Learners as co-instructors/ Instructors as co-learners

In 1984 Bloom and his colleagues discovered that there is a significant gap between student potential and achievement in formal educational settings. In one-on-one tutoring, an average student out-performed 98% of  those in classroom settings. He gave the academic community a challenge -

"I believe an important task of research and instruction is to seek ways of accomplishing this [academic success] under more practical and realistic conditions than the one-to-one tutoring, which is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale. This is the “2 sigma” problem. Can researchers and teachers devise teaching-learning conditions that will enable the majority of students under group instruction to attain levels of achievement that can at present be reached only under good tutoring conditions?.... If the research on the 2 sigma problem yields practiced methods (methods that the average teacher or school faculty can learn in a brief period of time and use with little more cost or time than conventional instruction), it would be an educational contribution of the greatest magnitude" [quoted from abstract Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network by Jon Mott and David Wiley http://www.ineducation.ca/article/open-learning-cms-and-open-learning-network]


Technology seemed the obvious solution to meet the challenge. Thus, the learning management system or course management system was born. The abstract cited above is insightful and explores the limitations of uni-directional distribution of knowledge in the traditional educational paradigm. Technology in the form of CMS or LMS has done little to change this formalized distribution of knowledge - the control of what is taught and how it is assessed is all in the hands of the class administrator.  Furthermore, the learning is restricted to a time code - when the class is over, the learning stops. This is more efficient, but this article argues and I can't help but agree that this model limits student curiosity and creativity, thus their ultimate potential.


Education should facilitate discourse through encouraging participation, self discovery and various forms of creativity and problem solving. I have been a follower of shamanic practices for years and one of the things that I have learned is how our language and concepts about how things should be fixes them in time limiting their full potential in a universe of limitless possibilities. By tightly defining the content to be learned by the student and containing the field of learning to a time black, rather than building in choice that promotes curiosity and personalization of the learning, we are fixing the parameters of the learning field. In essence, current technology builds a container as limiting as the walls around a classroom. I love the notion brought out in this abstract that we are setting students up for greater success in life in general if we set up our learning environments to support learners as co-instructors and instructor as co-learners and encourage the on-going growth of the shared knowledge long after a course has ended. Let's face it, when we go out into the real world, the problems and potential solutions are limited only by our lack of imagination and creativity. I know that I have learned a lot from my children - it matters not that they are nearly 30 years younger than I nor that I am more "educated".