Form: Short Note

CREATING ONLINE COLLEGE COURSE MATERIAL BETTER THAN OR EQUAL TO THE UNIVERSITY SETTING.

PRESENTING

The biggest problem with presenting classes is not creating a narrative: a story – especially a heroic story -, starting with characters, their problems, their journey, revelation, and consequences, and delivering it ‘theatrically’. Most of the best professors ‘over act’ or ‘stage act’ and tell a heroic story. And then teach facts, calculations(methods), and arguments (essays) in that form.

If I had two bits of advice to teaching departments it would be a 1) restoration of the ancient art of rhetoric (acting out words – the theatre of presentation ), and I might suggest basic stage-acting courses as a requirement; and 2) the socratic method of working a student through steps.

And I would venture that aside from writing decent lesson plans, and socratic method of inquiry into the student’s frame of mind, the primary indicator of the success of a teacher with students would be determined by the presentation quality of his or her classes.

DELIVERING

The biggest problem with delivering classes at scale is simply ‘covering the material’ instead of following the rule of ” here is what I’m going to tell you, here is what I’m telling you, and here is what I told you. Here is what you need to remember. Doing homework that follows ‘here is what you need to remember’. Then conducting ‘reviews’ of the past material by repeating here is what you were told, here is what you needed to remember, and then testing on it. Cycles matter. (Online language courses do this very well).

TESTING

The biggest problem with delivering ‘tests’ at scale, is that the questions aren’t contextual enough (wordy enough) for people with different frames of reference. Short questions lacking context do not occur in real life, and short questions favor those with good memories who share the professor’s frame of reference, rather than understanding of the subject.

Just as grad schools give case studies, most essay questions should provide context. calculation problems while studying might be simple recitations, but on tests should be word problems when possible. And fact questions should be limited to multiple choices. So facts: multiple choices, calculations: word problems, and essay questions: should provide context.

STAFFING

The Biggest Problem of Staffing a class at scale is that scaling storytelling works, Scaling examples works. But scaling tutoring doesn’t work – where tutoring consists in assisting individuals in bridging frames of references – eliminating those little missing bricks of free association that make incremental understanding possible.

Requires:

– Professor (class),

– Assistants (tutor),

– Peers (discourse),

– Test (measure)

– Professor or Assistants (issue reward/congratulations)

LIMITING

The uncomfortable problem of tutoring is that without a series of prerequisite classes there is no way of limiting entry to those who bypass prerequisite work and demand remedial teaching from the professor, the tutors, and the peers. (which is what 90% of male internet chatter consists of: demand for remedial teaching);

IN CLOSING

In other words, it’s a bit expensive to put on a good class at scale.

professor. one assistant(tutor) per 100 students. At least 20 to 1 class composition time. (one hour of online class takes +20 hours of production. And more likely it takes 40.)

For a ‘college course’ we would see 45-50 hours of course material, requiring 100-150 hours of ‘study’ (practice, or reading). for the student this is a 150-200 hour commitment. For course creation, assuming you haven’t written a book already, it takes 20×50 hours or 1000 hours (six months of work) to put together an online college course.

Which is why no one does it. Instead we get videos of classrooms, audiobook lectures, and topic-courses of 16-30 hours. ( The Learning Company has done a great job with their programs. They select some of the world’s best TEACHING professors, who already have course material, and record them teaching it. It would be interesting to know their cost of production. )

So it’s a business venture to put out college courseware. What we have now, generally, is hobby-level production. We won’t (likely) be able to afford college course level production without online accreditation.