[MUSIC] Welcome to the first week of our course, work future for education. Each week in this course, we will be looking at different aspects of education and examining what the fields of educational research, can tell us to help us understand this in little more detail. I'm guessing that you started this program, because you're interested in learning something. So it seems reasonable to start the whole course off, by examining what we mean about learning and how we learn. So our first question is, how do we learn. And I'm delighted that my colleague who works with me here at the institute, Doctor Fiona Rodger, is here to help us understand that question, and to go into it in a little more detail. Fiona works with me here at the institute, on our Masters of Education program, and she runs a module called Critical Perspectives on Teaching and Learning. So she's an expert in learning, and will be able to answer some of our questions. So we're going to dive right in. Fiona, can you start us off by telling us does everybody learn in the same way? >> No, I don't think we do Clare. I think that's something that's really interesting about learning. We all learn in very different ways, because we are all unique as people. Therefore we're all going to learn very differently and we find the way that suits us best. So if I can give you some examples, some of us learn through listening. We enjoy listening to lectures or programs or something on the radio. Often we do it by observing. I've been a classroom teacher. So I'll sit and I'll, I'll watch, I'll observe. We observe other people in our practice. So we can pick up from that. A lot of sharing. Working in groups. Working with your peers. Discussing. Talking. And we learn formally and informally. And also very particular to this module that I've been working on, and that possibly the mooc will help, is this online learning that we do. When people share through discussions online or meet online or through Skype and talk with one another. So there's loads of different ways of learning. Doing, roleplay. Experience. Lots of people learn from experience. Lots of jobs, people learn from experience. So no, I think we all learn in different ways, and it, we find the way that suits us and suits what it is that we want to, to do. >> So, so would, would you agree then with people that say that. Individuals have a preferred learning style. >> I think people find the best learning style that suits them. Some people like to be locked away in a quiet room and just get on with reading, others prefer to, to, to meet with their, their colleagues and their peers and share in that way. So, people find the style that works more for them. And some people like doing it independently, some people like sharing, so. You find the style that work, that works for you. >> So if we were to break it down into its component chunks. >> Mm-hm. Mm-hm. >> How does somebody go about learning something? >> Well, there are different ways of doing that. That sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier. But I like to think about models of learning and ways of doing it. So we've talked a little bit about collaborative learning, working with, with peers and sharing ideas and having conversations and discussions. There are other models of learning, something like reflection for example, is a really good form of learning that some people adopt. You know looking back, thinking about what you've done, kind of unpicking the process of what you've done and you can learn in that way. There's lots of theories around learning, there's lots of people agree and disagree with one another and that's what really interesting about getting in, involved in learning because you learn what everybody is talking about. And some people say we learn by constructing knowledge. We think about what we learned in the past, and we've all done that. My particular interest lies in adults learning and what they bring to that and what they bring as a repertoire, of life experience and knowledge and construct that knowledge. A lot of for example might say that we learn through social interaction, again that's a bit about the collaboration that we work with other people. We can learn behaviors. Somebody very big on learning is somebody that we call who's a Brazilian, who talked about the banking form of learning, where we just learned facts but we didn't, we perhaps don't understand, the reason for the facts. So we look a bit in this module as well about, understanding learning rather than just banking facts. So there's lots of different ways of learning