What do we mean by that?
Well classically, classes were around these confined architecture,
so 1 to 20 or 30 students was about right in a conventional classroom with children.
If you were running a course at university,
it might be one to a couple hundred in a lecture theater.
And there may be some breakout tutorials along the way.
So there was a kind of fixed set of limits around what was viable.
What was never viable was one to one, unless you were super rich.
And beyond these numbers, things didn't scale well.
So in other words,
there was a kind of state of rigidities about scaling in traditional education.
And one of the ways, in which scaling was handled in the old education,
was the teacher speaking as a format.
Now this is in fact the source of this idea.
In fact, the idea of the teacher speaking while the students listen is,
in the measure of human history, a relatively new idea,
mostly with mass institutes of education in the 19th century.
But in fact, in the history of the West, one might track it back to St Benedict,
the founder of Western monasticism, who famously said, it belongeth to the master
to speak and to teach, it becometh the disciple to be silent and listen.
Now was education in the Academy of Athens like that?
No, it was dialogical.
So what with Western monasticism,
we set up these places which build these kinds of knowledge relationships.
And interestingly,
it's out of western monasticism that the universities are formed.
And these become the first forms of modern education.
So the old universities of Europe were originally
monasteries before they became universities.
So this is one of the classic forms but again the scaling issue was you had
to be in a room where there was a limit to how many people could listen.
This is the not-so-new school.
These are three MOOCs that Mary Kalantzis and I now have online including one
about learning ecologies, two about various forms of literacy.
And what's interesting about these is they actually
bring you to the 21st century without changing it much.
In fact, the old relationship of teacher to learner that
St Benedict founded around this notion of teachers speaking and students listening.
But in fact, Coursera as a form is essentially a video lecture,
that's really what it is and in fact it's the same form going on except it's become
much more scalable, in other words.
There are thousands and thousands of people that do our MOOCs and
other people's MOOCs, so
one of the things it's done is built something that's much more scalable.
Now our question is, how does one scale richer learning environments than that?
I mean in fact, it's a low hanging fruit to scale education in these ways.
And why do we want to scale it?
Now one of the great things about Coursera is that there are now 30 million accounts
and our university has had 2 or 3 million students do Coursera courses already.
In fact, what it does it makes high quality educational, or let's be narrow
about it, high quality video lectures available to huge numbers of people.
And Coursera gives you certificates for what you've done, so
you've got some form of accreditation, so in one way,
it's one of the marvels of the digital era that this thing is possible.
But how do we get away from those traditional pedagogies which
are embedded in the video lecture?
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
