The Problem With 'A National Effort in Online Education'
Alex Usher points out quite correctly that universities will need to be online by the fall. We're not likely to be out of the Covid woods by then, and in-person classes will likely be limited and few.
So he proposes this:
for each of the (say) 100 courses with the highest enrolment taught across Canadian universities is to create, in common, a large basket of very good online resources which each institution could then incorporate into its own learning platforms. For instance, there could be short films of experts in the field talking about or demonstrating key knowledge/concepts, providing animations and examples.
Now in all fairness to the rest on the education community in Canada, it's not like anyone hasn't thought of this before. Indeed, the solution Usher proposes is almost identical to what I proposed in my 1999 paper and presentation, Learning Objects:
the world does not need thousands of similar descriptions of sine wave functions available online. Rather, what th…
So he proposes this:
for each of the (say) 100 courses with the highest enrolment taught across Canadian universities is to create, in common, a large basket of very good online resources which each institution could then incorporate into its own learning platforms. For instance, there could be short films of experts in the field talking about or demonstrating key knowledge/concepts, providing animations and examples.
Now in all fairness to the rest on the education community in Canada, it's not like anyone hasn't thought of this before. Indeed, the solution Usher proposes is almost identical to what I proposed in my 1999 paper and presentation, Learning Objects:
the world does not need thousands of similar descriptions of sine wave functions available online. Rather, what th…
