Raleigh, NC
I'm a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University with an intense affection for all things FOSS. I'm particularly interested in leveraging Open Source in the classroom and expanding the commons of freely-licensed educational courseware. I'm a Computer Scientist, so FOSS is obviously a big part of what I'm interested in, but I would particularly like to see Open Source and Libre Culture penetrate the non-technical disciplines, since there's a whole lot more to it than computing!
Authored Comments
"<em>Slaves to the user interface</em>" ← This.
I despise computer applications courses that teach students "how to use tools". I've taken them, and they are a miserable experience.
These classes should not be teaching students how to mindlessly navigate cryptic arrays of menus to acheive certain formatting results - it should be teaching and fostering intuition on how to recognize common concepts between applications - whether it's Word, OpenOffice, or Google Docs - so that students aren't completely lost when they are exposed to a different environment. At this point, it's not even a matter of "openness" - it's a matter of developing lifelong learning skills over teaching mechanical habits.
We've got some enlightened officials over here, so I certainly hope teachers take advantage of this newfound flexibility.
I've recently signed up for a summer course on Coursera, both to learn Ruby on Rails as well as to experience this "disruptive" model. It starts in a few weeks, so I'm quite excited!
There are a few things I've noticed, both in popular and peer-reviewed literature:
<ul>
<li>Students don't need to sit through a lecture that their professor has recited for the tenth time in his career when they can watch a pre-recorded lecture that may be better.</li>
<li>Students don't need to rely on an expert to identify and correct their misconceptions - volunteers on forums do an excellent job of that already.</li>
<li>Students don't need to wait on the professor to give them feedback on assignments when their peers can review their work instead (in fact, one suggestion I have as a condition of taking an online course is to do peer review for your classmates).</li>
</ul>
One thing is for certain: the lecture model is on its way to becoming obsolete. But does this does this disrupt undergraduate education?
... maybe? Can self-paced online courses teach and assess the higher-order thinking and problem solving we expect from junior and senior coursework? Are there really going to be enough volunteers who can produce high-quality courseware, or are they going to have to rely on grant funding to motivate them? How do we fund this model? Is it sustainable?
I honestly don't know. And that's what makes this such an exciting research field! Harvard and MIT may be offering these courses for free, but the data they'll be collecting on student performance and interaction is going to be tremendously valuable!