In Defense of the Living, Breathing Professor‘
“Crowd-sourcing’ the grading of an essay online is no substitute for thoughtful evaluation by a trained educator.”
This is an excellent commentary about mass classes published in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. Have a look:it is all about why good teachers have little to fear form from the current fad in mass internet classes (MOOCS in the current parlance). The article is written by Adam Falk who is the President of Williams College in Massachusetts, and a Professor of Physics there. Williams College is of course the traditional high quality liberal arts college where rich folk send their kids. Excellent quality means small classes, and much professor-student contact.
I’m always impressed that those with the big bucks are willing to invest in institutions like Williams for their own kids, presumably because there is a “pay off” in the type of adults and citizens Williams create with their small classes. This is presumably because, as Falk writes that there are no substitutes online for that living breathing professor. Certainly it is not replaced by a celebrity-professor on the internet web-casting to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) asynchronously.
Now, if we could only get the rich to acknowledge that the small classes, thoughtful evaluation, and so forth that is good for their kids, is also good for the other 98%, we might get somewhere~
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.