The Future of Education

The use of constructive alignment strategies and frameworks for the development of learning and assessment help educators to be thoughtful and student-centered in their teaching methods. Students may now be involved in traditional classroom learning, online learning, blended learning, flipped classrooms and use an array of available technologies and resources to help guide them on their academic and clinical journey.
The dual benefit of learning being good for assessment and assessment being good for learning speaks to the connectedness of both (Cilliers, 2015). Designing activities that meet both formative (assessment for learning) and summative (assessment of learning) assessment goals with opportunity for several assessors helps the student to have multiple points of assessment and to gain rich and informative feedback throughout their learning experience (Harris et al., 2017). When planning learning activities, the direct application to real world scenarios, often labeled "problem based learning", helps to build a framework for learners to use that requires them to activate relevant prior knowledge to understand a new or different problem, building their competence and confidence (Regehr & Norman, 1996). A program of assessment involves creating learning activities that ideally, scaffold through Millers Pyramid starting at the "knows" level during academic education and ending at the "does" level in clinical internship Scaffolding learners to meaningfully engage in relevant, previously existing knowledge to enable retrieval of information will serve to strengthen associations in memory, provide contextual variability and an increase in meaning” (Monteiro, et al., 2013). The preservation of information learned is key and incorporating testing that requires the production of answers or recall has been found to lead to better retention over time (Rohrer, et al., 2010). Using a variety of assessment methods can help meet the needs of students who process and retrieve knowledge in a variety of ways. Enabling learners to see concepts in multiple contexts will help to make the contextual information less important for them than the deep structures.

Keywords: e-learning, adult education, masters education, online education, assessment;

References:
[1] Cilliers, F.J. (2015).  Is assessment good for learning or learning good for assessment? A. Both? B. Neither? C. It depends?  Perspectives in Medical Education, 4(6), pp. 280-281.
[2] Harris, P.,  Bhanji, F., Topps, M., Ross, S., Lieberman, S., Frank, J.R., Snell, L. & Sherbino, J. (2017).  Evolving concepts of assessment in a competency-based world.  Medical Teacher, 39(6), pp 603-608.
[3] Monteiro, SM., Norman, G. (2013) Diagnostic reasoning: Where we’ve been, where we’re going. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 25, Suppl1, pp. S26-32.
[4] Rohrer, D. & Pashler, H. (2010). Recent Research on Human Learning Challenges Conventional Instructional Strategies. Educational Researcher, 39(5):406-412.
[5] Regehr, G. & Norman, G.R. (1996). Issues in Cognitive Psychology: Implications for Professional Education. Academic Medicine, 71(9):988-1001.