Why do lectures prevail?
David offers a parody of the future of education. Now, the hard part about responding to a parody is that you never know which components are meant to be serious. From what I know of David, I think I can figure it out, but I offer the caveat that I may be wrong.
He offers two good reasons for which the future of education will look a lot like its past:
1. Employers will continue to want a third-party validation of their potential employees’ qualifications (degrees from accredited institutions). [I think he believes this one.]
2. The societal-shifting advances of the past (academies, books, printing, etc.) failed to disrupt the traditional lecture format of education. [I think this one is facetious.]
I want to explore the second point a little deeper, even it wasn’t meant to be examined..
If lectures were as soul-destroying as many educational reformists would have us believe, then no one would use them. (Even TED would change its format.) But lectures give something that other formats of instruction do not: efficiency.
It’s akin to why so many tests – even those created by good teachers – continue to employ multiple-choice items.
But surely we can find instructional media that are more efficient than lectures. A text posted online, for example, has the potential to serve orders of magnitude more learners than the thrice-weekly professorial song-and-dance in the lecture hall. And its distribution cost would be infinitesimal relative to the cost of a live lecture. If efficiency is accomplishment over cost, then online texts are much more efficient than live lectures.
That’s where David’s first point comes into play. Live lectures preserve the gate-keeping status of the institution. The lecture hall has walls that limit participation; they only include those meeting the requirements of the institution. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you look at the truly innovative institutions (e.g. WGU), they have shifted the gate-keeping mechanism from credit-for-participation-in-information-distribution (the role of lecture and the lecture-hall walls) to credit-for-evidence-of-proficiency (assessments). This model affords greater efficiency in instruction without sacrificing the gate-keeping (read: profit-generating) responsibilities of the institution.
Contrary to David satirical vision, I believe that education will look different in the future. And institutions who shift from information-distribution to candidate-evaluation will own the future of education.