because such personal work demands wisdom and tact. These weak administrators use bureaucracy to compensate for their own inadequacy; they remain within the comfortable confines of their office desk, and reach into classrooms with the long arm of overly-detailed curricular demands. Capable administrators, by contrast, understand that teaching is a personal activity, so they will step into messy |
intelligent, articulate scholars on audio or video, and deliver the audio or video to a student’ s computer. This has some value; even Yogi Berra acknowledged that you can observe a lot by watching. Student-spectators can learn from watching videos about history, literature, science, mathematics, and a host of other subject areas— especially videos featuring great teachers. Some enterprising folks group many such |
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classrooms and mentor the novice teachers they oversee. But wherever we find teachers who are skilled in their craft, and where |
Capable administrators, by contrast, understand that teaching is a personal activity, so they will step into messy classrooms and mentor the novice teachers they oversee. |
videos into a series and refer to the resulting package as“ a course.” Such videos( and video courses) supply one key benefit that comes from communication technology: they capture |
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they are allowed the freedom to practice it, physical classroom spaces are proven venues for excellent education. How does online education measure up to physical classrooms? |
faraway scholars and place their voices and images conveniently onto the computer screen in front of you. But these videos also reveal the limitations of video recordings. Any teacher whose |
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performance is captured on video does | |||
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Educating vs. Spectating
Some purveyors of online education offer their students a spectator experience, somewhat like the experience of watching televised baseball. They capture the voices of
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not engage sympathetically with students who view the video. The teacher’ s actions are recorded for playback on screen and speakers, and thus can never adjust for the studentviewer. The teacher’ s performance |
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8 | |||