Conversational KM - Student Driven Learning

A conversational method of teaching whereby the students engage each other as a key part of the learning experience achieves a higher percentage of high grades (and presumably better knowledge acquisition) than standard teaching practices. Standard teaching practices mean students often attend lectures to absorb and regurgitate the material presented during exams to test their understanding. This is what students (especially undergraduates) appear to understand as learning and the results are often disappointing. These students do not appear to be able to integrate received information with their own experience to date to create knowledge. In an attempt to improve this situation, we established a learning environment for a capstone Information Systems course where the students were driving their own learning (collaborative learning), within broad parameters established by the lecturer in charge. A key feature of this learning environment was a series of conversational workshops within which the students tested their ideas and concepts through face-to-face and online conversations among themselves. The pedagogy underpinning this approach is grounded in the belief that having to actively communicate with peers requires the articulation of current understanding with the view to change as alternative views are encountered. This paper presents the course content, curriculum structure, method of instruction and assessment for two years (2001 and 2002), discusses the approach adopted in terms of a model of collaborative learning, and looks at the outcomes from those years. For year, 2003 a plan for more structured research was put in place and that is also outlined.