I recently explored the idea that “course” is not always the right concept. I could hear my friends from academia thinking, “Yeah, but that’s what we teach.”
Well, sometimes.
I have a couple of points here.
First, many successful credit-bearing courses are successful because they significantly deviate from the traditional structure. I taught courses that were, at times or in full, case-based, hybrid, project-based, group-based, peer teaching based, or lab-based. My courses were usually loud and seemed to be, at best, controlled chaos. Also, consider that the University of Michigan has an introductory chemistry class in which student groups are tasked with writing the textbook during the semester. Calling the above “courses” without adding significant qualifiers doesn’t paint a vivid enough picture of what was actually going on.
Second, universities provide many things that are not credit-bearing courses: executive education, dissemination of research, engagement with the public, and others. Faculty and the administration should be doing as much as possible to make these events (or processes or whatever they are) action-based, community-driven, high quality, inclusive, focused, and valuable. (More on this in a future post.) Thinking about doing these things with a sage-on-the-stage approach is simply the wrong starting point. Just because people will take a “course” when they have to doesn’t mean that they want to take a traditional course—maybe, just maybe, they just want to learn something in the most effective and engaging way possible. Why should anyone think that a traditional course provides the right structure?
A great nationwide debate is occurring right now about the value of college education. Much of this has to do with the lack of engagement that students feel when in a college course. This should be a signal to all involved that propagating the use of this traditional structure may not be the ideal strategy. Thinking about what a universities do as providing “courses” may not be a productive starting point.
