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Millennium

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The Future Student

The typical college student of the next millennium is an individual with a substantial number of commitments in addition to pursuing an education. He has no time to commute to campus.

The coming of the new millennium encourages a new vision in education. Distance education will become a commonplace phenomenon in the next century. Without distance learning vast numbers of students will not be able to further their education.
The typical college student of the next millennium is an individual with a substantial number of commitments in addition to pursuing an education. He does not reside on campus and does not have the time to commute to campus. A great number of these students will be employed full time and will pursue further education as a requirement of employment for career advancement.

The Learner of the 21st Century: The typical student of the new millennium will be academically independent. He will be self-motivated with an inquiring nature. This student will be able to articulate questions and will be better able to discuss academic subject matter than the students educated in today’s traditional classroom environment.
These qualities are essential for success in the new model of learning. The ability to express oneself is critical as the interaction will be necessary between learners and learners, as well as between learners and instructors.
The learning environment of the 21st century will support the learners’ active questioning of instructors and content experts, as well as receiving information from them. In this environment the professor becomes an advisor rather than a lecturer.
A further aspect of the 21st century learner is that (s)he will be a lifelong learner. As the 20th century drew to a close, nearly half of all students enrolled in post secondary education were adults. If we add this to the numbers of individuals accessing post-secondary level training sponsored or funded by their employers, well over half of the post secondary students were adults. Trends suggest that this will increase.
There are three tenets of the traditional models of post-secondary education that have lead of pedagogical strategies that are not particularly suited to the adult learner:

Learning is primarily an individual matter; this view has led professors and institutions to devaluate collaboration in learning.
Learning, at least academic learning, is achieved, in large part, through the transfer of knowledge from experts to novices; this view encourages an emphasis on lecturers and readings as the major learning activities within the academy. Learning is a process of discovering knowledge, not merely relaying facts. Ideally, this process of discovery is a collaborative one.
Learning that can be garnered from individuals’ experiences provides little benefit toward academic learning, in spite of the fact that academic learning can inform and enrich individuals’ life experience. Traditional teaching tends to begin with theory, then introduces application. It is interesting that the logic of teaching is the inverse of the logic of discovery, which moves from observation to theory. Learning is a process of discovery and should start with experiences, observations and lead toward theory.

Collaborative Learning Networks (CLNs): CLNs will provide the future of distance learning. In addition to communication among learners and between learners and instructors, these tools will allow learners to interact with many more experts than are housed on any campus. CLNs will make use of content-rich computer application that will allow learners to explore and manipulate materials.
CLN-based learning will not be composed to term courses where the number of weeks determines how much content is covered in a particular course. CLN-based learning will be designed around competencies; it will exhibit greater flexibility than ever before in a formal educational experience. The role of the instructor in the CLN will be that of facilitators, advisor and co-discoverer of knowledge. The corporation of the 21st century will benefit from CLN-based learning.

The Transition Generation: Those in the transition generation – the ones who will begin college or graduate school at the beginning of the new millennium – will feel as if they are caught in a quandary. On the one hand, CLN-based distance learning will greatly facilitate their lives. On the other hand, they will have had minimal training in the skills necessary to learn in a CLN environment. Support will need to be provided to help develop the skills necessary to facilitate learning in the new environment. The mode and environment of learning that we have been dealing with heretofore will not disappear entirely. It will, however, be surpassed in functionality.
A new year brings with it resolutions to improve and better situation. A new decade carries even greater promises and a new millennium, so rare an occurrence, bodes innovation in sundry aspects of life.