Universities to be replaced by technology?
The Conversation recently published a couple of articles on "Mass Open Online Courseware" (MOOC), firstly by David Glance and later by Simon Marginson. This courseware, created and made available by various prestigious universities in the US, is supposed to enable any willing student to undertake a subject for free and obtain a "statement of accomplishment", or similar document. Both Glance and Marginson appear to believe that MOOCs are "disruptive", and wonder if such things will mean the end of university education as we know it.
Being employed as a teacher in a university, I, of course, might not have much to look forward to in being replaced by on-line courseware produced by teachers with much more prestige than I. As Gavin Moodie documents in his comments on the above articles, however, various sorts of courses have been available before -- all the way back to textbooks -- and people like myself are yet to be replaced.
Much of what I read about technology in education, particularly at the pop level, says a lot about technology and not much about education. I consequently found a lot to like in Tony Harland's critique of the supposed rise of a "net generation" amongst students and the resulting technophilia in Chapter 6 of his recent book University Teaching: An Introductory Guide. Harland quite rightly points at that it is highly unlikely that "students have undergone rapid evolution into some new type of hominid" whose learning needs are radically different from those of students of previous generations.
Why teach when I could be developing software?
Applying for lecturing positions, I've sometimes found myself responding to selection criteria like "An interest in developing the use of new technologies and approaches in teaching and learning" (this particular example comes from a position description for a Lecturer in Computer Science at Charles Sturt University in 2011). At the risk of making myself unemployable at such institutions, I'll admit to feeling unsure of how best to answer criteria that seem to me to make technology an end in itself.
Of course I use technology in my teaching where appropriate technology is available, and I believe it would help the students learn or meet the administrative needs of the university. I'm sure I'd have a very tough time teaching programming without a computer lab. I've even had a thought or two about how I might write some software to provide some useful teaching tool. But, as a teacher, am I supposed to be focusing on the development of technology, or the development of teaching?
A few years ago, I went to a research seminar presented by a mathematician friend of mine, in which he took the now-extraordinary step of writing out his material on a whiteboard instead of bringing a computer pre-loaded with slides. I thought it worked fantastically well: I, at least, find it much easier to follow mathematics by watching someone write it out line-by-line rather than being confronted with a slide full of equations.
Should my friend be chastised for failing to develop technology to support his presentation, or for ignoring disruptive trends in presentation technology? Or did he just use the best technology for the job?
