[etni] fw: Re: drop in attendance at lectures when material is put on line
- From: "Ask Etni" <ask@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:01:34 +0200
From: Lev Abramov - lev.abramov@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: drop in attendance at lectures when material is put on line
Esther wrote:
... in my day at some universities, eg Oxford, attendance at lectures for
modern language learners was not compulsory....
Curiouser and curiouser. First students are told: you don't have to come
to class. Then teachers start wailing: why don't they come to class?!!!
in *my* day - which was fairly recently :), when trained in Online
Education in Australia, I was taught that there are two forces that drive
students into lecture halls:
1) their need to acquire knowledge
2) the fact that attendance is compulsory.
Now, if you remove #2) and replace #1) in its frontal reincarnation
with an online alternative, WHY would anybody in their right mind
drag themselves out of the warm bed and into the classroom?!
This is especially clear if the lectures are just that: a professor
standing in front of the class *lecturing* (in the best possible
scenario, talking, in the worst and most frequent - reading out his/her
notes). What sort of student performance can be expected under such
conditions? Memorize and regurgitate. Probably acceptable for
declarative knowledge ("Battle of Hastings was in 1066"), totally
unsuitable for procedural knowledge ("to remove the inflammated
appendix, you have to first make sure you have located it correctly.")
The moment you put your lectures online, what's the use of coming
to class if one can just download the text and read it whenever
convenient, more than once, in a non-linear fashion (skipping
irrelevant parts or returning to points that are not clear)? (Now,
with the advent of iPod, you can even upload an MP3 recording
of a lecture for your students to download and listen to; this is
called "podcasts")
The most sensible course of action would be to
- make lectures available online
- replace frontal lectures with seminar discussions (either f2f or
online, via discussion forums) based on the lecture's material. This
way, the need to prepare for participation in the discussion makes
these lectures a compulsory reading; the discussion that follows
enable students to - understand the material better;
- make sure they have indeed understood it;
- enrich their learning via discussion (skillfully moderated by the
instructor)
- apply the newly-acquired knowledge by performing post-discussion
tasks (which can also be reported/submitted online for peer scrutiny
and instuctor assessment).
In other words, except for certain skills formation and transfer (like
the above-mentioned appendix removal), the overwhelming majority
of subjects can be effectively taught without ever seeing the instructor.
See
http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/ .
School, however, has two other functions: babysitting (so as to let
parents go to work) and indoctrination - which I'd rather refrain from
discussing. I have no doubt, though, that in the nearest future, with
the development of user interface, both of these functions will be
successfully transferred to the online domain. See you there!
Digitally yours -
Lev
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