What do you want from a teacher?

[pmb]

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education. I'm pretty sure that having a teacher is essential to the learning process, but the contents of a lecture/class/lab/whatever now have to be ... what? Certainly different in some way - slowly dealing out facts in dribs and drabs is old school (hah!) and boring, ignoring those facts and zooming in to discuss implications and intuition is nice, but lends itself too readily to surface-level-only understanding.

The middle path seems like a nice compromise, with facts dashed across the board quickly and then intuition discussed aloud followed by homework assignments that require a solid understanding of the facts, but my own intuition is screaming at me that I am looking at things on the wrong axis somehow. Like I have divided everything into left/right and ignored some crucial up/down aspect that will simplify the whole matter.

What's the missing axis? What do you want from a class? Facts? Intuition? A bit of both? A check mark on your transcript? Are online classes consisting of prerecorded lectures a good idea? Would you go to school via podcast? Why or why not? What would the podcast be missing that more traditional schooling provides?

Answers that include how class should change in light of emerging technologies and trends like MIT's Open Courseware initiative will be given double bonus extra credit.

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Get your letters today! Many are still unclaimed! I may forgotten to link to someone who already did it; if so, please let me know. This is taking a while, so I think I will start stealing the answers that others have already provided...

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

You're probably already entirely aware of this, but there's an enormous amount of research being done on teaching methods (with and without reference to new technologies). The field of "Physics Education Research", for example, is becoming a respectable specialty for a professional physicist (though I think still less respected by the general community as one's primary specialty).

The big message that I've seen coming out of those efforts can be summed up in the single phrase "active learning". The research that I've seen cited claims that student learning in any of the zillion active learning approaches out there is more successful than with a traditional course. That's apparently true even when you control for how "good" or experienced a given professor is (there have even been studies where the same professors taught the same class first one way and then another).

Essentially, the research seems to show that students learn surprisingly little from lecture-style courses (except for a "lucky" few, who not coincidentally end up being the majority of people who continue in academia and become professors). Courses where the students are actively involved during class, in practically any way, just work better. The cute summary of the active learning concept is that the professor should be "a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage". (I've tried to incorporate some of that into my classes, but it's hard work! And it always seems to take more time than I have, though I'm assured that it doesn't have to.)

I have no idea how one could be a "guide on the side" in an online course. I guess if the whole course were run as a newsgroup-style discussion or something... but I think it would be harder to get the students to participate actively than in a classroom. Other technologies (like "electronic response systems", aka "clickers") can be immensely valuable for getting students to participate (and letting them know that their participation is being monitored); I'd like to give them a spin one of these days, but my current school doesn't have that technology in place.