Not everybody is happy about MOOCs. It remains to be seen how exactly online courses will change higher education overall, but many people - including the author of a recent Wall Street Journal article - have predicted that smaller universities will start using video lectures from high profile professors as a supplement to or in lieu of to their own teaching staff - and some people, especially professors, are pretty upset about it. I recently came across an article on Slate.com decrying this potential development as being disastrous for both students and professors. As the author, himself a university professor, says:

“How do you teach tens of thousands of people anything at once? You don’t. What you can do over the Internet this way is deliver information, but that’s not education. Education, as any real teacher will tell you, involves more than just transmitting facts. “

Of course education is more than just transmitting facts, but learning how to use information must be an active process, one in which the teacher can guide the students, but for which students must ultimately be responsible. It doesn’t matter how many people you’re trying to teach - you’re never teaching everyone at once because everyone ultimately has to teach themselves. It isn’t that I don’t value good teaching, but I am of the opinion that learning is never passive. You can never walk into the classroom and expect the teacher to do all of the work, whether the class has 5 students or 500.

This has gotten me thinking: how exactly do we learn? Perhaps as a result of the influence of my Operations Management course, I decided to break down my own experience of learning into various components, so as to assess how well each of these can be addressed in an online platform. Here is what I came up with:

Learning activities that can easily be done alone in front of a computer

• Listening to a professor lecture. This is the hallmark of an online course, and it can certainly be done solo, in front of a computer screen.

• Reading. Also easily done outside of the traditional class format.
• Practice problems and case studies. My “hard skills” classes - Corporate Finance, Accounting, and Operations Management - all make use of practice problems and case studies. I tend to spend just as much time with the problems as with the lectures, and this is where I really start to use what I’ve learned.
• Processing new material through writing. For me, writing is one of the most powerful ways to feel ownership of something I have learned. If I can integrate new knowledge with what I already know through writing, then I really own it. Hence, this blog.

Learning activities that are more difficult to do in an online course but are still possible

• Processing course material with other students. Virtual discussion forums are definitely much more awkward than classroom discussion, but I still see some value in them. If there were a way to form small study groups - no more than 4 people - then they would really be useful.
• Processing course material with the professor. Some professors host “virtual office hours.” Not the same as regular office hours, but this format still does provide a way for students to ask questions that weren’t answered in the lectures

Learning activities that are impossible outside of the classroom