Serendipity35

If I use the acronym MOOC much more in posts, some readers will probably click off this blog. Yeah, in this year of the MOOC, there has been some saturation. But some of the issues connected to those courses are issues that have been relevant to online education for decades and some literacy and pedagogical concerns are important to all versions of the classroom.

One of the phrases that I heard when I first entered higher education (from the world of secondary education) was that teachers needed to shift from being the "sage on the stage" to being a "guide on the side."  This pedagogical shift was from a teacher-centered classroom to a learner-centered space.

That shift did occur - to a degree - and online learning and the arrival of the Internet made it occur faster.  Even in the college lecture hall of 300 students, the teacher was still the sage on the stage at the center of the learning experience. In the online class of 30 or 300, the teacher still controlled the content and, to a lesser degree, the interaction.

Remember "lifelong learning?"  As with the sage and guide learning shift, lifelong learning got some traction, but didn't move as fast or as far as expected. I expect that it will again be part of the conversation.  Many of the learners in these college MOOCs are lifelong learners who are seeking knowledge and not necessarily degrees.

Unlearning is harder than learning. That is not only true with bad habits, but with good ones. I have spent a number of years working with faculty to create or redesign courses to be used online. It was not always that their face-to-face course was bad and needed to be fixed. It was more often true that you simply could not do the same things you did in a classroom online and make it work. You just had to be less the sage because you had lost the stage. You have to rethink not only what you teach, but how you teach.

Now, these MOOCs are forcing us to rethink what we teach, how we teach and also why we teach. If you want to be a guide on the side, teach a course with 25,000 students. If you are a learner and want to experience sages on stages, go to YouTube.