At a New Year’s party today, I sat between a Harvard administrator and one of Harvard’s brightest faculty stars. They were discussing a recent faculty meeting at which the president and dean failed to inspire them with a bright vision of the future. I said that they shouldn’t expect inspiration from bureaucrats at Ivy League schools. By dint of their limitless wealth, these schools will always be at the top of the heap regardless of what the bureaucrats do. The innovations will come from scrappy new schools such as University of Phoenix, which figured out new ways to deliver face-to-face and online education such that hundreds of thousands of people were able to earn degrees that would otherwise have entailed huge sacrifices of schedule, calendar time, and money. There was no reason for a school like Harvard to deliver education any differently than it was delivered 350 years ago, i.e., a lecture hall, a blackboard, a bunch of physically-present students, and a library with physical books.
The Harvard professor objected “But there is a lot of great innovation in education going on at Harvard right now.” My ears perked up. Were they going to do something with Internet-supported cooperative work? With using teleconferencing to collaborate with universities in China and India? Maybe the minimal step of capturing lectures on video so that students could review them later? None of the above, as it turned out. “We’re putting more art projects into the curriculum and we’re going to curate some existing campus spaces as contemporary art galleries.”
Many Harvard lectures are already captured on video and can be streamed by students of the course on demand throughout the semester. This functionality is not exposed to the general public, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.
You are right that bottom-up innovation is probably the best (and only) way to make real pedagogical change at an institution with the sort of historical baggage that Harvard embraces. To some extent this sort of experimentation is encouraged and facilitated by the Presidential Instructional Technology Fellowship program, which pairs interested professors with technically competent students overseen by professional staff to create innovative curricular materials.
Sure, it is small-scale and depends on the professors to drive the innovation, but its not nothing, and there is some neat experimentation inside and outside the classroom at Harvard. Just, again, not necessarily exposed to the general public.
Daniel: I’m glad that Harvard has video now in some of its largest courses. That means the school is caught up to where the innovators were in the 1970s.
Online courses are available through Harvard Extension. The technology consists of of a streamed video that may or may not be linked to a Powerpoint Presentation slide. Content can be hit or miss. One guest lecturer in the climate change course maintained that the reason why China lacked refrigerators for several decades was because Americans had all the refrigerators.
Art is important. Not long ago the hype was about the demise of problem solvers & the rise of artists, the weightless economy. Maybe they should shift to subjects which can’t be taught remotely, like sculture. A lot of engineering projects only exist because of art, like photo.net.
Folks: Let’s not focus too much on streaming video. All of the research on pedagogy suggests that lectures are the least effective way to teach people and the lecture is the least valuable part of a university experience. Revolutionary technology in education is not putting lectures into cans, but rather tools that support collaboration among students and teachers.
As mentioned above the Extension School is trying all sorts of distance learning stuff. I believe you can now get a Certificate in IT or some such from Harvard without ever setting foot in MA. The undergraduate course Justice has been offered online to Alumni a couple of times(I don’t know if they use the same video and how old it is) but there is a blog and office hours with the Prof. to go along with it. Bloated with bureaucracy- probably but there is new stuff going on.