Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

Visions of Autonomous Learning
about a hundred years. I cannot go into all the details here and I will limit myself to
mentioning just some of them:
� John Dewey and his concept of “self-activity” (1916, p. 353). He maintained that
“Children like grown persons, require a judicious amount of being let alone.” –
“Only by a pupil’s own observations, reflections, framing and testing of suggestions
can what he already knows be amplified and rectified.” (1952, p. 553).
� Carlton W. Washburne and his “Winetka Plan” which put the learner beyond the
continual reach of the teacher ( cf. Scheibe 1969, p. 309)
� Maria Montessori and her “pedagogical material” which enabled children to learn
individually without the assistance of a teacher (cf. Montessori, 1913).
� Malcolm S. Knowles and his influential concept of “self-directed learning”.
� Charles A. Wedemeyer and his concept of independent learning (cf. Wedemeyer,
1981)
� Hugo Gaudig, a German school reformer, who advocated “free mental activity” of
students (cf. Gaudig, 1922).
� Otto Scheibner, another school reformer, who interpreted learning as an individual
working process and provided a general plan of independent learning consisting of
five formal steps (cf. Scheibner, 1930).
Some of these reformers tried to change the learning behaviour not of adults, but of
school children. This is an important aspect.
Helmut Felix Friedrich, the educational psychologist, characterised the general situation
in this way:
“Whereas the debates (sc. on self-controlled learning) 10 to 15 years ago were to
a great extent inter-disciplinary discussions in which educational scientists and
psychologists announced: you may use self-controlled learning, today they say:
you must use self-controlled learning.” (1996, p. 42).
Characterising the situation today I would add that we should re-double and concentrate
our efforts on establishing and developing autonomous learning.
The extent to which the vision of autonomous learning affected even the official
American national education policy can be seen from the following guideline issued by
John W. Gardner, a former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare:
"The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the
burden of pursuing his own education.” (Zimmerman & Schunk, 1989, p. V).
6. Visions of Pedagogical Innovation
6.1. First and Second-generation Online Learning
We have all experienced “first generation” online learning. We learnt that the most
important impediment to the development of autonomous learning is the widespread habit of
replicating traditional formats of expository teaching, such as lectures and taking notes.
Rolf Schulmeister (2001, p. 225) analysed a great number of learning projects at virtual
universities in many countries. His findings are as follows:
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