Flexible Learning

The term “flexible learning” is itself flexible and encloses several aspects; however, there seems to be a consensus in at least the following points:

• Flexible learning implies that processes of teaching and learning can be liberated from the constraints of time and place.

• Flexible learning provides learners with a choice about how, where and when the learning process will take place.

Furthermore, the term stands in opposition to linear learning (also called traditional learning ) and it is often related to student-centeredness in educational practices (or learner-controlled learning environments ). Although it is mainly used to encompass distance learning and open learning, especially in the context of higher education, its scope may be much wider, once it may also be found in face to face contexts and different age groups. In addition you may consult these two useful tables by various authors, which compile further characteristics of flexible learning:

Characteristics of Flexible Learning According to Lundin

Dimensions of Learning Flexibility: options available to the learner - Collin, Vingerhoets and Moonen

The five myths

Moreover, the term flexible learning is loaded with a series of myths regarding its popular understanding. Five of them can be identified:

1. Flexible learning is often taken as synonymous with distance education. This is not necessarily so. There are many ways to make education more flexible that can benefit students who are in full-time residence on a campus and even benefit those who are in the same room together. Flexibility can involve options in course resources, in types of learning activities, in media to support learning, and many other possibilities. There is more than distance that can vary. Moreover, distance learning may contain components of inflexibility itself as we will see further in this article.

2. Flexible learning is, as the term clearly displays, about learning. Contrary to the signifier itself, the real meaning of flexible learning is not unilateral but it equally applies to ‘flexible teaching’. Flexible teaching concerns the design and implementation of the course and assessment of tasks in a way which ensures that the array of flexible measures adopted by the lecturer or institution may benefit the learner. It also includes guidance and support of students regarding the access to resources . Thus from now on, when flexible learning is mentioned, it shall be understood as ‘flexible learning and teaching’.

3. Flexible learning is a new phenomenon. Flexible learning is not a brand new phenomenon brought by the practical means of the digital era. Students in higher education for instance, have for a long time chosen from a variety of courses, studied their textbooks in a variety of locations and times, and selected from a variety of resources in the library.

4. Flexible learning is all we need. This statement concerns the ‘ideal’ character acquired by the term, that is, people judge it to be invariably good. There are advantages indeed, but they have up to now been treated as unquestionable and very little research has been dedicated to a deep understanding of its discontents and challenges, topic which will be highlighted in the next paragraphs.

5. Flexible learning is more effective because it is fun. The assumption that flexible learning is more enjoyable than linear or traditional learning is nowadays embedded in the collective unconscious, as well as the assumption that one learns better in an enjoyable (fun) environment. For this reason, many people believe that flexible learning is a more effective approach when it is fun. However, based on the information presented by the chart below, one may say that outcomes of the combination between enjoyment and flexible learning are not as positive as the popular imagination has constructed. The graph shows in the vertical axis the ‘declarative knowledge’, which refers to the knowledge learners can speak about after the learning process; and which stands in relation to the level of enjoyment, in the horizontal axis, concerning the level of enjoyment they have declared to have had during the learning process. Considering that PC stands for ‘Program-controlled’ (linear learning) and LC for ‘Learner-controlled’ (flexible learning), one may conclude that in a linear learning environment, the higher the level of enjoyment, the higher the declarative knowledge; whereas in a flexible learning environment, the higher the level of enjoyment, the lower the declarative knowledge.

Taken together, these results suggest that learner satisfaction is not necessarily a reliable or positive predictor of learning, even in flexible learning environments.

Challenges of flexible learning

Many are the challenges faced by flexible learning approaches. Below are the most relevant ones:

• When dealing with complex content, flexible learning may prompt cognitive overload as well as accentuate individual differences.

“By contrast, any failure to increase flexibility is invested with perspectives on the self-interestedness of professionals and their lack of accountability. Discourses of flexibility establish flexibility as central to their regime of truth.” Benjamin Granger has conducted an interesting study on challenges of flexible learning. Below are some of the most interesting points of his research, which in turn endorses the statement above. Supported by the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) , which calls attention to the level of cognitive load in the learning process, the focus of Granger’s argumentation lays on the divergence of outcomes regarding learner-controlled (flexible learning) scenarios in both modalities of flexible learning, face to face and distance learning. One of the scenarios encompasses relatively simple content, whereas the other refers to complex content. As one may see on the chart below, learner-controlled scenarios (flexible learning) seems to be effective while dealing with simple content, with slightly superior results in opposition to ‘program control’ (linear learning). In the other hand, when embedded in a complex scenario, the flexible approach looses approximately fifty percent of its effectiveness. This experiment demostrates that flexible learning scenarios are in principle a weak approach when dealing with complex contents.

However, the flexible learning approach regarding the complex content has not shown to be disadvantageous for every participant. Granger suggests that the performance of learners inserted in flexible learning environments was strongly influenced by the level of the personal goal orientation, which refers to the motivational level and learning behavior of the learner. The higher the goal orientation of the individual the higher the performance in a learner-controlled (flexible) scenario, regardless of the complexity of the content. This assertion enforces the idea that flexible learning tends to highlight motivational individual differences , which are seen as a disadvantage in the learning processes.

• Distance learning (e-learning) may become unflexible due to technology accessibility disparities and lack of motivation in asynchronous learning environments.

