CodePath Attributes
Overview
In order to create optimal learning outcomes and environments, we need to consider the following aspects of an educational program:
Structure - Is the program properly structured to facilitate efficient learning?
Curriculum - Is the curriculum optimized for effective knowledge transfer?
Tools - Are there tools and frameworks setup to ensure consistent results?
Structure
Effective educational programs require incorporating the following elements:
Accountability - Upheld contract for participating in the program
Targeted - Tailored curriculum specific to the audience
Personal - Interpersonal social interactions between peers and instructors
Recognition - Public recognition for hard work and determination
Feedback - Frequent detailed feedback on projects
Ritual - Live sessions with peers and mentors, consistent structure and processes
Curriculum
An effective curriculum should incorporate the following:
Responsive Curriculum - Curriculum is flexible and responsive to instructor and audience needs
Reinforcing Materials - Content covered needs to be reinforced by digital materials and videos
Creative Projects - Important content needs to be introduced and then applied within a project
Peer Exercises - Participants should be working with peers to apply concepts creatively
Results-Oriented - Efficacy of curriculum and materials needs to be tracked on relevant metrics
Tools
Effective curriculum and education can be supported by software systems:
Curriculum Collaboration - Easy collaboration between curriculum developers and instructors
Online Resources - Participants need online references, notes, and videos reinforcing concepts
Project Tracking - Instructors need an easy way to track and review submitted projects
Course Announcements - Instructors and TAs need easy and template-based modes to communicate
Discussions - Peers and instructors need an easy forum for digital discussion with each other
Course Feedback - Easy way for participants to give the instruction detailed feedback
Student Experience
What makes for an amazing and powerful student experience?
Meaningful & contextualized - The topics, projects, and skills encountered in this course are significant to the student and relevant to their specific goals and frequently contextualized.
Proper leveling - Setting up students for success in the program by making sure students that enter the class are appropriately prepared.
Pacing and workload - Topics and concepts are introduced at a reasonable but intense pace and provides a manageable workload, while also challenging students.
Story and narrative - Provide a clear and compelling story for students, with proper context and motivational elements.
Flexible to student need - Course curriculum and program design that allows for an elastic level of difficulty, where advanced students can go deeper into reading and application, where less experienced students don't feel left behind.
Robust student support channels - Fast and accurate technical and career support such that students feel well supported when they are confused or things go wrong.
Components of Learning
There are several vitally important components of effective learning and retention:
Blended Learning
Spaced Repetition
Frequent Socialization
Giving Back (e.g Community)
Project and Inquiry Based Learning
Learning and Blended Modalities
Research reveals the benefits of a careful combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning modalities. Blended learning properly combined can allow for the best of both since each mode has distinct advantages and disadvantages.
Purely synchronous learning where students learn only in-person without comprehensive online supporting materials has significant limitations and similarly online asynchronous learning without any live sessions has can significantly weaken the efficacy. Optimal learning outcomes combine both synchronous and asynchronous modes of learning holding live learning sessions with peers in addition to well-designed supporting materials including guides, videos, graphics available online.
Learning and Spaced Repetition
After learning concepts, cognitive science research into learning demonstrates that retention is centered around the concept of spaced repetition to topics and curriculum. That is to say that each time a topic is presented and applied, that topic will be reinforced into memory. Therefore if you remind yourself of a piece of information regularly, the chance of you remembering it is drastically improved. Each time the topic is reinforced after a longer interval (a day, a week, a month, a year), the topic will be retained exponentially longer.
Learning and Socialization
The learning process and the resulting efficacy is largely determined by opportunities for students to engage with:
Other students
Instructors
Tech Fellows
Tech Support Representatives
Mentors
A synchronous mutual interaction is defined as a back and forth in which one person is both talking and listening in order to exchange information with another. Without back and forth synchronous interactions, strong relationships fail to form and the likelihood of optimal learning outcomes is greatly reduced. A few important questions to consider carefully when evaluating a learning environment from a socialization perspective:
Does the instructor demonstrate a passion for the subject being taught and for teaching?
Is the instructor perceived as caring about the success or failure of each participant?
Are students provided opportunities to engage the instructor in dialogues?
Are students given opportunities to frequently engage with their peers?
Are the students given useful feedback from their instructors on projects they complete?
There is an undeniable link between interpersonal socialization and effective learning. The opportunity to authentically engage with peers, mentors and instructors is vital. Mutual interactions where the instructor engages with students both in and outside the context of the material causes students to form important relationships with their instructor that builds respect and desire to surpass their expectations.
Learning and Giving Back
Students will understand and retain knowledge better when afforded opportunities to:
Explain learned concepts frequently during and after a program
Help others learn and allow other students to be their proteges
Constantly be re-exposed to knowledge over a period of weeks (and months)
We know from Bloom Taxonomy of Learning that there are many forms of cognition. There is countless research that consistently demonstrates that teaching concepts is one of the most effective ways to learn and retain them. In fact, even just suggesting to students they will need to teach in the future increases their retention.
This is why effective education needs to be paired with a community which allows those that learn to give back as quickly as possible and propagate what they learn to others. This "pay it forward" mentality needs to be encouraged early and opportunities for students to take on their own proteges needs to be frequent and easy to access.
Project and Inquiry Based Learning
Project-based learning is a dynamic classroom approach in which students actively explore real-world problems and challenges and acquire a deeper knowledge & Inquiry-based learning is more than asking a student what he or she wants to know. It’s about triggering curiosity. Our classrooms and curriculum center real world and students lived experience as the foundation in which to build simple to complex concepts.
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