One of the biggest challenges in training is identifying your students' knowledge gaps and having a strategy for dealing with them.
Generally, you want to identify certain performance goals for your trainees. That sets the target, and then after your intervention, you will want to test to see that those goals have been achieved.
An artisan builds each widget as a unique and unrepeatable project. If the artisan builds a chair, even though we all know the function of a chair and a chair's general characteristics, the artisan will build the chair from scratch. Each leg or arm will be turned and sanded lovingly. The surface will be polished and oiled until it is a work of art. It is beautiful, but it will also be expensive because all of that loving care takes time.
What is the most important challenge in education today?
It is being able to teach students when they have some free time, when they are not distracted, and only what they need to know at the moment.
Studies show that people forget 70% of what they learned 24 hours after training. So, it is essential that people only learn what they are most interested in learning at the moment. Usually, that is to solve an immediate problem.
One summer, when I was in elementary school, I was terrified! You see, by the end of the school year I had not yet memorized the Times Table and I knew that I'd be entering the upcoming school year clearly disadvantaged. I imagined a disappointed teacher and my embarrassment and humiliation amongst my schoolmates. That is pretty much what happened!
Jack and Jill are working on a physics problem. Their teacher asked them to calculate the force needed to hurl a 500 pound projectile from a spot on Earth to 20,000 miles in low earth orbit. They don’t have any idea of what they need to know to solve this problem and they don’t want to dig through numerous articles or videos on the subject. They want to learn what they need for this problem as thoroughly and rapidly as possible.
Current e-learning has been focused primarily on mimicking the classroom, except that the teacher takes on a less important role. Students are interacting with content that a subject matter expert assembled, but there is no direct relationship between the student and the content matter expert, a.k.a., the teacher. Webinars and the occasional live interaction are inadequate substitutes for the classroom experience.
Sandra Ponce de Leon writes about Knowledge Avatars.
The word Avatar has significant meaning in Hindi, it means the physical representation of a deity on earth, Knowledge Avatars takes inspiration from the word and aims to create the largest database of minds on earth through its digital tutoring platform.
In the near future, a Knowledge Avatar may also live in a physical robot, a virtual reality world, or as an augmented reality character.
Learn how to create a Knowledge Avatar here. It's easy!
We hear it every day. “It’s a great value for the money,” but really, what does that actually mean to educators and students alike? What exactly is the value of an education?
Statistics from the US Census Bureau and 2010 report by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workplace offer some striking insights on the value of an education:
Most of our lives we learn specifically what we need to achieve our goals. As children, we learn how to crawl, walk, and talk when we are physically ready to do so and when our brains are sufficiently developed to take on the task. Even so, we will only attempt something new, like the precarious act of walking, when we are motivated to do it. Babies start to crawl to get to something that they want, their mother and her milk, for example, a shiny toy, or perhaps something to explore. Similarly, we learn to talk to get what we want.