It's hard to change

There is an interesting contrast in the ideas expressed in an article about an Australian University's medical school's decision to replace lectures with online learning. While delivering information through lectures is still the most common method of instruction at universities, there are other ways to accomplish the same goals. The comments sound to me like a conflict between a student centered and a teacher centered instructional methods. Some people still prefer the "sage on the stage," but when you are talking about preparing people to perform a particular job, like teaching or being a doctor, there needs to be a balance between practice and theory.

The traditional university lecture will be scrapped by the nation's biggest medical school and replaced by online learning programs.

Partly prompted by a swell in student numbers expected in 2008, the University of Queensland's School of Medicine is developing an interactive web program to deliver the information now given in a lecture.

...

Every medical school teaches the same knowledge to its students whether they practise in Sydney, Melbourne or London.

The question is not what knowledge is best; the question is how to get students to use that knowledge.

It's better to use your staff's time to teach students how to use that knowledge to be doctors; to teach them clinical skills, clinical resources, professional and personal development and interaction with patients.

Not everyone is excited about this change, however:

But lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Melbourne University Kerri-Lee Harris said web-based learning could not replace the benefits gained by students from a lecture.

"There's value in the lecture irrespective of the discipline or the number of students or resources," she said.

"It's the value of having students learning together, it provides an opportunity for students to hear and engage with the same material at the same time and question it during the lecture and after.

"That isn't achieved when students access online resources or other resources independently."

Talk about not trusting the students to learn on their own!

Dean of education for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, John Collins, said there was no replacement for a passionate teacher who could give those insights to a student. "Medicine, like religion, is not taught but caught," he said.

Professor Collins said the proposal amounted to providing learning aids on a computer and using teachers as a supplement.

In contrast, consider the recent comments by John Seely Brown about engineering education:

Seely Brown argued that education is going through a large-scale transformation toward a more participatory form of learning.

Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education, he said.

In particular, he praised situations where students who are passionate about specific topics study in groups and participate in online communities.

"We are learning in and through our interactions with others while doing real things," Seely Brown said. "I'm not saying that knowledge is socially constructed, but our understanding of that knowledge is socially constructed."

Maybe the University of California Riverside School of Medicine, when it opens in six years, can learn something from what they are doing at the University of Queensland.