#edgar-dale-cone-of-learning

#edgar-dale-cone-of-learning

A diagnostic assessment is a pre-instruction evaluation used to identify learners' prior knowledge, skill gaps, and misconceptions before teaching begins. Its purpose is not to grade performance, but to inform decisions about teaching, pacing, and support.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that human knowledge, at its most foundational and meaningful, is ineffable. Moreover, it requires stepping beyond what one sees as the established rules and into the realm of the unknown. Think of a master jazz musician or an elite athlete who, after facing an unpredictable moment, would find it impossible to convey precisely how and why they did what they did to deliver a peak performance.

Broadly speaking, he identifies the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first as exemplifying growth. Growth describes enrollment, of course, but also the pace of technological and economic advancement that was, in part, enabled by the growth of higher education. (The first community college, Joliet Junior College, was founded in 1901, starting a chain reaction of institutional growth that peaked in the 1960s.)

Whether it's executive coaching or life coaching, people understand the concept and know that there is value to it in higher ed. However, what's been missing is this foundational research that really explains why coaching works in this context and how you can then leverage it to have the most impact on student success. What does a coach need to know, and at what skill level do they need to operate in order to have the impact on students that we want to see?

"We don't have a platform for this." "We don't have an LMS." "We just need something simple." "We don't really have the budget for eLearning." And suddenly, every Instructional Designer and Learning Experience Designer in the room feels a tiny wave of professional panic. Because let's be honest: most of us were trained, socialized, and rewarded in environments where "good learning" was synonymous with technology. Authoring tools. Learning platforms. Interactive modules. Video. Simulations. Analytics dashboards. AI-powered everything.

At its core, the curve of learning represents how quickly proficiency increases through experience. The learning curve theory shows that improvement is not linear. At first, people might feel confused and make mistakes, which can slow progress. After some time, though, they start to improve faster. Eventually, as they approach mastery, progress may slow again.

The forgetting curve explains how quickly people lose newly learned information if it is not reinforced. First introduced by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late 19th century, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve demonstrates that we forget information quickly after we first learn it, and then the rate of forgetting slows down over time.

When we look more closely at how and why organizations actually invest in these systems, we can see that the popularity of adaptive learning has far less to do with pedagogical ambition and far more to do with operational pressure. Understanding this gap between how adaptive learning is marketed and how it is used in practice is critical for organizations trying to decide whether it is the right approach for their learning needs.

Collective learning is how a group or system creates, improves, and keeps knowledge. This knowledge lasts beyond any one person or cohort. That is the most practical collective learning definition, because it shifts the focus away from individuals and toward the learning system itself.