Asking how we (the instructor) can get students to learn what we want them to learn is a flawed perspective. It has an air of authoritarianism on the part of the instructor, which leaves the student as a passive recipient – or vessel – that needs to be filled. Learning however, is an active process (see discussion of assimilation and accommodation in my previous post). This is as true for adults as it is for infants, and as true for academic material as it is for hobbies and pastimes.

A better question then, is to ask how we can get our students’ activities to match what we intend – referred to as constructive alignment. For example, if we want students to be able to explain some process, how do we ensure that all students work towards being able to explain it? Some students will do this of their own volition – regardless of what our intentions are – but many others will not. It is these latter students that we need to engage, and who are much more common in today’s post-secondary learning environments than they ever were in the past.

So how do we do this?

If we want students to be able to engage in higher-level cognitive skills, we need to ensure that what we get them to do requires them to use high-level thinking. However, we also need to ensure that our intentions (i.e., learning objectives) also reflect these same high-level skills. In other words, we need to ensure that our activities align with our learning objectives – and vise-versa.

As an example, Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally is a short (3-week) open access course on Coursera. The learning objectives for this course are split between high-level (e.g., analyze, assess, critique), and mid-level (e.g., describe, explain, summarize) cognitive skills. However, there is one learning objective that requires students to “Give and example of…”. Using the verb to give permits students to locate or reproduce someone else’s example, and thus use low-level thinking to complete it. A better learning objective would be to have students “Generate an example of…”. Switching to the verb to generate means that we expect students to use higher-level cognitive skills to come up with their own examples.

The activities in this course consist of weekly videos, readings and discussions, each requiring no more than 10 minutes, plus one additional longer reading, and a final peer-evaluated project. The videos have occasional multiple-choice questions pop up to ensure the learner is attending to the main points. The discussions are brief and designed to actively engage students with the material, while the final project requires the student to evaluate “a product or method for teaching or improving reading”.

But, do these activities align with the course’s learning objectives?

The discussions and final project appear at first blush to align well with the learning objectives. However, discussions frequently require the learner to describe an experience – in other words, identify something. While this is a great first step, a better activity would additionally require the learner to reflect on how or why their experience connects with the course material. This would ensure that students are not only able to identify the phenomena in their own lives, but also ensures they understand why it is an example.

One final consideration is whether the activities assess the actual learning objectives. Or put differently, whether the learning objectives reflect the course outcomes. When it comes to the final project, this doesn’t seem to be the case. As stated above, this final project requires the learner to evaluate. However, there is no learning objective that indicates the student will be able to evaluate anything. Instead, the learning objectives appear to be things the learner needs in order to be able to evaluate. What seems to be missing then, is a course-level objective. One that indicates students will be able to evaluate, critique, generate, etc. upon completion of the course. Something that seems to be missing in all Coursera courses.

What does this all mean?

Ever more students today are those with goals that don’t engender the application of high-level cognitive skills. However, industry wants graduates who can perform said skills. This inconsistency means that we, as instructors, need to ensure that all students who participate in our courses engage in at minimum mid-level cognitive sills such as summarizing, describing, and explaining. The way to do this, is to ensure that what we don’t just simply expect students to do them, but that we ask them to do so. Because if we don’t ask, we are unlikely to get what we want.