Technology Helps Higher Education SPRING Into the 1970's

(From the movie "We Need to Talk About Kevin")

In what looks like another self-congratulatory ceremony, Harvard & MIT held a conference yesterday called, "Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education." There's always money for this stuff, isn't there?

Reporters were "allowed" to watch, but nobody could quote the key players. As ridiculous as this sounds to me, there were a few points to be gleaned about the positives and implied negatives of this "brave new world" in higher education.

One interesting point dealt with immediate feedback. New systems allow students to realize what they have learned immediately. That's a far cry from typical procedures, where tests and creative work need to be graded by a human. The drop in wait time is an important benefit to a MOOC situation. It's nice to see professors realizing what K-12 teachers have been taught since 1970.

Other issues were discussed. These large-scale courses allow students to "shop online" for the best teachers. MOOCs could challenging the way professors teach. As Inside Higher Ed reported, "The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before." Suddenly, the higher education community is interested in memory process. The focus was on older research--a real interest in how people actually learn things.

Since this "seminal work" is written in academic language and fails to offer meaningful quotes, I'll use the words of SimplyPsychology.

Unlike the multi-store model it is a non-structured approach. The basic idea is that memory is really just what happens as a result of processing information. 

Psychologists Craik and Lockhart propose that memory is just a by-product of the depth of processing of information and there is no clear distinction between short term memory and long term memory. 

All of this is standing on the outside, looking in. These academics would all do well to make a call to area code 210 (or 206) and find out what MRI studies have been showing us in those special medical schools that allow education researchers to use their cool stuff. Perhaps they could use the course notes from various music education courses I taught over a decade ago. Welcome to 1996, guys--and you cited a 1972 paper to get here.

If this new, exciting approach to memory is to have relevance to the MOOC world, then it would follow that the deeper the processing, the deeper the memory and recall. Logically, then, the worst way to learn a new set of information would be a standard MOOC. Yahoo! gets that, and you know that had to be a miserable decision. There really is no way to compete with a small class of experiential learners engaged in face-to-face interaction. Casually-generated language is easier to remember, and that happens with direct human interaction. You can try to make an online course more like the typical liberal arts college class, and you can save large amounts of money in that process.

Just don't tell me how it's better.