Keeping learning accessible

2025-02-23 10:23:00

I'm on various IT-learning Discords, to my own detriment sometimes, that's no secret. 

On one of the servers, three or four of us experienced folks have been coaching one particular learner who's been on A+ 1101 for six months now. Along the way, the student has had a much lower pace than the average student and almost every topic leads to days-long discussions on intricacies or on misunderstandings of the topic.

It's to such a point that some of the new faces (whom join the server every week) utter things like "surely you're trolling" and "you can't be serious".

Among the seniors we've discussed the matter and we're sure this learner is not a troll. Instead there are a number of clues that point at either a learning disability, neurodivergence or simply a somewhat lower cognitive capability. These include:

• Highly repetitive speech patterns.
• Confusion caused by sentences with complex grammar or vocabulary.
• Taking learning content or written or spoken word absolutely literally. 
• When asked to summarize what they learned on a certain topic, they will combine copy/paste of what was told to them with injections of random terms and concepts that are seemingly unrelated or provably false.
• A seeming lack of capabilities in visualization and in cause-effect or complex pattern thinking.
• Spending countless hours taking notes and trying to summarize a 5-15 minute video. To quote: "[I spent 2 days] going over the transcript [of a 23 minute video] and copying stuff there, making a reference page for each slide, etc then making questions to test myself on the material from the vids"

Recognizing such indicators is one thing, knowing how to deal with them is another thing entirely. Unfortunately we're not quite equipped for it. 

For one, each of us is just another visitor of the Discord server. We do this in our spare time, to help others and to have a little fun along the way. It's not within our capabilities to spend 4+ hours every day providing 1:1 coaching to this learner. 

Sub-optimal factors for the learner:

• They attend an online degree programme, with zero learner-teacher interaction. It's all self-study. 
• They use the professor Messer free YouTube videos to learn for the A+ certification. 
• They mostly interact with us through written chat messages, on their phone. 
• Seemingly all the learning and note taking also occurs on their phone. 

I have theorized that the learner in question surely would be better served by attending a "real" school: brick & mortar buildings, full-on interaction between students and teachers, a teacher who can immediately notice that a student is struggling. Unfortunately, going to such a school is not always an option given factors like location, region, personal budget and their social situation or upbringing.

It's been an interesting journey.

Just today I've had to remind some of the others in the server that not every brain operates in the same fashion. Case in point:

• Not everyone grasps language at the same level and introductory level teaching should ideally take place at A2/B1 levels of language proficiency. For example, when another member stated "“a single drive failure breaks the array with data loss” and “array will work as long as one drive is operational” aren’t hard to understand", they were wrong. That's not A2/B1 level writing. 
• Aphantasia is a real thing. I just did the comparison with myself and Marli: I'm a 5 (I can vividly "see" an apple in my mind, turn it over, heck even take a bit out of it and remember how that feels and tastes). Marli is a 3 on that scale. This is why we need diagrams in teaching, next to just spoken or written word. 

kilala.nl tags: work, mentor,

View or add comments (curr. 0)