Session 8 - Goal Based Learning

What are your initial reactions to this theory/model?

• As I read the articles on goal-based learning (GBL), it sounded similar to the problem-based learning approach. They both recommend using real-world learning situations.  I find it interesting in the types of artificial goals that young students have. I feel teachers can help foster goals for the students. The challenge is that the students are usually only with a teacher for one year. Parents are in a very powerful and unique position, where they have life-long influence on students’ goals. This brings up the age-old question of how can parents instill goals in their children, if they have no goals themselves. I feel children are not born with natural goal setting abilities, thus parents and teachers need to model how achievable goals are created. I feel students need to understand the meaning and purpose of goals, before they can be effective in GBL.

What are barriers to its use?

• I feel that creating interesting and effective GBL modules can take a lot of time to create. The examples that I have seen have different paths for students to select based on their interests. Creating these would require more time and effort on the teacher’s part. Having choices is a good thing, but require a lot of up front planning and development time.
• Another challenge is there are many teachers that are not very tech savvy, in creating web modules that are visually, auditorily, and interactively engaging to the students. If they are just created like web pages, with a bunch of web resource links, students are not going to be very excited and interested in the lesson activity.
• Since students have many varied interests, a teacher should have a variety of different GBL lessons for student to select. When students have choice, they are more likely to be interested in the activity.

Since we are taking learning theories/models that were not necessarily created with the Web in mind and turning them into Web modules, what Web-based tools or resources could be leveraged to carry out this learning theory/model online?

• I believe GBL can be implemented in a web-based environment. The challenge for teachers is to come up with realistic goals. Extrinsic goals like stickers, food, etc are not always that motivating for students. Intrinsic goals like figuring out how much fence is needed to create a pen to save abused horses can be more motivating for a student. That assumes they like horses. I feel it is important for teachers to have several different goals to allow for a variety for diverse student interests.