Retrovolution
I had intended to wait until completing my Coursera course on university teaching before writing another comment on massive open on-line courses, but today read some words from recent ex-Vice Chancellor Jim Barber in The Australian's higher education supplement (Seven lessons of survival in an online world, 9 April 2014, p. 29) that prompted me to write earlier. Barber, along with some elements of the course I'm studying, seem to to believe that there is something terribly wrong with university education, has been for years if not centuries, and that the whole business is about to be swept away by fantastic new approaches and technologies that will have our students dancing in the streets with joy, not to mention heads full of knowledge.
Coursera's course being presented by American-accented lecturers at Johns Hopkins University, I was much reminded of the complaint that "Americans don't understand irony" as I learned about the need for innovative teaching techniques from a talking head with slides, and "discussed" the value of learning in small groups with hundreds of other learners on the discussion boards. Barber himself thinks that anyone "who continues to believe that the purpose of a lecture is to transmit information [needs] to be dispatched to a re-education camp" though he doesn't state what he thinks the purpose of a lecture actually is. (He may mean "class" rather than "lecture", since I take the very definition of the latter to be the oral transmission of information from the speaker to the listeners.)
Teaching Americans about irony and lecturers about communication aside, I actually found the course interesting and informative, with a good balance between delivering established knowledge, enabling student thought and discussion, and providing exercises that put relevant skills into practice. But this leaves me only more puzzled as to what Barber and his fellow revolutionaries are on about: I learned engineering using much the same combination of techniques twenty years ago, and it's no surprise to me that people use them, because they work (at least for me, and the many students who've successfully completed courses at my current instituion). Sure, they're on a web site instead of in a classroom now, but I wonder where the revolutionaries have been if they think that such techniques appear only in science fiction.
Sorel Reisman, writing in the April 2014 issue of IEEE Computer (The Future of Online Instruction, Part 1, pp. 92-93), seems to me to have a much better grip on the state of on-line education than many of its enthusiasts: he observes that MOOCs are simply learning management systems that support large enrolments, and that learning management systems are themselves simply content delivery systems tailored for educational content. He himself thinks that any real advances in on-line education must come from what he calls "adaptive learning", where the learning system adapts to the needs of individual learners. (Coursera's course recommends more or less the same idea under the name "personalisation", but the focus there is on how human teachers can provide it.)
A recent conversation with an experienced high school teacher told me that the same phenomenon exists in other schools: every now and again, revolutionaries come to school and ask teachers to "update" their methods with techniques that teachers have been using for decades, possibly under a different name. Perhaps such practices could use a buzzword of their own, maybe retrovolution?
