Efficiency in education — and its corollary, productivity in education — is frequently researched and often discussed. And the purported efficiency benefits reaped with the use of some particular piece of edtech receive much focus.
Such thoughts need to be kept in perspective. Efficiency must not be the primary aim. Education must be the goal.
Here are a few hints to what I am thinking:
- The cognitive process of learning is not well understood. It is almost assuredly the case that a person’s unconscious process of building a neural network of associations (something akin to what might be meant by “learning”) is messy, non-deterministic, non-linear, cyclic, and in need of variable periodic refreshing. As someone who has taken numerous mathematical optimization courses, I recognize a problem that defies optimizing when I see it.
- In the above I didn’t even mention that, while people have similar learning abilities, every person learns both in different ways and at different rates, and those differences vary by day, context, and content.
- Add to these the observation that learning seems to have a social element as well. Any time multiple people are involved the process of determining “best” (or “most efficient”, or whatever) gets exponentially more difficult.
So, maybe, just maybe, learning is by its very nature not efficient and trying to make learning efficient necessarily means making it less effective. Fighting against that nature removes opportunities for learning that might otherwise present themselves.
If what is to be learned isn’t important (pick your, ahem, favorite corporate learning experience), then by all means focus on efficiency.
My recommendation is that a learning designer (or teacher, or subject matter expert) focus first, second, and third on designing a learning experience that enables the student to learn the material. Design that! Use the appropriate pedagogical tools at the appropriate times. But don’t be afraid of building in activities, project, and group work that provides the learner with opportunities to reinforce his/her learning even though it increases the amount of time taken to teach the material (i.e., decreases efficiency). Focus on achieving your learning objectives.
My primary point here is that, for learning, purported efficiency in education does not necessarily equate to good education.
