Dear Commons Community,
Coming on the heels of the vote of San Jose State’s Academic Senate, citing a lack of administrative openness and “extremely low morale,” last week asked the chancellor of the California State University system to review governance at the university, The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article today highlighting the divergent views of two professors who are able to disagree and agree on instructional technology.
On one side is:
“Peter J. Hadreas … a jazz pianist before he was a philosophy professor here, …
“To have somebody in front of you whom you really believe is going to try to find the truth of things even if it goes against the group—to see somebody like that is as powerful as learning what ad hominem and half-fallacies are,” he tells us. “I don’t think the screen can do that.”
He’s talking about online education, of course—a high-profile issue here at the San Jose State University, where Mr. Hadreas is chair of the philosophy department. He says the web is great for transmitting information, but that the most important exchanges occur among humans face to face. Teaching philosophy, for example, is not just about plunging a bunch of data into another person’s brain; it’s also about empathy, spontaneity, and the sense of embarking—together, and in good faith—on the mission of learning. The key, in other words, is trust.”
On the other side is:
“Khosrow Ghadiri, a part-time lecturer in electrical engineering…He believes the web can help hammer home the bedrock concepts at the foundation of his discipline. But he still sees his presence in the classroom as essential for students.
“They need authoritative figures, so that when they ask the question they believe you,” Mr. Ghadiri says.
Sometimes he’ll overhear his teaching assistant give a perfect answer to a student’s question, he adds. “But the students, they don’t believe him. They verify it with me…
he says he understands how philosophy is different from electrical engineering—that learning outcomes cannot be as easily measured, even at introductory levels. And he agrees unequivocally that professors should be in charge of what they let into their own classrooms.”
The Chronicle article goes on to review San Jose’s grand experiment with MOOCs and comes to the conclusion that:
“Nobody knows what MOOCs—and the new companies and technologies that have come with them—will mean to traditional universities and the professors who teach there.”
So let the experiments continue but the lesson is maybe we should let the faculty work out the issues.
Tony
