Tuesday 30 May 2006

College 2.0: No Lectures, But Plenty Of Podcasts, Blogs And Text Messages

A lecturer at a West Yorkshire university has abolished traditional lectures in favour of podcasts.

Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University, says the move will free up time for more small group teaching. [from BBC news]


Students can then ask questions via email or text message, and the professor will respond on his blog. [from techdirt]


Distance education has been doing this for a long time, this is just another form of delivery.

Question:
Is this better than lecture in a hall with 1000 students inside? yes.
Will this increase "learning"? no.
Is this increase interaction between teacher and students? no.

The benefactor of this:
Students: do not have to travel and sit in the lecture hall, but lost the opportunity to going out with friends after the lecture.
Teacher: do it once. Next year, same podcast. Save time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I heard this on the news, I was initially aghast that it was considered "news". Then I decided, what the heck, if it gets people thinking about alternative methods of access to learning, I'm in favour!

Albert Ip said...

Hi Karyn,

Yes, such "news" is not news-worthy. Most of the time, I was actually quite angry when I saw this kind of information appearing in the media. The reporter(s), in most cases, missed the point!

New practices in teaching/learning are news worthy ONLY if these new practices can lead to real improvement in learning! Unfortunately, I do not recall I have seen any such news-worthy news.