Saturday, February 21, 2009

Classrooms full of experts: the teacher-centred teacher's nightmare

We are conditioned to believe that the mode of learning in our classrooms should involve a very high degree of control on the part of the teacher. Maybe thats why we persist in trying to integrate technology into the teacher-centred classroom by replacing her with a computer (see Chicago's VOISE academy).

Since we first started having serious discussions about "technology integration", we have looked for ways to replace the teacher with some form of virtual instruction. I was a willing and eager participant in the search for an integration formula at a Canadian University in the early 90's. First, we tried whole-course multimedia development - even great teachers, people with an exceptional rapport with their students, pulled themselves out of the classroom to create multimedia courseware.
Months or frustration (climbing steep learning curves), and many thousands of dollars later, we found that modules did not hold students’ attention and that student performance declined. More tellingly, students who had been expected to love the new medium, felt shortchanged - they had wanted the great teacher, not some digital facsimile.

Amazingly, the conclusion of our school and many others was not to abandon multimedia courseware but to hire dedicated (and expensive) artists and programmers with the expertise to build more attractive and interactive courseware (much of which turned-out to lack the substance that would have been injected by the subject-matter expert). We were not alone. Large US companies, betting on predictions from big names that elearning would make huge profits, lost millions of dollars developing multimedia that wouldn't sell (Tony Bates, 2005).

One of the reasons why coureware didn't work is that it often came from one of 2 flawed sources: 1. companies who put it in the hands of designers and programmers who made it pretty and functional but very light on content OR 2. post secondary institutions and other groups with subject-area expertise who created content-rich product that gave little or no consideration to the teachers and their curriculum. As someone who spent up to 10 days designing an individual screen on a CD ROM (to be viewed by the user for 2 seconds or less - what is the educational value in that?), I can say that development costs were often underestimated in these multimedia projects as well.

In the late 90s, laptop programs began to pop-up around North America. At Acadia University, Canada's first post-secondary laptop school, the program exploded onto campus with 4,000 notebooks; 928 online courses; 215,000 online e-discussion groups by 2002. The response to mandatory integration by the terrified faculty? Powerpoint mania, and the subsequent revelation of "powerpointlessness": after spending countless hours converting lectures into PowerPoint, students only learned LESS, and grew more discontented (and were thankful for the escape offered by ICQ).

Still searching for the ideal digital prof, we grasped at the promise of learning objects (LO). Many believed they offered the best possible approach to developing support material for the classroom. Still used often, learning objects can be woven seamlessly into a great learning experience and can harness multimedia to illustrate a concept very compellingly. On the other hand, LO's can be little more than a TV ad, selling concepts rather than constructing understanding. At worst, they are little more than a powerful and very effective means of communicating the developer's bias.

Of course there are great examples of PowerPoint use, of Learning Objects and even of modules and courseware but in all of the successful examples, there IS no formula. They vary hugely for one another and for every success, there are many apparent "failures" that look superficially identical...except for 2 things:
1. the successes all started from the question of how to improve learning, period.
2. they are all student-centred.

So much of the search for a 'formula' has been about supporting, facilitating and injecting technology into the traditional teacher-controlled classroom...which doesn't work.

For the first time in history, teachers (who are brave enough to integrate technology into their teaching) are facing classrooms full of experts. So, for the first time, "student-centred" is not just another teaching strategy, it is the only strategy.

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