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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Ok, naive question: how "21 separate and not that great tutorials, all happening at the same time" is not what a class is supposed to be? If I go to the class, I expect to learn information from the teacher. There will be occasional classmate information that will be interesting but I expect 90% of my time spent gaining information from the teacher.

Since when do we expect classes to be social events? If I want to learn with other learners then I don't really need a teacher, or a classroom, actually. I need a forum, a la stackoverflow, and a good doc/book.

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No, that's not what a class is supposed to be.

The view of a classroom as being a conduit where the teacher transmits knowledge from their brain into the students is entirely outdated. That's not how learning works.

To learn, you have to process information, build understanding. One way that has been shown to work quite well at this is to make students explain to each other and challenge each other.

You may have heard the phrase "I didn't really learn this until I had to teach it", which is another reflection of the same thing; the act of explaining to other people improves your understanding.

Not to mention that it also improves your skills at things like making a coherent argument and working with other people, which are quite useful skills to have in life.

If this doesn't work for you, you don't need the teacher either. After all, what can they tell you that you can't just read in the textbook?

>That's not how learning works.

I've learned lots of information from classes by just paying attention to the lectures and doing no out of class studying/conversations unless I had particular trouble with something, in a wide range of subjects like physics from Newton's laws to relativity, various history classes, music theory, epistemology, calculus. Is this that unusual of an experience?

You may just be predisposed to that form of instruction. Many other folks aren't.

One of my most interesting experiences was US history Class in high school. The teacher was supposedly boring as hell (like that guy from ferris bueller). I kind of went into a trance in but recalled quite a bit of facts and did great on his tests.

Now did I really grok the subject? Perhaps not.

No, I learned lots like that too. But the mere fact that "I've learned a lot from doing X" doesn't mean you wouldn't have learned more from doing Y.

Well, I understand two positions that I find coherent (and I spend my time switching between them):

- Either you do see the classroom as a conduit of knowledge from teachers to students. Indeed, that's not all there is to learning, you need to understand and exercise your new knowledge, but that happens in a different time, outside the classroom.

- Or you see knowledge transmission as a more or less autonomous task and you favor social interactions between students to help them "build understanding" as you suggest. In that case the teacher (and, arguably, the classroom) is not necessary anymore.

I fail to see why you would want a classroom and teacher if you are in the position 2.

I know something it is that if I were to pay for a class, I would want to have more than a bunch of people equally ignorant as I am trying to understand a thing together. I would want an experienced teacher giving us the core knowledges. But again, I mostly live in the IT world, where such a class is almost never necessary.

Having a discussion like this serves numerous purposes for a skilled teacher. By having a genuine discussion, the teacher can:

* get an immediate assessment of students' understanding

* provoke deep processing by the students who participate

* Draw out students who are otherwise passive and disengaged

* Learn what subtopics are particularly interesting to the class, and adapt the schedule accordingly

* Allow students to experience the process of active learning rather than having everything handed to them

* Other things...

It's not an either/or situation, it's a tactic. A good teacher will use open-ended discussion for all of those things and more, but it isn't the only thing going on in a typical class. Ultimately, the teacher is still there imparting knowledge. The discussion is just one of the ways that's done, and a high quality discussion can be extremely valuable.

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