Courses Need to Die

In our extended Starbucks stay on Friday afternoon, one thing Darren and I got to talking about was courses and what they might look like. We both talked talked about David Warlick's HitchHikr site and how this grreat model could be used. Imagine that instead of tagging conferences, courses could be  broken down and tagged. Instead of searching for who is writing about a certain conference, students could search for lessons on certain topics and for when they are being presented. They could then login to that class, participate in the discussions and learn what they need to.

I also took this idea a bit further on my 6.5 hour drive home last night. Instead of working with individual lessons, I wondered about courses being divided into components. For example, an English teacher could divide their course into each of their projects (novel study, online safety, digital photography, etc.), tag and post these on a timeline. Then, if a number of teachers were doing this, students anywhere could assemble a course based on the requirements of their school or district. For example, a school could require a student to complete two novel studies, a grammar (gag!) component, a project on digital safety, another on separating truth from fiction online, etc. The site like HitchHikr would basically serve as a clearing house, listing project outlines, allowing students to search for tags, set up a timeline for themselves, etc.

A system like this would allow students the freedom to assemble the pieces of their courses from a number of places from the best teachers possible, and allow them to move through the pieces as they need them.

technorati tags:hitchhikr, david, warlick, darren, kuropatwa, courses, learning

Comments

[Bud Hunt]

I'll try again:
While there're tons of details to work out with this idea, it's a really good one. We allow many of our students to create and complete self-paced units at my school, which means I'm always trying to develop good curriculum. It would be handy to have a good collection of lessons, units and projects to draw from.
Since you've come up with this great idea, I propose (tongue in cheek) that you get to work on it. I know that others have tried to build online lesson repositories -- but it seems like you'rre talking about something bigger here. Maybe there's a grant somewhere aching to be written.

[Tarmo Toikkanen]

This idea of getting rid of courses is of course quite radical to the school as an institution, but our research group and many others consider it quite crucial. Advanced pedagogies, such as Progressive Inquiry, that really meet the learners' own needs and motivations, and provide essential skills needed in this day and age, are quite conflicting with this artificial separation of subject areas.

Individual courses also have the bad habit of making teacher collaboration harder. If a pupil comes to a history teacher with his idea about finding out how the Egyptians built the pyramids, it would be an excellent opportunity to work on this project in collaboration with the physics teacher, the geography teacher, and the biology teacher. But if school rules allocate only for time slots for each separate subject, how can this be achieved? What we need is more free form scheduling, which allows multidisciplinary study projects, encourages teacher collaboration, encourages student collaboration, and in general makes the learning scenarios more authentic, so students learn the skills they will actually need in real life, instead of just random bits of information.

[Leif Harboe]

Get rid of courses? There are probably too many courses, and in my opinion - kids in Norway stay too long in school (most go there for 13 years - till they are 19 years old.) They attend something like 15000 lessons (divided into 45 minutes) - and they are - even in the senior classes always told what to do, what to read, they are given little room for choices and reflexion. Even so - I believe learning is a social acitivity, and that some structured acitivies (like courses are supposed to be) where they on a regular basis work with math or foreign languages, where they have discussions - and tasks to be carried out. The main problem in our schools (I teach at an upper sec. school - students age 16-19) are too many courses - too many subjects - too much running around, change of teacher, change of classroom, change of group, too little time for each subject.

[Tarmo Toikkanen]

Leif, I think the point is not getting rid of the organization and structure of learning, but by replacing (maybe not entirely, at least at first) courses with something better. Maybe "project" is the word I'm looking for here. Cross-themed projects that last a suitably long time (4-12 weeks), of which each student would have 3-4 going on simultaneously. The projects would involve all the teachers that could contribute to the themes being discussed in it. I've actually written an article to a magazine about this vision. Maybe I should post it on my blog as well...

[Clarence Fisher]

The idea is much more project based, but is also much more social, with the idea being that we need to create a structure where kids can find other kids, classes, and teachers who they can join with, learn with, and benefit from. When considered, the number of classrooms world wide is massive, but they are completely unorganized and unnetworked. By creating tools which will ease collaboration between classrooms, you make them into a network which can then be capitalized on and utilized for its power.

[Miss Profe]

I would like to see courses like MFL become morphed ino something like the project you're involved in Clarence, but still maintain some of its structure: become more project-based, but still structured.