When technology advances, teaching styles regress. Every new wave of technology touted as a boon to education — radio, TV, DVDs, the internet — has tended to revive the idea that the ideal class structure is the lecture, where faculty broadcast information to disconnected student recipients. Yet we’ve known for decades that lectures are poor ways to create learning experiences, and that actively involving students–with the class, the teacher, each other–is far more effective. The thesis of Imagination and Distributed Learning is that the range of possible experiences available online is larger, more varied, and more interesting than most of what is on offer from colleges and universities’ online courses. Students will read teaching and learning research, and do field work where they set out to learn something online and reflect on the experience, and then set out to teach something online, and reflect on that experience. The goal of the course will be for students to build up alternatives to existing (and often quite dull) online educational practices today. The final project will be a proposal, plus designs or partial implementation, for online tools or experiences that will create experiences users can learn from. These proposals will be presented to a panel of people managing existing online programs at NYU and elsewhere.

Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 11 Weeks