Geoff White

Mental load: helping clinical learners.

Background:  The quality of an individual’s learning is influenced significantly by the quantity of mental processing they are required to manage in a clinical learning situation. Some clinical learning settings require the learner to process high levels of complex knowledge and skills, whilst simultaneously monitoring and responding to challenging social or emotional inputs. This paper introduces the concept of ‘cognitive load’, its negative impacts upon novice learners in particular, and its real‐world implications for teaching and supervision.

Gen Y learners: just how concerned should we be?

Background:  This article is a response to expressions of concern from a range of sources, including reports of curriculum redesign to accommodate the characteristics of Gen Y, claims made in the press and concerns expressed by educators in the health professions. Are these concerns grounded in research and if so how can educators in the health professions respond?

A Framework for Facilitating Higher-order Strategic Thinking in Online Management Development

Organizations which grow by responding dynamically and strategically to rapidly changing business environments require managers capable of analytical and creative thinking in individual and team contexts. Whilst management development of this kind is hard to achieve within a localised workplace, it is even more difficult in globally distributed workplaces. Appropriately designed online programs can facilitate effective management development within and across multi-site organizations. This requires, firstly, the insightful and purposeful development of a learning environment which is grounded in an understanding of the dynamics of learning and, secondly, the delivery of this environment online. These contexts require an instructional design model which focuses upon expertise development in collaborative settings - the key elements of our model.

Real-life learning in higher education

While real-life learning is commonly identified with workplace or lifelong learning outside of an individual’s initial pre-workforce education, this does not preclude real-life learning experiences occurring within Higher Education programs. This paper describes a program that aims to integrate real-life learning experiences into a pre-service teacher education program in a way that provides rich, contextualised learning experiences, provides a basis for meeting the requirements of external certification criteria that focus on evidence-based performance rather than on academic competencies, and provides students with authentic learning experiences in the effective use of ICT in their professional roles and classroom-based work.

Teaching for Quality Learning Online

The majority of online instructional programs are transmissive, viewing learning as passive, rather than as interactive and engaging — important attributes for the promotion of higher order learning. We argue that the lack of clear pedagogical models for online learning is a critical limiting factor in the development of quality teaching online. We present a model for designing online learning environments for facilitating higher-order thinking in traditional and ‘fuzzy’ contexts. Conceptualising user interaction with the instructional system under the categories of ‘Interaction and ‘Expertise Development’ greatly facilitates the incorporation of effective pedagogical approaches in the instructional design process.