Education and Experience

I started this as a LinkedIn post, but I wanted to spend a little more time exploring it here. John Dewey wrote extensively about education and experience. In short, every education is an experience and every experience is an education, as long as you approach it with the right mindset—namely the ability to reflect on your experience and what it’s taught you.

I’m currently enrolled in a project management overview course. It’s online and asynchronous. In addition to providing a wealth of experience and insight about project management—and I had no idea project management was nearly as complicated as I have learned it is—I’ve learned some important things about online, asynchronous courses, now that I’m tackling on from a student’s perspective. One of things this course does, which I love, is give us a couple of very short weekly quizzes, including unlimited chances to take them. The quizzes aren’t high value—sum total they’re maybe 1% of the overall course grade—and since you have unlimited chances for re-takes, getting 5/5 eventually feels extremely do-able. Oh, did I mention you get the right answers when you get questions wrong? Yeah. You’d have to ignore the quizzes completely or work really hard to get less than 100%.

Here’s what I love about the whole system. It prioritizes learning and reflection over any sort of grade or score. I mean, ultimately, isn’t that what learning is supposed to be about? You know, learning. Which brings us back to John Dewey and education and experience. The experience of taking this course has given me an important education about teaching and learning. Will it help my understanding and appreciation for project management? Not as much as it will help my college students.