The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article called Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century by Jeffrey R. Young. Young shows that students nowadays may expect that professors will upload their lectures and other course content to the web so that students can view them at their convenience, thereby making actual attendance in classes obsolete. He further points out that the technology exists to allow prospective students to bypass traditional college or university courses completely; by picking and choosing from the many excellent free online offerings, today's student can educate themselves. Young cites evidence that students' deepest learning takes place outside the classroom anyway - in the ancillary moments of education found in internships, research opportunities and the like.
I found this piece thought-provoking in many ways.
I don't upload my lectures for students in my face-to-face classes. One reason for this is that I tend to use PowerPoint slides with minimal information on them as I lecture - they act more as visual prompts, with keywords. Much of the "good stuff" - the discussion, dialogue, conversation - about the lecture material does not appear on the slides. Furthermore, I often edit or change as I go along. So uploading the slides may well be inaccurate - it would certainly be incomplete. I also believe that working through the material in class with an expert and other students is a valuable experience that does not get replicated by reading the slides on one's own.
The question here is whether or not professors in face-to-face classes should also try to deliver the class online for students who don't come to class. If this were possible, then students would rightly question the value of coming to classes at all. But it isn't possible - nor is it within the expertise or job description of most professors teaching face-to-face classes. Rather than replicating face-to face classes online, professors should use technology to support their classroom work. Alternatively, students can take online classes where the professor's role is rather different - more the guide on the side than the sage on the stage.
Young questions whether the sage on the stage model of pedagogy should be used at all. A valid question. My first reaction was that Young's suggestion that education outside the classroom is the most meaningful sounds a lot like my experience at graduate school. I had a few formal courses, most in esoteric areas of psychology that I had no experience or burning interest in, but my education outside the classroom was immense, far-reaching, and profound. It was self-driven, collaborative, and engrossing. Rather than abolish classes, why can't we bring more of these experiences into the classroom?
Could students direct their own learning through selection of online materials without the need for a professor and become well-educated in the process? Of course they could, given sufficient interest, time and self-discipline. Would this be equivalent in some sense to traditional education? Probably not. If I suddenly decided to become an engineer, chemist, or archaeologist it would probably take me years of trying to sift through the online world to find the focus, material, and depth that traditional education could provide. In the real world, only the retired and the independently wealthy could probably pursue that kind of education to the level of expertise needed to work in their chosen field.
Young questions the role of instructors in education. There is a great deal of research on the benefits of a constructivist model of online learning - students learn better when they collaborate with other students and their instructor, and when the instructor is fully engaged in the process. Students in online courses who are left to fend for themselves without instructor guidance flounder. The rates of student attrition in such courses far outpace those in face-to-face classes. Most of my students work many hours a week and simply don't have time to become fully independent learners; many are straight out of high school and lack time management skills and self-discipline. For them, college instructors are more than just curators of material. We give content and context but we also guide and mentor students in the process of learning, and evaluate the outcome so that students and others in the wider community can give recognition to the learning.
The affordances of technology have changed the educational landscape. Young's article raises some excellent questions about how we should navigate this new world.
No comments:
Post a Comment