Elementary school learning experience
Having a terrible memory means that I don’t tend to remember a whole lot from my childhood, especially the part being in elementary school. One vague memory of a learning experience in elementary school was of an authentic experience during an ESL lesson. We were learning this obscure language called English, that no one around us ever used. I guess as kids we (I?) couldn’t really figure out why we were learning this pointless language, until one day, foreigners came to visit our school. For the most part they really looked just like regular people except for the mind-blowing fact that they could only speak this foreign language that we had been learning for the past few years. I think we had probably studied how to form simple questions by then because I remember being asked to prepare a question for them. This clearly made an impression on me since I eventually ended up becoming an ESL teacher! That day, I learned that English was not just an obscure foreign language, but the common tongue of our planet, spoken by a large portion of the world population.
High school
For an experience I had in High School, I decided to pick a negative one to contrast it with the first one. So I had this foreign math teacher who seemed like a pretty smart guy except for the fact that his course lacked any sort of continuous assessment. Due to this lack of progress testing, he never realized that most of us could not understand the concepts he was teaching until the middle of the term. Not only were we lacking the foundational or pre-requisite concepts for his course, but we also struggled to understand him due to his foreign accent. Despite a few attempts by students to point out the issue, he only realized the scale of the problem after the mid-term exams made it clear that there wasn’t a whole lot of learning happening in his class. I think in retrospect, the reason that he failed to realize the problem is that there were a few students, perhaps 3 or 4 out of a class of 35 students, who excelled at math and kept answering his questions. Also, we were usually quite attentive in his class and paid close attention. This probably gave him the impression that we were all doing really well.
Adult learning
Most of my adult learning experience has consisted of self-learning courses, training workshops, and intensive group classes.
Khan Academy
I took a few classes on Khan Academy to review concepts that I had since forgotten but soon found myself addicted to learning.
The website makes use of gamification to encourage learning and breaks content down into more manageable chunks that are ideal for high school and college students alike.
In addition to gamification, the presence of video lessons to go alongside the text notes can help accommodate learners with various learning preferences.
Thanks to a self-learning approach combined with a nifty mobile app, learning can also happen anywhere at any time–perfect for busy individuals who lack the time to commit to a full-time course.
One last notable advantage of Khan Academy is its price tag. At zero dollars and zero cents, it’s pretty hard to beat. Had it not been free, I likely would not be where I am today.
Duolingo
I have been an avid user of Duolingo for many years now. Admittedly, despite its quirks and lack of depth, it still manages to make learning addictive.
The way it pulls it off is by using extreme gamification and using points as currency. It also makes use of competition with other users to motivate learners to continue studying beyond what the user had originally intended. This comes with the caveat that learners may often feel punished for failing to keep up with others or missing a day of practice.
Just as with Khan Academy, Duolingo also features a main self-learning component with mobile-ready bite-sized learning activities.
One area that easily sets Duolingo apart though, is its wide variety of practice activities which include speaking activities, word puzzles, and interactive translation tasks.
CELTA
The CELTA is a TESOL training course by Cambridge Assessment that consists of an online self-learning pre-course component combined with a 4-week on-site intensive training program featuring group classes, observations, written assignments, practice lessons, and lots of…. stress (and no sleep!).
During group lessons, learning consists of visual aids, sample activities, and practice tasks where we apply what we’ve learned.
There are too many things we learned that would apply here, but one specific example of a method we learned included discovery and social learning where learners would discuss their work together to attempt to understand a concept, text, or dialogue using their own prior knowledge.
Codecademy
Codecademy is a learning web app that helps beginners learn coding by following self-paced tutorials. A few years ago, I took one of their courses in an attempt to learn web development, which helped me learn certain concepts I struggled with.
The main appeal for this app is that it would give me feedback on the code that I typed in real time which I thought was really helpful when learning coding.
One major downside though is the lack of training on more fundamental computer science principles which would ideally teach learners what computers are capable of doing coding-wise regardless of the programming language that is being learned. For that, I found Khan Academy to be a better resource.
In short, the main appeal of Codecademy is that is helps learners gain confidence in their ability to code at a basic level which might just be what some people need to step into their next career.
Conclusions
Throughout my life, I have gone through many different kinds of learning experiences, which as I reflect upon them, helps me realize how these learning scenarios have affected me as a learner and how they will inform my own learning experiences as a prospective learning designer.