Old and cynical

Reading through the posts of so many of my classmates on the Coursera What Future for Education? MOOC, I feel a little old and cynical. So many of my new colleagues have the fervour of revolutionaries. Old classrooms are bad, modern technologies are good. Transmissive pedagogy is bad, Vygotsky and collaborative constructivism is the way children learn.

And I reflect that if the old ways are so awful why have they lasted so long? Because there is no doubt that people today are better educated than they were one hundred years ago.

And they will say that the old ways may have been satisfactory (not good, never good) but that they are manifestly inadequate for the new world where people no longer need knowledge and where learning is available online. But the majority of e-learning opportunities are entirely transmissive. And I worry about whether they are ditching the baby with the bathwater.

OK, so this MOOC has the transmissive video lectures, the collaborative discussion forums and the reflective learning journals: all three elements of education. But so does my old traditional classroom. And there are benefits to the classroom.

When I stand in front of a group of students and lecture them I am continually processing instant feedback. They tell me with their body language (and sometimes their disruptive behaviour) when they are bored or when they are struggling with the concepts and I choose an alternative mode of transmission. Sometimes you can sense little 'eureka moments' pinging all around the class and you tweak what you are saying to make it more challenging, to explore higher and higher concepts. At other times you scaffold. But you can't do that with a pre-recorded video lecture. (Though the advantage of the video lecture is that you can replay it as many times as you wish, as if repetition of the same material necessarily leads to enlightenment.)

And when I encourage students in my classroom to discuss, I carefully structure their discussions and I continually eavesdrop and interject. Most discussion boards contain a series of statements without dialogue (unless the students on the course are severely limited in number). If you have thousands on a MOOC it is impossible for the teacher to respond to all but the tiniest fraction of them.

So that just leaves us with reflection. I don't do that very well in my classroom: it is too noisy and if they were all working in complete silence I would be scared of someone coming in and criticising this. Perhaps the really traditional classrooms where kids sat and worked through problems from the book in silence were better! In my class. homework is where reflection goes on and many students don't do that. So perhaps it is this aspect of learning that needs modern methods most.