“(…) all flexibilities come with provisos, pre-conditions and commitments (or inflexibilities)” Chen 2003

In the context of distance learning or e-learning, flexibility for learners, educators, or institutions may translate into inflexibility for others. As such, the experience of flexible learning in such contexts comes with hidden restrictions or inflexibilities that are not made visible, for instance those related to accessibility problems. As Chen states, flexibility is not a given. Apart from the individual affinity with flexible learning environments, as discussed above, there are still other factors like accessibility and time-zones, which may constrain rather than provide flexibility to learners. The flexibility regarding time and place, for example, may become rather an obstacle than a facilitator in some cases. The expressions ‘whenever and wherever’ are highly dependent on the purchase power of the learner, on where he/she is placed, and on the infrastructure of this locality. Power problems, blackouts, pick time and slow internet connection may impede the learner to access the online content ‘when he/she wants to’. Moreover, the lack of a mobile device or internet connection, will avoid him/her to do it ‘where he/she wants to’. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that asynchronous, e-learning environments foster less or more difficult communication among training participants . In other words, the time difference around the globe may hamper the contact of the learners with other peers, which would eventually lead to disunity among participants. Within this disunity, the learner does not feel like belonging to the‘community of the course’, diminishing his/her motivation toward the course and increasing the rates of discontinuity of the involvement in training prior to mastery. The conceptions of social learning theory (or community learning theory) and communities of practice may help one understand the relevance of interaction among participants.

How can we overcome the challenges?

• Of individual differences and cognitive load:

According to Granger, individual mindsets may be influenced and even shaped in order to optimize student’s use of learner-control (in flexible learning environments). The Learner Goal Orientation may be naturally high in some individuals, but as Granger suggests, may also can be induced or stimulated by external actors (trainers, instructional designers, supervisors, etc.) through error encouragement for example; thus making it an individual difference that can be influenced prior to and during training. Blended learning approaches regarding the application of both linear and flexible learning sets, in which the learner is provided with partial control of learning activities, may be also considered as an alternative to overcome individual differences and cognitive overload.

• Of inflexibilities related to distance learning:

Technical challenges: in this context, another facet of Blended Learning, which regards the combination of online and offline activities, such as printing material and face to face events or encounters, serves as alternative to contour the inflexibilities related to distance learning. Community belonging issue: in order to provide the learner with a deeper feeling of community belonging in an online environment (where learners will hardly meet personally) and thereby enhance his/her learning experience, two paths are recommended, the first concerning the learning process and the second concerning the after learning process:

1.Stimulating discussions through online forums is a well known way to prompt engagement among peer learners. In adittion, the level of engagement (frequency and quality of participation) of the learner in forums could be used as a form of assessment for the course, increasing even more the number and quality of the discussions.

2.To keep learners engaged after a course and bring them together as community of learners with similar interests, it is higly recommended to create an alumni group page (e.g., a Facebook page), where they may keep in touch, exchange and eventually collaborate with each other’s learning experience and projects.

Benefits of flexible learning

•With the ever widening scope of higher education around the globe, students will demand educational programs and access to these programs in a way which will be easily adapted to their lives and cultures.

•For professionals, better quality of results could be potentially achieved, in that only the necessary content, in the most up-to-date versions of resources, would be chosen.

•The market is becoming more and more competitive and therefore demanding; people will need to combine various sets of skills in orther to fulfill an employer’s requirement. This will lead to the necessity of more flexible curricula to provide learners with alternative pathways through the content to suit their needs.

•The conception of lifelong learning will keep the youth within the learning environment as they mature as well as bring back into learning older groups of the population. Theories and experience with adult education show that adults tend to better fit to courses which consider their background and suits their needs, adding value to their life.

Related topics

The right technology to support flexible learning - working flow technology.

Flexible learning: issues on space, time, knowledge and power.

Intrinsic Learning Behavior

It is characterized by the natural neural cognitive activities responsible for learning processes performed in the sub-conscious level; it is the ‘brain behavior’. Examples from intrinsic learning behaviors are:

• information processing and association with prior knowledge – memory;^[1]

• learning from mistakes and failure;^[2]

• innate curiosity;^[3]

Each of this operations, are performed by the brain within various learning styles sets, depending on the individual’s personal inclination.

See also: cognitivism

Active Learning Behavior

Employed in parallel with the above-mentioned activities, the active learning behavior refers to the actions performed by the individual in the conscious level aiming the mastery of the task to be learned. The latter is the most frequently addressed in the literature on learning behavior and encompasses the following practices:

• self-discipline (through self-conditioning);

• self-organizing, establishing a strategy;

• self-studying, self-reflection;

• self-motivation^[4];

• engagement;

• concentration, focus, mindfulness;

• transformative learning/collaborative learning (widening one’s perspective): exchange of ideas, seeking feedback, sharing information, seeking for help, talking about errors, collaboration, argumentation, discussion;

• learn by doing: to put the knowledge in practice, problem solving;

• creating a proper environment for learning activities, learn in a proper environment;

• provide oneself with proper sleep;

Outer Stimulus

An alternative approach refers to the outer stimulus ‘pro-learning’. It consists in the way the mentor (eg. the boss, supervisor, trainer, instructor, etc.) acts in favour of the learning performance of his pupil. For example, challenging the learner’s previous knowledge and conditioning his behavior by making use of either negative reinforcement (punishment), or positive reinforcement (reward, compliment), the latter enhancing motivation.