teaching doesn't scale, but learning might

Over the weekend I sent the post below to the tech rhet list; I'm posting it here to link to other blog conversations about this question and to hold a place while I think more about Steve's response about the nature of education.


Steve [Krause]  might be right,

And to me, it's another example of how teaching doesn't
> scale.
>

But it is also a pretty good example of the ways that learning can and does
scale.  The course is about elearning, not eteaching afterall.  Learning is
hard to come by, even in a small f2f classroom where we do the right things
like conference with each of our students individually.  I'm much less
interested in the question "how well is this course being taught?" than I
am in the question "how much learning is happening there?"   That is an
ill-framed question that sounds sadly like an opening to a tedious
discussion of assessment practices (not where I hope we go with this!).
 I'm surprised by the intense focus on what the instructors want us to get
out of the course.  With 40,000 students (one of the instructors tweeted
yesterday 16,000+ active on the site) there must be countless goals for
taking the course and things people want to get out of it.  My own goals
have little to do with the course content (although Kathy's blog as made me
think in new ways about Prensky and has opened my mind to the possibility
of learning in ways more aligned to what I would guess are the sanctioned
goals of the course).  My point is that the goal isn't to teach but to
learn, and the learning isn't only what the teacher wants it to be.