I'm doing a course right now on teaching in higher education where I'm supposed to learn how to teach students at a university. When I started the course, I thought we would be taught how to teach students in a classroom (the way most of us were taught!). After watching some videos on Youtube I'm asking myself if the term "classroom" is still appropriate in this sentence?
In times of Web 2.0 with it's Youtube, blogs, Wikipedia and many others, is the way we still teach really the best or do we also have to move on to Academia 2.0?
Before the web was there, going to a university was the way to study because the information was there: In form of teachers and libraries. With the internet this suddenly changed. Information is everywhere. We can access libraries online, find thousands of journal articles, ask the world if we have a question and can answer questions if we know the answer. Information can be broadcasted in many ways: It's not bound to be in books anymore, it can be found in videos, podcasts, online discussion forums and many more. All there on our screen within seconds. So why should students attend lectures any more if they can access all the information online from home?
From a constructivists point of view, this is a dream come true: The teacher can act as facilitator who helps students to find the information they need, organize it into comprehensible chunks and build up their knowledge by linking these chunks. The students can learn the way that they choose is best for them (and that itself is a learning experience) and can be spread over the whole planet. The knowledge can still be assessed at the end to obtain different university degrees.
Teachers have to let loose of their classic views on learning and teaching. They are not longer in front of their class. The teacher is now faced with a distributed learning community in which he has the role of a guide. The information doesn't necessarily have to be prepared in a lecture because it is already out there, but the students have to learn how to use and evaluate it.
Nowadays, students already know how to use modern technology. They most likely already had to learn that information has different degrees of reliability and use multiple references to verify it. They grew up in a different environment than most of their teachers and we shouldn't ignore that. The world is constantly changing, so why should we stick to classical teaching styles? Just because they worked for centuries doesn't mean we can't improve them.
The world changes faster and faster. Perhaps teaching should, too!
Here are the videos:
- The machine is Us/ing us
- Information R/Evolution
- A Vision of Students Today
- Rethinking US (a students answer to the first one)
- and a quite famous one: Did you know?
Thanks for reading,
Sven
