Learning How to Learn in a Technology Course: A Case Study

There is a growing interest in helping students to become better learners, and this article describes how the team designing an Open University distance-learning course set out to create a course that would explicitly attempt to help students acquire the learning characteristics of mature and capable practitioners in the field. The article discusses how the course team went about this task in ways that turned out to be consistent with both experiential and constructivist perspectives of learning. It explains how the learning-to-learn goals of the course were explicitly articulated to students and how the course structure and the assessment policy sought to 'impel' students to acquire and deploy learning skills that would stand them in good stead after graduation. The article ends by reviewing the evidence, available from students' marked assignments and from surveys, of how well students actually did 'learn how to learn'.