New Ways to Learn

The way things are
Universities are a place of great learning. Throughout the course of our degrees we learn lots of things, through both formal and informal channels. For many of us, consciously thinking and reflecting on the way we learn and on the way a lecturer teaches does not happen very often. For instance, this might only happen when we’re writing up our course evaluation forms, or if we’re asked to explain why a particular lecturer or tutor was good or bad.

In fact, there is a whole field of study dedicated to looking at teaching and learning: pedagogy. There isn’t one universally “best” way to teach a subject. As we all know, the methods, styles and preferences of teaching differ between faculties, schools, and lecturers.

Similarly, there are also different ways of learning. Learning music is a very different process to learning a language, math or literature.

Lecturers learn too
On the other side of the story, most lecturers aren’t just lecturers – they’re educators, too. As such, they grapple with the problem of how to better teach courses, as well as how to better design assessments that will help students learn better.

Lecturers don’t have all the answers, and as such there is lots of reliance on student feedback, in both passive and active ways. Passive methods might include: More active methods include:
 * Looking at grade distributions
 * Tutor feedback
 * Journal articles or methods tested elsewhere
 * Student Evaluation of Learning and Teaching forms (SELTs)
 * Class rep feedback
 * Student comments
 * Student reps at College Education Committee

The way we think things should be
Ultimately, students are the ones doing most of the learning. As such, they themselves know how they learn best (for instance, think about all the exam and studying strategies you have). In a sense, then, lecturers use the feedback methods above to guess at how each student learns best.

This is a difficult process for lecturers, particularly when considering the other things they have to deal with already.

Though pinpointing how each individual student learns best is an impossible task, there are student groups that are in contact with the different ways students learn different subjects best. Faculty-specific organisations like the Law Students’ Society (LSS) or the Society for Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) also deal significantly with ways of learning in their respective fields.

We believe that there are incredible opportunities to work with these societies, as well as interested students, in developing constructive proposals on how to improve the learning experience at ANU. Instead of having lecturers trying to guess at how students learn best, students instead should put forward well thought-out ideas of how they learn best.

The scope of such a proposal could take two broad approaches:
 * Improvements to the way courses are already taught, such as looking at the appropriate of certain types of assessments, course content, the way course content is delivered, and so on.
 * Looking at entirely different ways of teaching and learning. Of inspiration could be the interdisciplinary approaches of the Vice-Chancellor’s undergraduate courses (course coded “VCUG”), or the “curiosity”-driven approach of the Cross-Disciplinary Students Academy (XSA).

Do
 Solution  : education reform proposal

We think that students have a lot to say about what they get out of their courses, as well as how they learn best. Drawing on the lessons of successful courses, and in conjunction with faculty-specific organisations and the XSA, we want to conduct a broad exploration and evaluation of learning at the ANU.

We want to then turn reflection and analysis into concrete proposals for faculties at the ANU, so as to improve methods of teaching and learning.

 Solution:  public education

We think that public education, in the form of getting students aware and thinking about the issues surrounding teaching and learning, is crucial in helping deliver a better academic university experience.

 Solution  : expanding networks

The clubs and societies on campus have access to lots of talented people, valuable ideas and specialised insights. Consciously expanding ANUSA’s networks, working closely with clubs and societies and tapping into this pool of talent will help contribute to a more vibrant university experience.

 Solution:  informal participation

Getting students talking to their lecturers about their education is a key step if we want to improve learning at the ANU.

In addition, students will need to be engaged both formally and informally in the process of developing an education reform proposal, to allow as many opinions and perspectives to contribute to this as possible.

Anonymous Discussion:

We've talked about giving feedback to classes in a course that I'm doing. One of the things that was suggested was having a constant mechanism of feedback. I'm not sure there's a whole lot of point in getting students to give feedback at the end of the course. By that stage the only people who really respond are those who either loved or hated the course, you miss out on a whole lot of people in the middle. As well as that, by only providing feedback at the end of the course the incentive for giving it isn't really there because those students won't see any changes in the course that might be made because of their feedback (unless they have to do the course again). Perhaps having a constant SELT sort of thing on a course's WATTLE site might be a way to allow feedback more regularly. It would allow students to give feedback on particular lectures if they so wanted. So if a student thought a lecture was particularly good or bad then they could say so (anonymously) during the course so the lecturer has a chance to change the way they are teaching. There are probably other ways to go about getting constant feedback as well.

That said, as far as new ways of learning go, I think it's difficult for lecturers to change their way of teaching drastically. My classes are small so it's easy to do question and answer type things or having a spice smelling and guessing competition and then relate that to trade routes (which was an awesome lecture, just saying). For larger classes, especially those with hundreds of students, it's hard to do more than just talk. I think it's perhaps not the lecturers that should be changing their teaching methods but the tutors (so what I wrote above is also relevant for tutorials). Tutors are those that students have the most contact with and the classes are fairly small so the teaching technique can be adapted to the learning style of the tutorial as whole. There might be another problem in that solution if the course convenor isn't open to the idea of creative education strategies. I think it's important that the communication pathways between tutors and course convenors/head tutors are open so that creative learning isn't frowned upon. If a tutor is wanting to engage with their tutorial group in a new/different way then it's really up to the course convenor to be ok with that. Tutors won't take risks if they're worried about the reaction that those higher in the ranks may have. I'm not really sure how to fix this problem. Perhaps it might be the role of ANUSA to hold some sort of talk fest where tutors and course convenors of similar classes get an opportunity to engage with students who are interested in teaching methods to be able to get feedback. Having the course convenors present may also allow them to hear what students actually want and therefore allow their tutors to take 'risks' when presenting content. 