Learning from Watching Others Learn

Abstract

This chapter outlines the ideas and assumptions on which the ‘Vicarious Learner’ project is based, describes some attempts to test the ideas empirically, and considers the exploitation of the approach in education. The basic idea — expressed in our use of (1986) term vicarious learning — is that through technology we are now able to capture, store and retrieve the records and outputs of real learning episodes, and to make these available for new learners. One important question is whether a database of such material might essentially represent a new kind of courseware, easier and less expensive to generate than conventional courseware. Our project has attempted to demonstrate how the idea might be exploited in practice, and we describe our design of a system, called Dissemination, which compiled such courseware from the recordings of students and tutors engaged in a specially-devised set of ‘task-directed discussions’. In an experiment comparing subjects who were offered this material in addition to conventional courseware we found that those students who chose to use the vicarious resources tended to model in their own performance the tasks, language and approaches used in the discussions they had viewed vicariously. We tentatively conclude that the experience of watching other students learn helped the new learners to model the basic task of learning more effectively. We ask: is this an effective way of ‘learning how to learn’? Certainly, though, this is only part of the story, and in the latter part of the paper we consider how the approach might be effectively exploited.