Welcome to the ‘Learner Autonomy Beyond the Classroom’ course, which was developed with May Kocatepe from Endeavour College of Natural Health, Australia.
Click here to view the video transcript
Hi, I’m May Kocatepe, I’m the Head of Teaching and Learning at Endeavour College of Natural Health, located in Australia. Endeavour College is a multi-city institution with campuses all across Australia and I’m based in our lovely Sydney campus. I’ve been involved in teaching and teacher training for almost 30 years now. My background is in adult education and academic literacies and I’m passionate about finding out how our learners learn. I strongly believe that if we know more about how our students learn, we can create teaching practises that are effective in facilitating learning. I’ve spent a good amount of time researching what students do beyond the classroom, away from the gaze of the educator. I wanted to find out what do they do? What kind of resources do they use? How do they use these resources to create learning opportunities? And to what extent does this experience contribute to learner autonomy? In this course, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about autonomous learning beyond the classroom. First, we’re going to look at some key concepts, out of class learning, autonomy, and related to these concepts, motivation. We will also look at what learning beyond the classroom constitutes, what does that look like and how do we create autonomous out of class learning experiences for our students, those that are meaningful and effective. I will also share some practical strategies for you to try out in your own teaching contexts.
Access to education has become ubiquitous. Students can learn anywhere, anytime. There is a wealth of resources students utilise outside the classroom. Some of these are created by educators, such as homework tasks. Others are freely and widely available on the internet, such as videos, podcasts and websites, which students make use of to learn, clarify, and/or consolidate learning. These resources are not regulated by educators but equally have the potential to assist student learning out-of-class.
Our goal as educators is to facilitate student learning. This involves giving attention to developing students’ capacities for autonomous, self-regulated learning beyond the classroom, just as we do with in-class learning. This course will look at how we can design out-of-class student learning experiences that develop learner autonomy and foster effective practices.
“An autonomous student will recognise to what extent the contexts and resources they are engaging with out-of-class are effective, and they will make necessary changes.”
Get Involved And Share Your Learning
- Share your perspective. Throughout this course, you will see discussion prompts at the end of each lesson inviting you to share your thoughts and experience. We encourage you to respond to these discussion questions and read those of other educators to benefit from theirs. When you see a comment you agree with or find helpful, hit the ‘Like’ button to help other educators find it. You can also reply to any comments from other members that you find interesting.
- Ask a question. You can ask questions of experts and other educators in the discussion threads in courses.
- Pick up your course badges. To earn your Course Completion Badges make sure you mark all lessons as ‘Mark Complete’ once you have completed a lesson. At the end of the course, click ‘Mark Complete’ and you will be asked a few multiple-choice questions to earn a Course Completion badge. Once you’ve had a chance to apply your learning, come back to complete an Impact Badges by applying what you have learned in the courses and answering a short survey.
If you have any questions or issues, please email us at [email protected].