The non-course is aimed at college students who are currently time abundant and are looking to take some control over their own learning and their own mental outlook. Time abundance might happen because the student is taking a gap year due to the pandemic, yet the student is not doing traditional gap year activities, such as traveling abroad or working as a volunteer for a non-profit. But students who are enrolled in college may still find they are time abundant, either because they are no longer doing extracurricular activities or because their social life has been severely limited. Recent graduates, those who haven't yet found work or who have lost their first job due to the pandemic, should also be included in this group. For the time being, I'd prefer that students in the non-course are not still in high school, though I will not try to verify if that is true. The only reason for this restriction is that eventually I hope there will be substantial peer-to-peer learning and I believe that requires student experiences to be somewhat similar. As the non-course proceeds, we may reconsider this restriction.
The reason for the non-course is my belief that college education is broken in a fundamental way. I base this on my own recent experiences in teaching, on selective reading of Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the reading of several popular works that have received a fair amount of attention. I've written quite a lengthy post that explains this, as well as how such a non-course would proceed, in this blog post, The Librarian as Teacher, the Teacher as Learning Coach, and the Student Driving the Bus. I encourage the student who is potentially interested in taking the non-course to read that post carefully. But to make things easier, here is the part that describes the problem.
Now let's consider how typical instruction occurred before the pandemic. The instructor selects the material to be read and makes the lesson plan for how that material will be covered in class. The student's understanding of the material is subsequently assessed in a test, which is high stakes in that it matters a lot for the course grade, and the date of which is pre-specified. There may be homework given after the material is presented in class that provides assessment in a lower stakes manner and serves as preparation for the test. I've discussed the underlying dynamics of the situation in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams? The upshot is that while students may get reasonable grades under this approach, they are mostly playing an artificial game that produces only surface learning. Indeed, school becomes a charade, regarding learning, yet still seems essential, for getting a good job after graduation. The approach doesn't encourage nurture of the student intellectually, which is what school really should be about. In my view, the vast mental health issues that college students currently face is mainly a consequence of this underlying dynamic.
It is important to ask (and then understand) why students don't opt for self-teaching instead, taking each class as a second path to the subject matter, while they've already or simultaneously are following their own path through the material. Of course, some students do this. Indeed, they self-teach outside of their coursework as well. But such students are comparatively rare. For the rest, consider the following:
1) There is huge pressure on students now to have a good GPA to get a good return on investment. As tuition has been hyper inflationary for much of the past 40 years or so, (at least till the pandemic changed things) this pressure is much higher on students today than it was on me and my cohort when we went to college (in the mid 1970s).
2) Online technologies, particularly mobile devices, have had a negative impact on student reading, especially reading for pleasure. (I'm not counting reading text messages. I'm talking about long form reading - books magazine articles, etc.) Students "learn" to skim rather than to read carefully and digest what they are reading. Indeed, because they don't get enough practice at this, many students can't make good meaning of long form pieces, even if they were to put in the time to read them slowly.
3) Self-teaching seems slower and is apparently more time consuming than the alternative - to memorize the lecture notes. This is almost certainly true at first, but someone who has a firmer understanding of foundational material can make better sense of new ideas that are built on that foundation. Someone who memorizes only can't do this.
4) As the memorization habit hardens over the years, the student loses self-confidence as a learner. This lack of self-confidence contributes to the student's stress.
As to the solution, the key idea is the student driving the bus, which might be something new for the student. What is different in the non-course here than in that post is that with the non-course here there is no university sanction. So I will play the role of Librarian and Teacher. And one should not think of the non-course as an independent study done under a professor's supervision. Independent study does provide college course credit. The non-course here won't do that.
The non-course is one conception of how college education might be fixed, by actively encouraging each student to drive the bus. In this sense, one should think of the non-course as an experiment. The non-course as concept is unproven. It might fail, for some or for all the students that try it. Let's admit that possibility up front. Students who take the non-course are willing to do so in spite of the risk of failure. Also, even if there is some success with the non-course, surely there are things that could be done better, so a second time around there would tend to be more successes and fewer bumps in the road during the non-course offering.
Students can start the non-course most any time. (If I'm on vacation or otherwise indisposed, those times will be blocked off.) And students can stick with it as long as they want, with the caveat that if the numbers start to get high we will first look for a more scalable approach ourselves and then look for a way to attract outside resources to replicate the non-course approach. Students can also try to do non-course activities on their own without taking the non-course. That would be learning on one's own without feedback and commentary from others. Non-course alumni, one would hope, will be doing that for the rest of their lives. (The jargon for that is called lifelong learning.) For those students who are possibly interested in the non-course, but somewhat shy about it, starting out on your own might be a way for you to discover if you want what the non-course can provide you. I'll never be the wiser about that, unless you tell me.
Professor Arvan
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