10 Brain-Based Learning Laws

I am especially interested in taking teaching techniques that work in the classroom, and adapting them for online teaching. My book Moodle Teaching Techniques began as a long list of classroom teaching techniques that worked for me. I chose techniques from that list, and show the reader how to apply them online.

Jeff Hurt's blog entry, 10 Brain-Based Learning Laws That Trump Traditional Education, suggests 10 research-based principles for effective teaching. His article is intended for classroom teachers and presenters. These principles, or laws of learning, can be accomplished online with some specific techniques. So just like we can take traditional teaching techniques and adapt them for online teaching, we can take the latest research-based teaching principles and apply them online using specific techniques.

Let's look at one of these brain-based laws of learning, and figure out how we can apply it online. 

Law 2: Emotions trumps facts.

Hurt writes that, "Neuroscience has proven that everything the brain learns is filtered through emotions. There are no exceptions. How we use emotion to aide learning determines learning’s success."

To apply this law, we should bring the emotion to class early. Get the student into the desired emotional state first, and then start teaching the student. We can bring an emotional component to our online classes in several ways.

Consider putting an emotional, motivational video into the introduction of your course. For example you could begin a course about the oceans with the traditional course description and list of learing objectives. Or, you could begin it with a fun video:

In 1992, a freighter hit a storm in the Pacific Ocean sending two containers packed with 29,000 plastic ducks overboard. Dr Iain Stewart tells the story of how the mighty ocean currents sent them on an epic journey to the four corners of the Earth.

Then, you can state the learning objectives in terms that refer back to this video. For example, instead of saying,

We will learn to identify the major ocean currents, and how they organize themselves into gyres.

we could say:

We will learn about the major ocean currents that probably carried the rubber ducks on their journey, and how the gyres formed by the currents could take the ducks on an endless cicular journey.

Because we are not there to set the emotional tone for our online class, we need to use a proxy to set the tone. Video and audio can set the emotional stage for us.

In future posts, I'll talk about how we can apply some more of Hurt's ten brain-based learning laws.

As always, I welcome your comments! 

The LMS must open itself to the Web or die

ArsTechnica.com has an article on the future of classroom technology. One quote from that article caught my attention:

"The LMS is a great management tool, but we don't see it as a teaching and learning tool," said Groom. "Spaces determine how you think and learn. Blackboard as an example doesn't exist on the Web. You wind up accessing it through an abstract login. It's a kind of cockroach motel, locked into a space outside of time, outside of the Web. Divorce the learning and collaboration from the Web and you're separating it from where most people are doing their learning."

Moodle, Blackboard, and other learning management systems keep adding new features and more capabilities. With each new version, the environment inside the LMS becomes more rich with features. But what are these LMSs doing to open themselves up to the Web? How are they bringing Web content into the LMS? What features are they using to send students out to Web content without losing the student?

One good answer is Moodle's IMS LTI Tool. IMS stands for "Instructional Managment Systems," and LTI stands for "Learning Tool Interopability."

I encourage you to learn more about Moodle's LTI Tool by reading the excellent blog post by Gavin Hendrick.

(cross posted in the blog of my new site at http://www.williamrice.com/blog)

Moodle versus Sakai

I received a question about how Moodle compares to Sakai. I'd like to share it with you.

What are the advantages to a ... university of 20,000 faculty and 5,000 students to using Moodle over Sakai?

I found several advantages to Moodle over Sakai:

1. Moodle is better documented from every angle than Sakai. Administrators, Teachers, Students, and Developers all have better documentation in Moodle.

2. There are more official vendors ("Partners") providing service for Moodle than Sakai. Note that the term Moodle Partner is a trademark, and is managed by the founder to ensure that anyone awarded that label knows their stuff.

3. There is a much larger active community for Moodle. It's no advantage to have the most popular software in a category if the community of users don't help each other. But Moodle's community is both larger and more (inter)active than Sakai's. Put simply, if you don't want to or can't pay for consulting, you have a better chance of finding answers from the Moodle community than from the Sakai community.

4. Moodle's user interface is more consistent than Sakai's. And I don't just mean in the traditional sense, where you compare the icons, colors, menu actions, and layout on each page to ensure they match. As you go through a Moodle site, things look, feel, and function consistently. But more importantly, you interact with each activity, your classmates, and the teacher in a consistent way, whether it's in the chat room, a forum, or leaving feedback on a workshop.

This is because Moodle is designed around an educational philosophy called "social constructivist learning." Sakai, on the other hand, is designed around a technical framework. Try as I might, I could not find anywhere on the Sakai websites a statement of their instructional philosophy, or what instructional strategies they strive to support. To an IT person like those I work with every day, this isn't a big deal. But to teachers and students, it is a key point.