Collaborative Development Programmes on Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategies

The underpinning

The education environment worldwide is changing rapidly in the last few decades due to the following factors:

• Increasing amount of data, information and knowledge, in particular that of user generated content (UGC), that we have to deal with in our daily work


• Half-life of much of the knowledge and information is getting shorter: information supplied to us in a structured professional development session months ago will often be out-of-date by the time we adopt or apply it


• Changing demands of parents, students and employers on the skill set learned in a programme

As practitioners of the education sector, where people often work with their heads rather than their hands , we all experience fast moving challenges in our workplaces day to day. These challenges are mainly originated from:

• The overwhelming volume of information and knowledge created from time to time:
  
  
  

  “Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created. We now create five exabytes every two days”

  Eric Schmidt, CEO Google (2010)

  
  
  
  
• The half-life of knowledge is shrinking.
  
  
  

  “The half-life of knowledge is 6 – 18 months and dropping. This time compares to a half-life in 1960s at being 12 – 15 years”

  Alex Hutchins Knoxville Adult Education Examiner (2011)

  
  
  
  
• Plus the escalating expectations of parents and students on the direct linkage between education programmes and further studies and/or workplace; while employers expect that graduates of an education programme can provide the necessary skill sets to perform duties of related jobs without further on-the-job training.
  
  

Dynamic challenges in our workplaces imply that we have to adopt new ways of working. For people with extensive working experiences in the sector, they should find that the ways of student learning are changing continuously. For instance, traditional content-rich knowledge transfer model can no longer motivates most students; new contexts (new disciplines and contents) as well as experience-rich learning by doing become more popular. We have to adopt new strategies, technologies, and knowledge from time to time.

New ways of working required new ways of learning for teachers!!!