Why Using a Typewriter When You Have a Computer?

Why is a little, highly ranked housing university like Rice schools that pride itself on a small student/sense ratio and that has the happiest students prod deep in developing MOOCS?

This is the question that I unavoidably get asked the minute I mention Rice’s partnerships with Courser and Ex. And it’s a reasonable question, for at first look the MOOC world, with its worldwide delivery, open enrollment, and high abrasion rates seems to be at theatrical odds with the highly selective housing four-year learning ecosystem that schools like Rice deliver to the small amount students who are conventional each year. And yet, of course, it isn’t that simple. How we teach is as important as what we teach, and it is for this cause that Rice faculty has, from the start, had a big hunger for experimenting with the new education capabilities provided by platforms like Ex. and Courser.

Just as used computers and the internet unexpectedly created a whole range of communication opportunities that made the typewriter largely outdated, Rice faculty want to know if and how digital delivery might make the classroom chalkboard, the slide projector, and the power-point presentation a thing of the past addition or at times replaced by tools that enrich our matriculated students’ learning knowledge and make face-to-face classroom time even more modified and interactive than it is now.

In fact, faculty interest in testing was a real reason in the university’s decision to partner with not one but two platforms. And it is the option for radical innovation and learning about learning in the process that continues to imprison the imaginations of our best faculty from a range of disciplines including chemistry, earth science, computer science, electrical engineering, religious studies, and philosophy.

To help this new process along, our faculty council developed guidance and best practices that have played a critical role in decision-making about how we develop our digital education attendance more generally. Our students have been as paying attention as our faculty is helping to shape the look and feel of learning on our site in light of new digital delivery tools and not just by signing up for courses that are testing out flipped or blended formats. Rice students have been lively collaborators and team members, working straight with faculty to develop course material for both platforms. In fact, our platform partnerships have created an essential new opportunity for students to work together directly with faculty the possibility for just the kind of focused research that many of our students and their parents prize and that distinguishes a Rice education.

Recognizing that their classroom knowledge has the potential to be transformed by new teaching techniques and tools, the student friendship has convened a working group to understand better students’ hopes and ambitions for their thinker experience while at Rice. Their goal is to help shape the academic knowledge of those who follow them to be contributors to the transformation in teaching and in the learning about teaching now underway on our campus. Like many of its peers, Rice is interested in developing MOOCS to get better the quality of education that we deliver to our students.

But inquisitiveness and a thirst for new knowledge the very things that motivate people to learn in the first place are behind this interest. Creating surroundings where a robust spirit of inquiry and intellectual risk taking thrives is core to Rice’s mission. And so, at the most basic level, we are experimenting with digital delivery and online platforms to make sure that our campus is a place where assumptions are challenged not in actively accepted, where lively questioning of the world occurs, and where new forms of knowledge and testing thrive.