At home my wife has an internet radio station on all day with soft, lilting music to bring some sense of sanity to our home of eight people. Every now and then the station will have news. As I was at the desk for just a short time I heard a report of a web site that blew me away. Not that it was novel, not that it was technologically advanced (because it is not), but it hit home to me the importance of understanding transparency in learning.
This site, www.ratemyprofessors.com does just that. Pick a state. Pick a college. Pick a professor. Rate them. WOW! I think of all the professors I have been through and how some of them are only half as effective as they could be. Smart they certainly are (most of them) but many didn’t know how to teach. As students have come in, in the past, picked a class and then saw that, maybe two professors are teaching. Which one to choose? Close your eyes and guess. No longer!
In fact, I am taking Masters classes from Boise State University (the Instructional and Performance Technology Masters) and went to look at my new professor for this fall. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like BSU has updated their records and it just says “STAFF” right now. BUT, if there was one assigned that person might be on there. And if there were choices (as there often are) you bet I will take into consideration the comments!
Professors are rated on “Easiness”, “Helpfulness”, “Clarity” and “Rater Interest” and they can leave comments, like this:
“Online class. His powerpoints were written for lectures, they lose something online- they contain test questions, but no answers. Need to read the book (well)to pass his tests. The lab activities online are lame.”
Good information! So obviously this is useful to the students but is this useful for the professors? Depends on how you look at it. I am sure there are a number of professors that don’t really want to change their teaching style, even if it stinks. But let’s imagine the fate of such an educator. They teach a class poorly. They are rated poorly. Their class enrollment declines. A few months of that and the administrators notice a pattern. They find the cause. They need to fix the cause. It becomes hard to hide behind what you want to avoid.
Here is the kicker in the whole thing: Neither the school nor the professors had anything to do with or say in creating this wealth of information. They can’t control it. It is all student run.
So how does this help learning? Obviously in large organizations this same thing could happen with the trainers. But expand your thinking beyond that. Information that was previously not known, or at least not aggregated so as to be useful information, is not only gathered together but can be acted upon, creating change. And those in charge of gathering, formatting, and dispersing training had nothing to do with it. This can be good or ‘bad’. The ‘bad’ part is that it may be information that is embarrassing, like ratemyprofessors.com.
Either way, information, whether or we want to or not, is becoming more and more transparent and aggregated. And we won’t always be in control of it. The question is, how will you take advantage of it and use it to create a useful solution?
