MOOC providers are investing in the “lights, camera, action” side of online learning, capturing lectures by academic luminaries using Hollywood-quality TV production techniques. Even with the democratization of production technology, using these tools masterfully takes time and specialized knowledge and could/should be a job of its own.
An interpersonal expert, with excellent communication and mediation skills to promote interaction between students and faculty and to play the role of the “caring demander” in online learning activities. This person ensures that the course is personalized to students and bears the psychic load of staying emotionally invested in students’ success– even when it involves challenging meetings or explaining content multiple ways.
In massive online courses, this person could also resemble a community manager– a social web-era job title responsible for keeping online communities productive, positive, and enjoyable places to be. Beyond the confines of a single course, this person could help students and faculty from throughout the university form communities around common areas of interest and promote interaction between disciplines.
I believe that more courses should feature all of these diverse skills– even if it means that it takes more than one person to deliver them all. Ideally, this approach might make it possible to cost-effectively provide a higher level of service to a greater number of students by combining the strengths of the technology with the power of caring teachers.
As the team generates re-usable learning materials that can endure into the following terms, the value of this approach will continue to pay for itself. Even if it only improved outcomes for the same number of students at the same cost, it would be an unqualified win all the same.
If your school currently has a teacher to student ratio of 1:30, ask yourself if you could combine four classes together so that each teacher could play one of these roles for a group of 120 students?
This blog post originally appeared on TedCurran.net.
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