Darren Draper stirred up another conversation on his blog yesterday (Hacking the Curriculum) which intersects a number of my interests: independent study, reusable course content, and open education, and reiterates the question, what is not replaceable in teaching? In the live classroom? In individual instructor-developed curriculum? And how far can we stretch the re-usability of online educational materials?
Coincidentally, I watched 49 Up last night, and took particular notice when Nick, a physics professor at UW Madison, commented on how his job in the classroom is to (misquoting, surely) “show the students why they should care about this stuff” and to “make the books more interesting”.
It sounds like such a simple thing, and teachers have been doing it since textbooks and formal schooling began. But it’s a thing most textbooks (and perhaps most packaged, static content) are inept at. Why? Perhaps because teaching provides a human-to-human interaction wherein participants can, on-the-fly, read and respond to each other appropriately, strategically building interest and engagement. These human-to-human interaction can trigger affective responses that enlarge perspective, enhance interest, or increase retention.
Live classroom teaching also allows the teacher to follow tangents, abandoning pre-planned curriculum entirely and ending up a places not originally intended, but nonetheless valuable for the divergence. I have experienced the pleasure of such tangents many times as a teacher; indeed, I usually end up learning about the subject myself, learning about student needs, and learning how to teach better the next time.
So that’s my initial thought. What’s yours? What is not replaceable in teaching? What do we risk losing as we move more and more instruction online, as we realize grand dreams of opencourseware, self-directed learning communities, etc?