Individualised+learning+and+Requirements+Elicitation

Thinking about requirements elicitation it requires both sides to listen and try and understand the other's point of view. On hand to try and listen to the requirements, on the other hand to try and understand why and where the person is having difficulty understanding the requirements of the first.

This is very similar to education, one person (the teacher) is trying to explain a concept to another (the student), or more typically, a group (of students). Each of these students will have their own misconceptions and misunderstandings. In a one-on-one environment (as for requirements elicitation) these can be dealt with directly - provided the teacher is sensitive enough to detect where the misunderstanding arises from, and is knowledgeable enough to fill in the required blanks and redirect the student along the path to learning the new concept. This to me seems a basic requirement for successful learning, and possibly explains why mass-education is not very effective in many cases (both secondary and tertiary). The other basic requirement seems to be an interest in what is being taught (i.e motivation) and also in teaching the student as both the teaching and learning activities here are highly cognitively demanding. However, the ability to assist someone to understand something seems to be very rewarding to those who have the opportunity and ability to do so (as long as they have the time and patience - perhaps a problem with many apprentice ship schemes where the teacher is in fact maybe more interested in getting the job done quickly than in training a young person. This is maybe a fundamental point of difference between teaching and requirements elicitation. In teaching the teacher is presumably highly motivated to pass on knowledge, in requirements elicitation, the "teacher" is most likely most interested in gettin on whith their normal job and not that motivated or interested in helping someone else develop their understanding. Note that in both cases, the "teacher" is learning also. It is commonly noted by those that do requirements elicitation that people do not really udnerstnad the processes they are involved in, and often the requirements (as expressed) change over time due to the questioning of the elicitor and the resulting reflection. In the same wya, teachers often say that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it, as the questioning of the students often forces teacher to reflect more deeply on the material they are teaching and to expand their knowledge and the connections they make.

Note also, that in a formal system, students are supposed to be eliciting knowledge about the content from teachers in lectures and tutorials, however, it is quite possible, given the motivation to get good grades (and ultimately certification) and the subjectivity associated with marking, that students instead become experts at eliciting the assessment requirements from staff, and as with all requirements elicitation, students get frustrated as the requirements change slightly (as staff are forced to reflect on what they are really assessing). Also in this sense, teachers are probably as reluctant as business experts are teaching students the assessment requirements, as they are most likely motivated to teach students about the course content, not the assessments.