Rethinking The Academy:

Control Over the Content of Courses


At first, the issue of content creation may not seem immediately germane to an article on the pedagogy of cyberspace, but in fact it may well be. What is at issue is student power over teaching and over teachers.

The virtual classroom affords opportunities to turn the class over to student input and design in a way that may not be available to teachers in the traditional classroom. (Of course, the first question is whether or not students ought to be allowed to design course syllabi!)

Teachers who do decide that students can indeed make useful and academically sound decisions about what to teach and what to be taught may also find their teaching modified by the freedom made available by electronic ways of teaching, by finding that teachers and students can and often do change roles as they teach one another the technology. Teachers will find that allowing competent students to teach a technology they may in fact know better than the teacher will be to the benefit of everyone involved.


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Last Modified: August 2, 1996

Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick