Growing your own

So, I’m sitting here in my office on a beautiful  Australian spring day. The sun is shining brightly, the air is slightly fresh sending wafts of scent from the spring flowers. Its a good time to be alive and its a good time to be thinking of growth and change.

True to form, I trotted down to the local garden center and bought back a truck load of seeds and ideas on what I can do in the garden. I feel good this year, the potatoes are growing well, and I’ve managed to grow snow peas for the first time. Having invested a good amount of time in the garden, I feel content enough to sit in my office and allow myself to explore ideas on software testing and training.

And I’ve come up with the crazy idea, wonderful idea. For some time I’ve wanted to invest in online training in software testing. Its a model that I think will suit me well. I live far far away from the rest of the world and as much I as enjoy meeting new testers from around the globe, continuous travel is not for me.

To date, I’ve struggled with the concept of online learning. When I learn, I like to get my hands gritty, experience the stuff I’m wrestling with. With my online coaching, I make sure I include a task of some sort but thats one on one. Is it possible to offer online experiential learning to many people?

And then I read about these guys at Venture Lab. The courses are highly experiential & require collaboration to succeed. I sniffed a model that I could possibly work with.

But I’m taking it one step further. I want to make the students the designers of the course. Its the students who will work out what needs to be learned and how that will be achieved, and how they will know they achieved it. There will be some external structure, perhaps in the form of exercises, some philosophies to abide by, but basically, its the students who will dictate the content & the pace. In fact a lot of these ideas are from the coaching model I have worked on holding onto the concept that learning requires real desire from the student, and to do that the student needs to dictate the learning (with the teacher offering space and direction to learn).

I see this courses as being a permission giver. We’re so drilled to think of learning as something we have to sign up for, like it's impossible for us to learn outside a course. In this way, I’m helping overcome that little hurdle and get into some real meaty learning.

I’m very excited about these ideas and what will come of them. I’m not sure where they will lead and I guess that’s half the fun! If you want to join me on the crazy, wacky journey, feel free to contact me on Skype at charretts, or else add a comment below.

I’ll be adding information on this model as it progresses.