The state of university didactics

8 points by pigats ↗ HN
Universities are the place where two main processes take place: 1) students reach the highest grades of education 2) cutting-edge research

Most of the people working inside universities work both as teachers and researchers, but they perform the two tasks in very different ways.

Modern research activities take often (almost always?) advantage of international teams of people, peer review and in some ways go beyond the single university.

Didactics, on the other hand, is far back behind as far as I can see (in Italy, at least): every teacher seems to be reinventing the wheel in every single course of every single faculty in every single university, even if most subjects are widely overlapped.

I think this is a big disadvantage for both teachers and students: for the formers it means more work; for the latters it mean a more partial vision of the subject and more error prone didactic contents. If I were a teacher, I'd like to see other teachers' contents, peer review them and maybe use them as my course (under some sort of licence). As a student, I would like to be given easy access to high quality didactic contents even if they are not written by my teacher or inside my university.

I also think wikipedia and google are not enough here, since I'm talking about university-teacher curated university-grade contents. Arxiv and similars neither, because I'm not looking for papers.

Isn't this a major issue in the university didactics? What is the state of didactics in your university?

6 comments

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Well, teachers seems to be left alone in this task. Nobody check their work even just to make suggestions :(
their work is often hidden behind locked platform or unguessable urls. think they should be released and aggregated. Suggestions and corrections will come
Sounds like you're describing Connexions: http://cnx.org/
interesting. but I'm thinking about something more "social" and less "elearning". In connexion contents come only from the authors, from what I can see, while teachers (the authors of the universities) may not be the first to see the advantage of putting knowledge there. I think there could/should be a more targeted platform for university didactics online needs.
...or a Threadless for the best teaching of the world? http://www.ForgetTheTextbook.com
don't want to throw textbooks away, and don't want to select one best course for every subject (inside university, you'll always have to follow your teachers' contents to some extent). I just want to collect every piece of information produced by university teachers & students and think this would be terribly useful