The
New York Times ran one their nuttier articles about online education yesterday,
this time about Harvard Business School’s new online plans.
Universities
across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the
educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of
online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which
students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being
left behind.
The truth is somewhat different however. Universities are certainly
putting their courses online. The question is “why?” I talked last week with a
University President whom I have known for many years and asked him why he was
building online courses. His answer, unsurprisingly, was “fear.”
Then, a few days later I met with the online division of a very well
known university and asked them the same question. Their answer was that test
scores improved in courses where students had access to the lectures online.
The real answer, I think, was that they were also afraid and some Foundation
had given them money to do it, so they did it.
The Times goes on to quote Clayton Christensen, a well known HBS
professor:
He said he remembered listening to an edX presentation at an
all-university meeting. “I must confess I was unsure what we’d be really hoping
to gain from it,” he said. “My own early imagination was: ‘This is for people
who do lectures. We don’t do lectures, so this is not for us.’ ” In the
case method, concepts aren’t taught directly, but induced through student
discussion of real-world business problems that professors guide with carefully
chosen questions.
This,
is of course, the actual problem. If HBS or anyone else wants to build online
curricula, the question they should be asking is: what exactly they are putting
online? Courses, followed by tests? Really? This, according to the Times, is
what HBS is doing:
Students have nine weeks to complete all three courses, and
tuition is $1,500. Only those with a high level of class participation will be
invited to take a three-hour final exam at a testing center.
If
this is what they are doing, then they should be ashamed. People go to HBS to
be able to say they have a Harvard MBA. I was a professor for way too long to
believe that students are there primarily to learn. They want credentials. HBS,
to its credit has typically offered courses that involve argument and
discussion, not tests. Online lectures, followed by tests, are a parody of what
real learning looks like.
The
university world has lost its collective mind. Fear (and greed) has driven them
to take their worst educational devices, lectures and tests, and try to make
that the cornerstone of the future.
So,
let me say it one more time:
We
learn by doing, not by listening.
We
learn by mutual story exchange in a conversation.
We
learn when we have goal, something we are trying to accomplish, and by that I
do not mean gaining a credit towards a degree.
We
learn when we have peers and mentors with whom to discuss the things we are
working on.
MOOCs
(and lectures in general) pervert what it means to teach. Teaching isn’t
telling, it actually involves listening, helping, suggesting, and so on.
Universities know how to do this. That is how most PhD programs work. Massive
education is not about learning and it never was. Yes, professors like
lecturing. I like lecturing. I just don’t delude myself that my lecturing is
teaching anybody anything. When I want to teach somebody something it involves
constant interaction. By interaction I do not mean stopping a video lecture and
guessing what comes next (which is what the Wharton Business School seems to be
doing.)
It
would be nice if all the universities really did want to build online courses
because they were trying to be disruptive (to use Christensen’s word.) But
universities are very afraid and have never seen disruption as their goal.
Some
will however, and those that do will succeed by providing something other than
lectures and tests.
The
system will change soon enough. I doubt HBS will lead the way, but there are
universities out there who intend to do just that.
The
computer is a powerful device for doing. Time to get busy and use This, it that
way folks.
No comments:
Post a Comment