I like the article in todays Guardian by Germaine Greer criticising the plan by Oxford to force students to sign contracts and attend lectures. Greer has some points I agree with :
“Lectures are a misshapen survival of medieval pedagogy, which took authority as absolute and understood the teacher’s sole duty to be that of expounding it”
is one – the article is well worth reading in full (http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1699238,00.html )
A learning contract in itself might not be a bad idea, if it encourages students take responsibilty for their learning, but Oxford have got it completely wrong – they are using the contracts solely to protect themselves from being sued for poor quality teaching. This is typical of the defensive mentality of many universities, something which I have often been critical of – we cannot run a university on the basis that we spend all our time worrying about being sued, we need to create postive learning communities based on trust and respect.
The Greer & Sutherland article also raises interesting questions about the value of ‘lectures’ I have long held that the ‘lecture’ where information passes from the lecturer’s notes to the students notes without passing through the mind of either one, is indeed a waste of time. This is an issue which I will return to again and again, but I do broadly agree with Greers idea about handing out the ‘lectures’ on DVD for students to watch, and using the scheduled class for discussion and interaction.
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