John Frey. The subsequent trial transformed the BPP and Newton into international phenomena. Despite a fervent “Free Huey” campaign and a bravura defense from his attorney, Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. He served two years in prison, being released after his appeal revealed that the presiding judge of his original trial twice incorrectly instructed the jury and allowed disputed evidence to be presented to the jury. Two further retrials led to deadlocked juries. Returning in August 1970 to a transformed BPP, Newton struggled to cope with the fame and expectations placed upon him. Just as important was an extensive FBI campaign of disinformation, surveillance, infiltration, and occasional violence. Newton’s long-term use of cocaine did little to help. In 1974 he fled the United States for Cuba, fearing prosecution for the murder of a teenager, Kathleen Smith. He returned in 1977 to face the charges, which were eventually dropped. Following the collapse of the BPP amid accusations of financial impropriety, Newton essentially disappeared from public life. He was shot and killed in West Oakland by Tyrone Robinson, a local gang member, following an altercation over a drug deal.


Author(s):  
Teresa J. Carter ◽  
Jeffrey S. Nugent

Twenty-first century information communication technologies are enabling learners to create personal learning networks (PLNs) tailored to individual learning goals, needs, and interests, with implications for self-directed learning in the digital age. New, readily available digital media tools, open courseware, and other Web 2.0 technologies are changing how learners interact online, creating a participatory culture of knowledge sharing and content creation that is very different from early uses of the Web for accessing content. As learners participate in the multiple virtual communities of practice that comprise a PLN, they require new skills that merit reconsideration of the role of the educator in helping learners to become self-directed in both formal and informal learning contexts.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-35
Author(s):  
Paul Brunton

Change is a constant in our profession, and we are familiar with this on a daily basis, as we constantly change how we practise. But consider how the way we learn and the very structure of our profession has changed in recent years. If I think back, I attended a traditional dental school and had, in my view, an excellent undergraduate education. Compare that top-down approach to the approach today, with its self-directed learning and student-led clinics – to give a couple of examples of a bottom-up model of providing effective dental education. The net result of this, in my view, is that today’s graduates are a little different in many respects, both when they graduate and in their long-term career ambitions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 1168-1188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Chan-Chio Lao ◽  
Hercy N. H. Cheng ◽  
Mark C. L. Huang ◽  
Oskar Ku ◽  
Tak-Wai Chan

One-to-one technology, which allows every student to receive equal access to learning tasks through a personal computing device, has shown increasing potential for self-directed learning in elementary schools. With computer-supported self-directed learning (CS-SDL), students may set their own learning goals through the suggestions of the system based on their e-portfolio and strive for the goals with efforts and mathematics capability. However, unlike adults who hold specific purposes that lead to enhanced motivation for SDL, children’s motivation is crucial for learning individually. Therefore, this study examines the differences in motivational orientation and learning strategies between second graders with different intensities of intrinsic and extrinsic goals. The results indicate that students with high intensity of both intrinsic and extrinsic goals demonstrate significantly higher motivational orientation and learning strategies than those with low intensity of goals. These results provide supportive evidence for the design of CS-SDL at the elementary level and offer a reference for exploring children’s motivational differences in CS-SDL.


2013 ◽  
pp. 142-153 ◽  

Welcome to this new SiSAL column, which will examine a long-term project conducted at one institution in depth over several issues. The focus of this column will be the curriculum design project currently being undertaken at the Self-Access Learning Centre (SALC) at Kanda University of International Studies (KUIS) in Chiba, Japan. In my role as Academic Coordinator of the SALC from 2011-2013, I was in charge of leading this project in its initial stages, before I moved institution. As editor, it is from this perspective, as someone familiar but no longer directly involved in the project, that I hope to collate and introduce a number of columns from the learning advisors and teachers who are conducting the research and designing the new self-directed learning curriculum. In this first installment, a revision of an earlier article which first appeared in the IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG newsletter, Independence, (Thornton, 2012) I present the background to the project, the framework used to guide it and the results of the first stage, the environment analysis.


Author(s):  
Ng Wen Lee ◽  
Wan Noor Farah Wan Shamsuddin ◽  
Lim Chia Wei ◽  
Muhammad Nur Adilin Mohd Anuardi ◽  
Chan Swee Heng ◽  
...  

<span lang="EN-GB">Criticisms on multiple choice questions (MCQs) include the possibility of students answering MCQs correctly by guessing, and MCQs generally are said to fall short in cultivating independent learning skills, such as taking charge of their learning goals. Countering these common concerns, this research used online MCQ exercises with multiple attempts to investigate the experiences that drove students to become self-directed learners. In this research, 60 students completed two sets of online MCQ exercises with multiple attempts outside of classroom time for six weeks consecutively. Both focus group interviews and an online survey were conducted to investigate the experiences of using online MCQ exercise with multiple attempts in relation to the development of self-directed learning (SDL). The findings of the study showed that the criticisms may be unfounded. Data leads to the conclusion that the majority of the students do not just try to guess at the correct answers. Rather, many of them attempted the online MCQ exercises more than once to improve themselves indicating that they were interested in self-learning. Students also reported that they utilised search and inquiry skills that clearly showed motivated initiatives to plan how to overcome their weaknesses by independently looking for relevant resources, determine their own learning goals, and evaluate their own learning performance as a firm indicator of SDL development. Based on the findings, this study is able to refute the claim that MCQs are unable to cultivate independent learning skills.</span>


2014 ◽  
pp. 58-78
Author(s):  
Satoko Watkins ◽  
Neil Curry ◽  
Jo Mynard

In the fourth installment of the column following the self-directed learning curriculum development project at Kanda University of International Studies, Japan, Satoko Watkins, Neil Curry and Jo Mynard detail the process of conducting a pilot of a possible self-directed learning curriculum for freshmen students, that would meet the needs and principles established in the previous two installments. This pilot represents quite a shift for the learning advisors (LAs), as it would bring what has up until now been a largely self-study course into the mainstream classroom environment, taught by LAs. The installment offers an insight into the strengths and potential weaknesses of such a course, and how students responded to it.


Author(s):  
Jorrick Beckers ◽  
Diana Dolmans ◽  
Jeroen Van Merriënboer

<p>e-Portfolios have become increasingly popular among educators as learning tools. Some research even shows that e-portfolios can be utilised to facilitate the development of skills for self-directed learning. Such skills include self-assessment of performance, formulation of learning goals, and selection of future tasks. However, it is not yet clear under which conditions e-portfolios optimally facilitate the development of these skills. We conducted a systematic review aimed at identifying and understanding influences on the development of self-directed learning with an e-portfolio. Inclusion criteria were used to select recent, high quality studies that focused on e-portfolios and reported an influence on self-directed learning. There were 17 articles that met the inclusion criteria. Institutional factors, curriculum factors, learning process factors, personal factors, and portfolio factors were identified. Portfolios are used most effectively when faculty development aimed at supervising self-directed learning skills development is provided, when the portfolio is integrated into the educational routine, when teachers coach students regularly, when scaffolding is applied to increase motivation, and when the portfolio is designed to facilitate at least goal-setting, task-analysis, plan implementation, and self-evaluation.</p>


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