Transforming teaching for tomorrow´s needs

Abstract

For hundreds of years universities have been the main centers for disseminating knowledge, supporting learning and conducting research. With the beginning of the Digital Age this situation has been changed in a dramatic manner. The provision of information is no longer restricted to libraries; information can nowadays be found in any place on earth as long as there is access to the internet. And learning activities are no more restricted to the auditorium. Students may create their own learning spaces for working in a group. So why do we still continue with our classical teaching methods in spite of knowing how boring it might be for many of our students? Why do we neglect the dramatically increased possibilities of finding information, creating and testing new products with the help from tools provided by the internet? And: How can we meet the expectations and requirements of companies, industry and the society with regard to the competences of our future graduates? In this paper we argue about these questions.
We need to make more use of the curiosity of the students in exploring new spaces of the internet. By training their information retrieval competences they might take over a new and important role in the teaching and learning process in providing substantial information and new ideas. As long as their search activities are focused on real and everyday problems and take place in a social and collaborative environment, they will be highly motivated to share their own findings critically evaluated by their peers. This also opens the scene for new ways of assessing their contributions.
The described scenario does not mean that teaching is no longer necessary; it will still be needed for creating a general understanding of principals and methods and their application in science, but time for teaching will be reduced by far in order to focus better on the students’ learning activities.

Key Words: Information retrieval, digital age, teaching and learning methods, collaborative learning, peer evaluation.