This is a hard-to-write article, as the words seem to grab from the depths of my soul memories I fought for a long time to push back and forget, but that, eventually, I managed to process. It touches me on a personal level more than many of the people around me realize or even thought possible. And even now, laying it down in a few words sounds a bit eery:
Have you ever been in a learning situation where the information wasn’t easily available? Now multiply that by ten or twenty, and you’ll get a small taste of what a person in a disability situation experiences day by day, at the hands of poor design in a learning or any other context.
People tastes and needs are always changing, and every trainer is, and should be, in a continuous battle to make sure their courses can survive the market. There are, however, several recipes for failure, ways to ruin your chances of survival right from the start and those recipes are rather easy to follow!
Almost a century ago, the French poet Paul Valéry declared that: “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be”. Looking at the education industry in general, it feels like the perception we have about our future shifts continuously, and not always for the better.
No matter where or when it occurs, learning, as a process, is an important component of our lives, and trying to find better ways of going through it generated many significant improvements over the years. It also generated a myriad of false facts, and without further ado, these are our top 5 learning myths that are losing touch with reality.
Raise your hand if you’ve never ever received an unsolicited email. A spam email. An unwanted creation that populates your inbox with titles aimed to grab your attention. Yup, I knew it! No hands were raised.
Studies have shown that in instructor-based courses, note-taking promotes learning. Some authors even suggest that this skill is a prerequisite for effective acquisition of knowledge (Bauer & Koedinger, 2006; Kauffman, Zhao, & Yang, 2011). The same benefits have been found in online environments, although there are certain advantages and disadvantages specific to virtual spaces.
