Two Million Minutes

On the heels of Did You Know 2.0 comes Two Million Minutes, a documentary that tracks the lives of six students, two America, two Indian, and two Chinese as they go through four years of high school (hence the 2 million minutes) in their respective countries. It i examine the value Americans add to the global economy, and the impact these students are likely to have on the economic futures of their home countries.

Executive producer Bob Compton, a venture capitalist for 20 years, was inspired to make this documentary after visiting India and China a few times for his business ventures. Impressed by the calibre of the employees, he decided to visit the schools and discovered that high schoolers in Indian and China were ahead of their US counterparts by 2-3 years. According to compton, global education standards are ahead of the US and especially in India and China, two of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Neil Ahrendt, one of the students in the documentary, in conversation with GMA anchor Robin Robers, claims that it is not entirely untrue that he has been portrayed as unmotivated in the film; he says there is not enough challenge in the school system to motivate him to expend more effort than was necessary. Bob Compton claims the film is not an indictment of the school system in the US, rather, it’s a closer look at the way the students in each of these countries allocates the time available to them over four years of high school.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences With Moodle

Frameworks for Higher Ed

• Learning from a cognitive science perspective – what do we know know about the learning process that we didn’t before.
• Principles of good teaching.
• Principles of instructional design
• Goals of higher ed.

How People Learn

• Knowledge is constructed
• Importance of foundational knowledge
• Role of metacognition – understand the learning process, how to get the students thinking about their learning process.

Create Significant Learning Experiences
Establish foundational knowledge, that you then apply to higher skills learning as well as other aspects of life.

There is the human dimension where they care about learning and develip skills so that learning is a lifelong process.

Fink’s taxonomy is not hierarchical, all the elements are available and impact the learning process.

Examples

Journaling – Reading Reflections Exercise
Post questions on the reading for students to respond to:
Main point of the reading, what info you find surprising and why, and what is confusing and why?

Due at the beginning of class, not graded but give students credit for doing it. Allows you to adjust class time and address sticky points or focus on active learning activities.

Allows students to see how knowledge is constructed, assess their own knowledge.  Allows the faculty to see what’s going on in the students’ heads; increases student-faculty contact.

Journaling can also be used in the affective domain to establish community; also to help them set goals and create a map to achieve those goals.

Using RSS Feeds to Bring Current Events To the Classroom
Allows students to see the relevance of what they are learning to the external world and current events.

Problem-based Learning
Using Moodle facilitated problem-based learning. Creates a cyclical process where students work with each other on projects and problems to consider what they do and don’t know and construct knowledge on it.

Becoming Intentional Learners
The course is just a channel to help students learn how to become lifelong learners. Students, inherently, do not have a clear idea of what it is to be an “intentional learner”, they need a framework to get them there.

Create a “knowledge survey” to assess student’s prior learning/understanding of the material. Student’s don’t actually respond to the quiz question, they let you know if they know the answer, maybe some of it, or not at all. Can be used to assess their confidence in their prior knowledge of the material to be covered. Used to evaluate what students already know before coming into the course.

New opportunities for significant learning

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