OLDaily

Learning Preferences Instead of Learning Styles: A Case Study of Hospitality Management Students’ Perceptions of How They Learn Best and Implications for Teaching and Learning
Cynthia S. Deale, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 2019/06/05

The term 'learning styles' has acquired a pejorative connotation caused not in the least by writers who just hate them, and writers who attribute to them properties (such as innateness, immutability, and relevance to direct instruction) never intended by their expositors. This article (9 page PDF) suggests employing the term 'learning preferences' to apply to the same concept, noting that "are also concerned with features that might influence learning, such as the setting, situation, and atmosphere, including where and when students prefer (to) learn." Viewed in this way, "perhaps focusing on the student truly makes sense." Image: AgileLeanLife.

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A set of patterns for the structured design of MOOCs
Steven Warburton, Yishay Mor, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 2019/06/05

Most of the content in the journal Open Learning is (ironically) closed, but once in a while a rare open article will pop out into my search results. Just so with this 2015 article, which I viewed today. This article describes the results of 3 intensive workshops, over the course of which a total of 20 design patterns were developed from shared narratives of successful practice. The patterns are described in detail in Table 1 (you'll have to click on the link to view them). Table 2 organizes them according to design domain.

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Capturing Expert Knowledge of Mushrooms
Show less Olga MegalakAudrey Crimet, Ugo Ballenghein, Yannick Gounden, Sage Open, 2019/06/05

This article compares how expert knowledge differs from novice knowledge, and describes methods of capturing that knowledge. This work informs how we subsequently teach people to become experts. In this article, the authors argue that experts apply both perceptual and conceptual information in judgements of similarity and difference, while novices apply perceptual data alone. It made me wonder how much of the expert's description is rationalization after the fact, and how much was actual application of conceptual information. There's a good review of expertise development literature, including an explanation of the key roles of similarity and difference recognition in expert knowledge.

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