From Teaching to Learning: Learner-Centered Teaching and Assessment in Information Systems Education

1. FROM TEACHING TO LEARNING Over the last two decades a paradigm shift has been taking place in American higher education. The traditional, still dominant paradigm is the Instruction/Teaching Paradigm. In this paradigm a college is viewed as an institution that exists to provide instruction. Under it, colleges have created structures to provide for the activity of teaching, an activity conceived primarily as delivering 50-minute to 75-minue lectures; i.e., the mission of a college is to deliver instruction. As a discipline some now recognize that our dominant paradigm mistakes a means for an end. It takes the means or method--called "instruction" or "teaching"--and makes it the college's end or purpose. To say that the purpose of colleges is to provide instruction is like saying that the business of Chevrolet is to operate assembly lines. Some now see that the mission of our higher education system is not instruction but rather that of producing learning with every student by whatever means work best. This paradigm is usually referred to as the Learning Paradigm. 2. COMPARISON OF TEACHER-CENTERED AND LEARNER-CENTERED PARADIGMS When comparing alternative paradigms, we must take great care in making the comparison. A paradigm is like the rules of a game: one of the functions of the rules is to define the playing field and the domain of possibilities on that field. But a new paradigm may specify a game played on a larger or smaller field with a larger or smaller domain of legitimate possibilities. Indeed, the Learning Paradigm expands the playing field and the domain of possibilities, and it radically changes various aspects of the game. In the Instruction Paradigm, a specific delivery methodology, the lecture, determines the boundary of what colleges can do, whereas in the Learning Paradigm, student learning and success set the boundary. Not all elements of the new paradigm are contrary to corresponding elements of the old; the new includes many elements of the old within its larger domain of possibilities. For example, the Learning Paradigm does not prohibit lecturing. Rather, lecturing becomes one of many possible instructional alternatives, all of which are evaluated on the basis of their ability to promote appropriate learning. In the Instruction Paradigm, the mission of the college is to provide instruction, to teach. The method and the product are one and the same. The means is the end. In the Learning Paradigm, the mission of the college is to produce learning. The method and the product are separate. The end governs the means. In the Learning Paradigm a college's purpose is not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of communities of learners that make discoveries and solve problems. The college aims, in fact, to create a series of ever more powerful learning environments. The Learning Paradigm does not limit institutions to a single means for empowering students to learn; within its framework, effective learning technologies are continually identified, developed, tested, implemented, and assessed against one another. The aim in the Learning Paradigm is not so much to improve the quality of instruction--although that is not irrelevant--as it is to improve continuously the quality of learning for students both individually and in the aggregate. The Learning Paradigm shifts what the institution takes responsibility for: from quality instruction(lecturing, talking) to student learning. Students, the co-producers of learning, can and must take responsibility for their own learning. Hence, responsibility is a win-win game wherein two agents take responsibility for the same outcome even though neither is in complete control of all the variables. When two agents take such responsibility, the resulting synergy often produces powerful results. …