Enhancing Life-wide Learning and Sustainable Development via an Academic Course ICOLACE 2012

1. Enhancing Life-wide Learning and Sustainable Development via an Academic CourseICOLACE 2012 Marion Ben-Jacob, Ph.D. Mercy College Dobbs Ferry, NY USA

2. Today’s Educational Environment • Involves technology • Global in nature • Sustainable development • World livable and fair for all • Differences and Similarities • Economic development • Environmental responsibilities • Social programs • Prepare students for future • Life-wide learning • Lifelong learning • Basic competencies in traditional classroom

3. Basic Competencies • Needed for life-wide learning • Needed for life • Reading with comprehension • Sound critical inquiry abilities • Retrieval of information • Evaluation of information • Writing grammatically • Understanding of basic math concepts

4. Evolving Environments • Educational • Professional • Preparation via a required freshman course • Format • Exercises • Projects • Suggestions for enhancements

5. Learning • Both social and active • Based on different opinions, experiences and discussion • Is ability to arrive at sound conclusions after giving rational thought to different sources • Need to prepare our students for the future

6. Startling Statistics • The US Dept. of Labor estimates that today’s students will have 10-14 jobs by the time s/he reaches 38 years old. • More than 1 out of 2 people are working at their current job for less than 5 years. • There are approximately 540,000 words in the English language; about five times as many as during Shakespeare’s times.

7. More Startling Statistics • Estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 1018) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year, more than in the previous 5,000 years. • By their 21st birthday, digital kids (students with access) will • have received/sent 250,00 emails or instant messages • spent 10,000 hours on the pone • watched 20,000 hours of television with 500,000 commercials

8. More Startling Statistics • In 2010 Facebook passed 500 million users • Over 740 billion text messages were sent over carrier networks in the US during the first half of 2009.i.e. 4.1 billion SMS messages are sent daily, -nearly twice as many as sent during the same time period last year. • There are currently over 276 million wireless users

9. How to Proceed with Education • Topics of specialization • Basic Competencies • Information is exploding exponentially • Need to continue learning • Move forward with progress • Fluent in • Information literacy • Written and oral skills • Critical thinking • Qualitative analysis

10. Information Literacy/Critical Thinking • Ability to research information from different sources • Interpret veracity • Interpret timeliness • Critical thinking • Analysis of a complex problem of issues by identifying components • Ability to defend a chosen course or path of action

11. Oral/Written/Quantitative Competencies • Oral &Written Competencies • Focus on ability to communicate effectively • Convey Information • Present info clearly and concisely • Grammatical language • Appropriate vocabulary • Hear, interpret, evaluate information and respond to instructions (oral competency) • Quantitative Competency • Ability to understand use of numbers and mathematics as they appear in literature • Analyze statistics and graphs in a document

12. Freshman Seminar- Critical Inquiry • Required course for incoming freshmen and transfer students • Addresses the issues of competencies • Underlying theme selected by professor • Pros and cons • Computer ethics • Geography • World explorers • Specific novel

13. Grading Consideration • Periodic quizzes, exams, papers • Weighted average of all the aforementioned • More concerned with summative learning than formative • Focus of course to provide student with leg-up in competencies so maybe greater emphasis on final project (at least 50% 0f grade)

14. Engaging Students • Standard methods • Reading Assignments • Required Papers • Required PowerPoint/Presentations • More Creative • Digital Stories – short video with voice-over • Educational Games

15. Freshman Seminar Jeopardy • Here are the answers to questions, organized topic-wise. You need to formulate the question to each answer, written in grammatical English. See how many questions you can formulate without referring back to the book. After that, you can refer to the text to arrive at the remaining questions. • Plagiarism • 1.APA and MLA • 2.Date of last revision and access date • 3.Intellectual property • 4.Promotion at work and time deadlines • 5.Referring to another’s work that is in the public domain • Licensing of Software Engineers • Responsible conduct of research

16. The Match Game • The competencies that we are trying to reinforce this semester are: • information literacy (search and select relevant and reputable sources of information from the library and the Internet), • critical analysis (read and comprehend material), oral presentation (organized and effective speaking), • written presentation (organized and effective writing) (and our section sneaked in quantitative reasoning).

17. The Match Game Continued For each of the following activities that we engaged in, please match it to the competency (competencies) that it reinforces. Be prepared to defend your answers. Activity: • Finding and retrieving sources on Mercy’s database on a specific topic • Reading chapter in e-book • Answering questions at the end of the chapter • Sharing responses in class

18. The Match Game Continued • Sharing opinions on issues in class • Searching the Internet and evaluating the reliability of sources found • Answering questions posed in class- writing the responses grammatically and then articulating them • Reviewing statistics • Reviewing graphs • Writing summaries • …

19. Pre and Post Course Assessment

20. Statistics • Pre and post course assessment • Same question asked on both • 20 students per class • Some do pre, some post, some both • Those who do not do post, were eliminated from chart. • Some post assessment lower than pre !! • Administration claims there is a positive trend over the years. • Conclusion- Assessment needs further work!

21. Conclusion • Competencies needed for • Lifelong learning • Life-wide learning • Sustainable development

22. Lifelong Learning Changes happening at rapid rate and need to be prepared; basic competencies are profession-independent and goal- independent.

23. Life-wide Learning Setting goals that are based on research and reality; critical thinking, information literacy, oral and written competency.

24. Sustainable Development • Need to research and evaluate situations and make incisive decisions based on facts; information literacy and critical thinking at its best; statistics/graphs (quantitative analysis) often included.

25. Basic Competencies Are the foundation for success for the individual and the global environment as well.