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Watering the Roots of Knowledge Through Collaborative Learning
By James Ronholm 15 July 2013 @ 2:25am Comments (1)
http://chronicle.com/article/Watering-the-Roots-of/140135/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
It reads a little like an advertisment for QuestU but it is about a different teaching model. They use block teaching and no lectures and the professor's first job is to teach. As is often the case there is very interesting reading in the discussion
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Comments
The critique of most educational models is a good one. I particularly like the report on the long-term effectiveness - or lack of it - of the traditional model.
At my former institution we operated a similar model to that of QuestU for some MSc degrees, though departments (albeit always at least two and often more, deliberately mixed and mismatched for diversity) were still an issue. Other MSc degrees followed a vaguely similar but almost as effective cohort model, so things like hand-in dates were synchronized to avoid conflict and the cohort model meant both students and profs got together and talked regularly to ensure synergies between courses. Such things are possible when numbers are relatively small and teaching relatively intensive.
Sadly, much of the undergraduate teaching at the same institution was dominated by the perceived economies of scale of the instructivist ethos. Until we lose that perfect storm of courses, grades, tribal departments and credentialling, coupled with an obsessive desire to control every variable, it is hard to see scope for much more than incremental and patchy improvements in such systems.