formed a famous Renaissance painting. What was the educational purpose of this task? The student, by completing the task, came away with no better grasp of the history of the painting, its painter, its context, its subject, nor of the artist’ s use of color, space, or perspective. So far as I could tell, the purpose of this task was simply to give the student a task. This example shows how some educators have capitalized on new computer technology to come |
become good pedagogy simply because it is delivered through a computer.
Other interactive courses are better. They drill students by quizzing them on key terms and concepts. Welldesigned questions can add clarity and focus to the lesson, and they can reinforce concepts through review. Most of these tasks are computerized versions of worksheets, though by clever graphic design and creative formatting, online providers can mask
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up with new forms of pointless busywork. The lesson may have been“ interactive” in some sense, but it displayed poor pedagogy. Poor |
Such courses are“ self-paced” only because students and teachers will never interact with one another, leaving no need to set deadlines or coordinate calendars. |
their fundamental similarity to oldfashioned paper worksheets. Besides their clever design, these quizzes have an additional advantage |
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teachers have been assigning pointless busywork in conventional classroom settings for generations; now some of today’ s online educators have joined their ranks. Unfortunately, some customers of online education rightly criticize the busywork that can degrade a conventional classroom, yet they cast aside their better judgment whenever video monitors and graphics are involved. Poor pedagogy does not |
over paper worksheets in their capacity for providing immediate feedback: a computer program can immediately inform a student whether he answered a question correctly or incorrectly. These interactive courses, when designed with well-crafted prompts, overcome the problem of student passivity that besets video courses of the performer-spectator type. They can be especially helpful for the type of |
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