An interesting piece:
Pause! We Can Go
Back! By Bill McKibben
“…the most
prestigious universities on earth have been busy putting courses on the Web and
building MOOCs, “massive open online courses.” Sax misses the scattered
successes of these ventures, often courses in computer programming or other
technical subjects that aren’t otherwise available in much of the developing
world. But he’s right that many of these classes have failed to engage the
students who sign up, most of whom drop out.
Even those who stay
the course “perform worse, and learn less, than [their] peers who are sitting
in a school listening to a teacher talking in front of a blackboard.” Why this
is so is relatively easy to figure out: technologists think of teaching as a
delivery system for information, one that can and should be profitably
streamlined. But actual teaching isn’t about information delivery—it’s a relationship.
As one Stanford professor who watched the MOOCs expensively tank puts it, “A
teacher has a relationship with a group of students. It is those independent
relationships that is the basis of learning. Period.””