I am a teacher. That is how I explain myself to anyone who chooses to ask me what I really do for a full-time income. I am not a professor (sounds pedantic and pompous), definitely not an academic (how boring is that..) and don’t consider myself any other thing more when compared to a dilettante on nearly every topic that I keep forth on.
It is in search of my teaching mission that I have put my regular classes online for most of the last 2 decades, though technology has made that writing easier. I still remember the first semester that I shared a course with an online audience was in the 1990s, when the internet was still in its infancy, we were using dial-up modems and phones were linked to landlines still. I recorded my regular classes using a VHS camcorder onto tapes and then converted the tapes into videos of woeful quality, but with passable audio.
- Music concert
- 21 February 2014: Updated code to handle triple-digit income
- A digital Camera or maybe several possibly
- 8 Examples of Operational Technology ยป
- Where you were
I submitted these, but with only minimal additional material, since writing was both frustrating and difficult to do. Obviously, the internet has grown and made sharing easier up, with class recordings now being made with built-in cameras in classrooms and converted to high-quality videos quickly, to be watched on tablets on smart phones.
Here, for instance, is my entire Spring 2017 valuation class, with links to the videos as well as nearly every scrap of materials that I provide for the class and even the emails I delivered to the class. I have long believed that the traditional university model not only is ripe for but is deserving of, disruption, saddled with legacy costs and a muddled objective.
That said, the attempts by online education to upend the university or college model have, for the most part, experienced only marginal success which is in looking to answer why that I started thinking about how we teach, and find out online. No personal touch: This may be a reflection of my age group, but there is a difference between being in a viewing and live a video of the same class, no matter how well it is shown, and documented.
No connections: We forget how much of the training in a class comes, not from lectures, but from the relationship, not between your instructor, and students but between students just, often in casual and serendipitous exchanges. With online education, the interaction, if it exists, is highly formalized and there is less learning.
Tough to remain disciplined: When you were in university, and enrolled for a 8.30 am class, did you feel like not heading to class? I certainly did, but what held me heading was the fact that my absence would be observed, not just by the teacher, but by other students in the class.