"Students want to search for schools online, look at school web sites and apply online"

Mark Shay
Chief Academic Liasion
EducationDynamics

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Heuristics and Discovery Learning

Students are learning despite what they're being taught!

A great deal has been written about how to communicate with today's youth, the so called Millennial Generation. Those of us involved in marketing to this group have a great deal more to read and write. Millennials are people whose entire lives been moderated by a keyboard, they consider the web as their primary source of information and have always had passwords and personal information stored on the web.

Communicating with this group is becoming much more of a challenge as a key attribute of this demographic is independence. It is the desire to independently communicate that has pushed new technologies, protocols and ethical standards. Millennial's are quick to adopt new technologies and equally quick to reject established norms. The other night, myself and my 16-year-old daughter were talking about the media and which media she trusts. She was surprised to hear of something called national network news that was broadcast at 6:30 p.m. and was the most important news broadcast of the day. Really? I thought news was 24 hours? She doesn't use email much (only to communicate with parents and teachers), hasn't read a newspaper, doesn't read magazines and spends three hours a day in front of a keyboard. Yet she is fairly up to date on current events so she is obviously getting her news from somewhere.

This rejection of mass media has a profound impact on mass marketing and quite possibly mass education. The independent nature of Millennials means they are eager to learn and very eager to discover on their own. Sitting in a lecture hall is not discovery to today's average college student-finding breakthrough research published on the web is. They comb the Internet looking to discover amazing facts as well as entertaining stories. Their parents may be "channel surfing" across 100 broadcasts on TV, but they are scanning YouTube.com for the best videos and sharing these with friends, and along the way discovering new friends who share the same passions.

As we look to what successfully engages young learners, it is important to recognize this curiosity and inquisitiveness is not limited to entertainment, it may be vital to learning. We hear that boys today are lost in video games and not doing well with traditional school methods. Perhaps their education is not allowing them the same freedom that their search for entertainment does.

In a recent column, we discussed the impact of blogs on student engagement, citing the experience of BlogAbroad.com as a positive influence on students' involvement in their international academic programs. We noted these are exceptional students, ones who are thoroughly engaged in their education and who have harnessed the power of technology to extend learning. Their natural curiosity and comfort with the computer and the Internet have combined to produce extraordinary results.

The underlying story is that students are discovering answers as opposed to being told what is correct. Research in experimental learning shows that students are more likely to retain content and find enjoyment in the learning process itself if given the opportunity to actively discover and explore new information. One innovative approach to education calls this "Discovery Learning" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_learning, which in simple terms lets students learn by doing.

This hands-on approach has tremendous opportunity in higher education both in teaching as well as in motivating a student. A major issue in college retention is engagement, how to get a student involved in their education as well as their institution. A growing amount of research indicates that the high transfer rate of freshman and sophomores comes from students feeling like they don't fit in. Can we use technology to engage these students like the BlogAbroad.com students?

Our GoalQuest division bases its retention product called FYRe on Heuristics, which draw on the lessons of experiential learning by giving students the opportunity to participate in the learning process through interactive self-tests, quizzes and scenarios. Based on quantitative and qualitative research with students themselves, these modules were designed to engage students in themes they might otherwise reject or shy away from.

It seems to work. At schools as varied as Loyola University in New Orleans, University of Southern Indiana and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, students are using these heuristics—a series of animated "experiential learning" modules and entertaining self-tests that engage students in subjects such as time management, academic honesty, writing and study skills, mental health and goal setting. The draw of the computer and the interactive nature of the modules seem to have the desired affect of having the student "discover" new things about themselves and their current situation.

We will keep you posted on their progress and expand our discussion on how new communications tools used by students may have educational benefit.

EDUInsight.com is a new online interactive journal that brings academic administrators together to understand and debate the issues of the day, analyze and review the latest trends, exchange ideas, and evolve common sense approaches to student recruiting, retention and online education.

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Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a common theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.

Mark Shay is the founder of EDU - a leading academic advertising provider, - part of Halyard Education Partners, a leader in student lead generation and enrollment management services.