Learning
experience

By Carmel Tse/October, 2019
University of Maryland LDT 100 Project

Elementary

I was born and raised in Hong Kong, which was then a British colony and at the primary school I attended, we were taught three broad subjects: English, Chinese and arithmetic. The school was staffed by local and Eurasian teachers and the teaching languages were a mixed of English and Chinese.

Take arithmetic as an example, there were two subjects – one taught in Chinese basically allowing the children to learn basic mathematic skills; and the other taught in English with an aim to expose the pupils to an “English” way of life and as an example we were taught pounds, shillings, pence and farthings of the old British monetary units, while we were using only the Hong Kong currency denominated at 100 cents to the dollar. The comprehension was remote and difficult as none of us had ever even seen a pound note.

High school

I moved onto Wah Yan College, Kowloon, a Jesuit high school taught by local teachers and Jesuit priests, mostly Irish.

The Jesuits are great teachers and this was what I wrote two years ago in memory of one of them:

“Teachers have students, good teachers have learners, and teaching gods have disciples… I was one of the few lucky ones who had a teaching god as my form master. Almost 45 years after being taught by the late Jesuit priest, I find what I recently learned at the Harvard Derek Bok Center was already practiced by the priest almost half a century ago. He was not just a high school teacher, he was a reflective practitioner. He was a pioneer on modern teaching concepts, he encouraged intrinsic motivation, he created an inclusive teaching environment and built student rapport, he engaged students in active learning and connected knowledge with real life, he used formative feedback, the list goes on…”

The reverend taught biology, English and religious studies. He devoted his entire career to teaching teenage boys in Hong Kong. He died in Hong Kong two years ago. He will be missed, but his teaching spirit will linger on.

Professional

I will like to reflect on an experience regarding inclusion within a learning environment. Mr. Master Instructor, my professor at Humber College, Toronto taught my course that prepared us to be drivers education classroom teachers. It’s like a "Teacher's College for Driving Instructors”.

As diversified as Ontario, 80 percent of my class were members of the visible minorities. Perhaps because of the diversity of the class, race was never a factor in the professor’s teaching. There were, however, other skills that distinguished our teaching abilities. The course was heavily focused on course presentation and curriculum building.

Knowing how to write presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint was a challenge for many of peers. I was among the first in sequence to do a class presentation, I prepared my PowerPoint presentation and stored it on a USB drive. I finished my first micro teaching session without incident. A few fellow students walked up to me and asked me what “brand” of USB I used to make the presentation. My answer was another long story I would share with later.

The professor said in the old days, instructors would record their presentations on VHS tapes, used a whiteboard and overhead projectors to present. He said they could still use that method but emphasized that our teen students nowadays are mostly internet savvy and we as instructors better prepare ourselves with new technology. Borrowing from George Siemens: "Connectivism is a learning theory that explains how Internet technologies have created new opportunities for people to learn and share information across the World Wide Web and among themselves."

krist2366, "Connectivism (Siemens, Downes)," in Learning Theories, June 1, 2015, https://www.learning-theories.com/connectivism-siemens-downes.html.

By Carmel Tse/November, 2019
University of Maryland LDT 100 Project

Learning Design and Technology

For logistic reasons, I began this MicroMasters program in almost the reverse order. By default, it's like forcing myself to use a backward design framework to organize my learning.

I first started with the IDT400 course and I noticed that University of Maryland has relabeled the series as LDT, Learning Design and Technology. The change perhaps reflects a more truthful approach, like the mirror always has two faces, the exchange of knowledge involves both teaching and learning. As teachers or instructional designers, we are also learning – learning from our learners, peers and other sources.

I wished I had done this LDT100 first in the sequence, it would have made the learning a lot easier especially through using tools like the Learning Theories Table. I made the table interactive and I kept it up to date with constant revisions and additions. When researching other topics, I always referred back to the table and it helped me organized the thoughts I gathered through short-term memories and transferred them to working and long-term memories.

Connecting my work to the learning theories, there is no question that the theories of connectivism and cognitive load are the most frequently used as my job requires me to design an online curriculum for Ontario’s beginner driver education. As driver education have students coming from a wide range of backgrounds and age groups, I find that the more traditional theory of behaviorism may sometimes be implicitly implied. Measures such as user activity tracking and identity verification in online education are actually forms of behaviorism. [1]

There is no one theory that I have to restrict myself to as I found that the application of the theories is often interchangeable. In fact, sticking to just one set of rules only can sometimes be dangerous as we might restrict the tools we can use. Learning theories are tools of the trade and they have to be sharpened from time to time to give us the leading or perhaps bleeding edge.

The reverend taught biology, English and religious studies. He devoted his entire career to teaching teenage boys in Hong Kong. He died in Hong Kong two years ago. He will be missed, but his teaching spirit will linger on.

1 Kaplan, D. (2018) Behaviorism in Online Teacher Training. Psychology, 9, 570-577. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/psych.2018.94035