Alumni Association Updates
Updates and Information on upcoming events from the alumni association.
MORE >>

alumi events

 

The New Classroom: Chaotic, Effective
Professor Arun Pereira
 
Discussions about the disruptive changes underway in higher education with the arrival of MOOCs (the acronym for “massive open online courses”, from Coursera, EDX, and others) tend to overlook an important point: the traditional brick and mortar classroom is not going to disappear tomorrow.  The traditional classroom will continue to exist—but it will look and feel very different from the classroom of the past.  In fact, in many universities the classroom is already beginning to witness behaviour by teachers and students that would have been considered educational heresy in the past.

More specifically, the traditional classroom, where silence is revered and students sit in neatly arranged rows of desks, studiously taking notes while the teacher lectures, is on the cusp of comprehensive change. 

From Disseminating to Doing

The death knell has finally sounded for the classroom lecture—the pedagogy of choice in the classroom, for over 600 years.  Today, no teacher can justify spending precious face-time in the classroom simply lecturing or disseminating knowledge; that can be done more efficiently and more effectively by recording the lecture as a podcast or webcast for students to listen to (and re-wind, pause, and repeat, if they want to) before they come to class. Teachers should be using classroom time for active learning (see below) and for managing, applying, and using knowledge. After all, today, just having knowledge is no more a differentiator; rather, it is what you can do with knowledge that matters.  Similarly, teachers should be less concerned about being repositories of knowledge—that function is more efficiently and effectively performed by search engines and wikis, all available to students at the click of a mouse.  Thus, storing and disseminating knowledge has moved out of the hands of teachers—and more importantly, out of the classroom. The irony is that most young students realize this, while most old teachers don’t. This leads to classes that are boring, counter-productive, and poor use of everybody’s time.

From Passive to Active Learning

We have always known that “listening is a not learning” and that “telling is not teaching.”  And for the first time, we can do something about it. This means, face-time inside the classroom can be spent on interaction and debate—the Socratic foundations of powerful learning.  Today, we have technology that offers powerful tools—including taking advantage of the students’ mobile phones—to vote on issues, debate and discuss, all enabling lasting learning.  New innovations in pedagogy such as “peer instruction”—a process of student interaction that leads to students “teaching” each other in the classroom has a growing global following among teachers.  Such approaches to active learning (first introduced in Harvard by Professor Eric Mazur) imply a very different role for the teacher; the teacher ignites a conversation inside the classroom, and then backs off, leading to peer-to-peer discussion and debate, enabling self-discovery and learning. Classrooms will be noisy, boisterous places—but they are carefully designed and scripted to be so by teachers who understand the power of active learning.

From Books to MOOCs

Why prescribe expensive text books to students when you have access to free MOOCS?  The equivalent of text books of the past will be videos and webcasts by the best professors in the world. Teachers can make their own webcasts or use other experts’ MOOCs that are increasing in number and variety by the day—and all available free of charge.  Mix and match experts from different parts of the world and you have a collection of content that cannot be matched by any textbook.  More relevant to teachers is the fact that the best students are already accessing, and following classes on MOOCs.  Thus, the teacher might as well take advantage of such student behaviour and make it work to his or her advantage, by using MOOCs for content delivery (and knowledge dissemination), and using classroom time for active learning.  

Conclusion

The traditional classroom in higher education is going through radical changes, all for the better.  Expect classroom sessions of top teachers to be interactive, loud, and involved—leading to deep and lasting learning for students.   If you are a teacher in higher education, you may have little choice but to be part of this change—or risk becoming obsolete.  If you are a student in college or a manager who attends training programmes, you should demand these changes of your teachers, because otherwise, you are compromising your learning journey, and ultimately, your career prospects.

Professor Arun Pereira is faculty, Indian School of Business (ISB), and is the Executive Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Case Development at ISB.