Publish at May 17 2005 Updated February 24 2022
Nearly all of us have been exposed to the Maslow's pyramid of needs. However, this kind of hierarchy systematically leads us to dead ends : drinking before fame or eating before sex? Some people are willing to die for ideas, for their children, for money, for honor and others are afraid of their shadow, mice or ridicule.
The order of priorities and needs such as hunger, security, recognition and other physical, biological or psychological considerations are a function of human decisions.
It takes a funny hunger or a high level of ambition to accept to lose one's honor, to betray one's friends or to conquer one's fear. Considerations of value and emotion decide priorities above all else. When these considerations are modified, the whole hierarchy of needs can change. So let's forget about Maslow and his pyramid of needs. Responsibility and control belong to people, whether they take them on or not.
Learning is about communication between a knowledge source and a learner. One can learn from a book or a website just as one can learn from a teacher in an institution or by making one's own observations.
The flow from source to person can be considered a source of satisfaction to the extent that it achieves its purpose: to meet the perceived need. Anything that disrupts it then becomes undesirable. Simple! So the professor, the student, and the institution know where they stand: it's all about creating and maintaining the flow from subject to student.
The flow (from source to receiver) that fulfills the perceived need generates satisfaction for the student.
Teachers, students, pedagogies, technologies, media can foster or disrupt this flow and generate satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
If the subject interests the student, the flow can be established, otherwise the professor or the institution can try to interest him/her, but it will always be up to him/her to take a look at it, to find an interest. Learning begins with observation; you have to take a look at the subject to begin with...
In principle, any subject can interest someone; the people are naturally open. We only have to look at the attitude of a class at the beginning of the year, the students are mostly enthusiastic... some months later the situation is quite different, apathy sets in so easily. What prevents the flow from continuing to flow ? Even if the words continue to be emitted, they cease to be received, to be understood, to be accepted; dissatisfaction reigns.
There are not an infinite number of ways to generate dissatisfaction in the study:
About every way to miss can be tied to one of these points:
Yet there are some who specialize in these approaches, with the results we know. For them, this is education, the real thing, painful and necessarily disconnected; if you like it there is something wrong. It might be time to get rid of these autocratic conceptions.
On a personal level, someone who panics at, say, a mathematical term used in an explanation, is likely to have not only a missing definition somewhere, but also an emotional charge that makes the thing unbearable for him. He, too, has his work cut out for him.
Both sending and receiving are involved: a visually or hearing impaired person will receive imperceptible messages; a student of another language will receive indecodable messages, a hyperactive person will receive incomplete messages, and so on.
Both those who produce the courses, those who transmit them, and those who follow them have a responsibility in preserving the flow from source to receiver.
Ultimately, the self-taught student can take on all the responsibilities. What is certain is that everyone's satisfaction lies in the actual existence of the flow between the source and the student, up to and not beyond the achievement of the student's intended purposes. Beyond that, the need and interest must be recreated.
With this in place, distance learning can spread everywhere. Satisfaction guaranteed.
Illustration: c.alberto via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA
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