What a beautiful essay this is!
Bernard Fryshman teaches physics. He describes the magic of the classroom, the anticipation of the young people looking to him for guidance, knowledge, wisdom, insight, discussion, and, yes, humor.
What he describes cannot happen by sitting in front of a computer watching someone lecture or seeing videos.
MOOCs are allegedly the wave of the future, and surely they have a place for some people.
But read Fryshman and you will see where the riches of learning are buried in plain sight.
What he describes is so beautifully written that I have trouble finding the right excerpt, but try this one, then read the whole thing yourself:
Experienced instructors know how to address the blank stare, and are able to evoke expression from students who seat themselves at the back of the room. Reinforcement, encouragement, constructive argumentation all help develop patterns of thinking and behavior which will long outlast the specific topic being taught.
A traditional college education usually comprises 40 or so separate courses offered by as many different faculty members, each of whom will bring to bear those qualities and strategies appropriate to the subject, reflecting his/her character and talents. Students will be brought into discussions where they will venture opinions – and defend them without anger. Most will learn to evaluate disagreeable perspectives and remain friends with both proponents and opponents.
They will learn how to change their minds, to deal with mistakes, and to respect the rights of others.
Faculty members know how to jostle students into active learning. As often as not they are enthusiastic advocates as well as practitioners of the subject at hand, and students will experience the passion as well as the process of a presentation.
Learning from a scholar enables a student to acquire knowledge in an organized framework from someone who has assimilated so much, and knows how to provide a roadmap that is uniquely effective for each particular group.
A scholar knows how to form connections with other courses and plant ideas and insights that will bear fruit in a subsequent course, or later in life. Students must be taught how to approach the unknown, the impossible, the unanticipated and the future. It is the competent, confident scholar/faculty member who will see the need for this kind of learning and have the ability to present it.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/02/28/wonders-traditional-college-classroom-essay#ixzz2ucjRrvfL
Inside Higher Ed
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh my gosh! Before doing a serious double-take I almost read the title as “Why College Courses Taught in PEARSON are superior”! Yikes! I’ve been reading a bit TOO much on the subject lately…..HA! Have a great weekend everyone! 🙂
lol 🙂
LOL
Having been in hundreds of college classrooms over the last 40 years as a student and faculty member, as well as visitor to other college classrooms and reviewer of college student assessment forms, I’d agree with Professor Fryshman that college/university classrooms sometimes operate as he describes.
As readers of this blog know, sometimes college classrooms operate with one professor lecturing to 100, or even hundreds of students who are expected to sit quietly and take notes.
I also agree, as Diane notes, that MOOC’s have a place “for some people.”
I have taught a class of over two hundred students every semester for the last 15 years, over one hundred for every semester over the last 20 years. Large introductory lectures are standard at large state universities. The largest class on my campus are a little over 800 students.
Still haven’t answered my question if you are remunerated to blog here. Incidentally, if you are a college professor, churning out little Freidmans, shouldn’t you be worried about the increased number of adjuncts, burgeoning administration costs and student debt induced waning enrollment–or is your stellar ability going to be recognized by your employers (which also incidentally don’t care about the school, just their career) and you will be saved from being canned?
Nano,
Thank you again for not referring to me by the sexually demeaning names (Ann Rand carpet sniffer and Koch sucker) as had been your habit. I appreciate the civility on your part.
I am not compensated in any way for posting here, neither my spouse or myself have any appreciable income other than our salaries as state employees at the university (my spouse does get some small royalty payments, around $500 Even large university presses don’t sell books on the scale of the large commercial publishers that Dr. Ravitch deals with)
I teach economics, but am not a professor. I am, actually, one of the people you warn me about, a non tenure track instructor. So far I have been rehired each year for over 20 years.
I hope you acknowledge reading this sixth response, but if not I am happy to answer you as often as you desire. Patience is one of the most important virtues of a teacher. That is what has kept me posting here for the last couple of years.
In the future, maybe android-robots will be able to fully replace teachers in classrooms and teach us how to be human.
R2D2
C3P0
and the latest
CC-$$ 🙂
I was just having this conversation today with our Virtual Public School lab coordinator. He says out of all the different courses available to take online, the kids who struggle the most are the one’s in the online math courses. Do you hear that, Khan Academy?
Khan explains some concepts very well and others are so confusing, it would take Robot-CC-$$ to interpret…
For specialized kinds of education it is a matter of scale. Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County offers students there the opportunity to take the first two years of college math classes while in high school (through differential equations). It is far more cost effective to put all the students in the county who are able and interested in these classes in a single school than to offer this curriculum in every high school in the county.
Wow,
This ended up in the wrong place. It goes in another thread entirely.
Great post!
What’s a MOOC?
It is a free online university course. It is nice for retirees that don’t need credits but essentially want to audit a class. A neighbor took one to keep his mind active. He said it would have been easy to cheat on the tests. Hopefully, other massive online courses have more safeguards.
Testing is one of the major issues with MOOCs, or any online course for that matter. There are testing centers that will Procter exams and others will use the cameras built into computers to monitor students while they take exams. I teach an online course a and try to design exams that are usefully open source (we have no book, it is all electronic) and base much of the grade on regular student homework and projects where finding and presenting information is the key. In our connected world, it seems to me that students learn how to find and digest information in a sort of just in time framework than learn a lot of information just in case it might be needed later. That being said, the student must have a good deal of background knowledge for the just in time thing to be useful.
If anyone is interested, there is a long (80 minute) talk by Eric Mazur on teaching physics in large classes. It is part of what persuaded me to work on “flipping” the classroom, though I don’t use Mazur’s method. The talk was given at UMBC, one of the most innovative universities in he country when it comes to minority education in the sciences.
Here is the link: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
MOOC stands for massive open online courses. This post and the associated link suggest that there downsides to on-line teaching
Online classes I’ve taken are always busywork. Very light on the learning. I much prefer in-person from an experienced instructor.
In a recent interview, the Executive Vice Provost at Arizona State predicts that in three years 80 percent of classes at his university will be taught via computer. Bill Gates is pushing this model as a way of getting costs down by increasing class sizes.
What a teacher can most do is be a model for his or her students of what it is to be a learner. Ideally, the student sees that up close, not at a distance, on a television monitor.
Too sad. College need a human connection, either to get help or to go beyond the lecture information provided in class. Who is going to mentor those who want to go to grad school?
College students
I do, amoung many others.