Education 2.0 & 3.0

The discussion board is certainly not new to the online classroom. In fact, some may argue that the discussion board is one of the most well-known and used tools in online courses. While the discussion board is ubiquitous within the different Learning Management Systems (LMS) that exist, and is consistently included in online courses as a way to collect formative assessment data and engage students, its use could be elevated by aligning Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Anderson, Krathwohl, & Bloom, 2001) with discussion board prompts. Focusing on the cognitive knowledge domain, Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a hierarchical framework of learning outcomes that instructors can use to create more interactive, diverse, and impactful ways for students to experience deeper learning (Mehta & Fine, 2019) and meaningful discourse surrounding course content.

Fostering critical thinking skills is always a challenge in teaching. Educators still honor Bloom’s Taxonomy as the basis of learning. With that giving way to its revised and updated interpretations, we now have critical thinking tools that can help in all of the key components of developing such skills. In a nutshell, learning encompasses a series of specific tasks, sometimes in order, but most often not.

Bloom’s Taxonomy can be a powerful tool to transform teaching and learning.

By design, it focuses attention away from content and instruction, and instead emphasizes the ‘cognitive events’ in the mind of a child. And this is no small change.

 

For decades, education reform has been focused on curriculum, assessment, instruction, and more recently standards, and data, with these efforts only bleeding over into how students think briefly, and by chance. This means that the focus of finite teacher and school resources are not on promoting thinking and understanding, but rather what kinds of things students are going to be thinking about and how they’ll prove they understand them.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet,here is a handy visual featuring what we think are some of the best educational web tools for Bloom’ taxonomy. For each of Bloom’s thinking levels we came up with a number of suggested tools that go with it. We have been very selective concerning the choices included and because of space constraints we  excluded several other tools that worth the mention here. Also, the visual is not hyperlinked, check out the chart at the bottom of the page for links of the featured tools. For an iPad version of this graphic, click here.

I have a confession to make.

I’ve sat in scores of meetings with project stakeholders, painfully agonizing over the verbs to use for defining the objectives of a course. Should we use ‘Develop’ or ‘Construct’? Which one is better – ‘Describe’ or ‘Explain’? Would it be more appropriate to say ‘Classify’ or ‘Categorize’?

You get the idea. After all, objectives define the boundaries of a course, and we don’t want to get them wrong, right?

Yes, but…