Pair-agogy

[steve.yost]

Thanks again all for an interesting meeting!

Afterwards, I recalled a variation of peeragogy that I tried once:

I was interested in a pretty technical statistics course, and I knew it wouldn't be great for rich discussion. So I invited people in my ongoing group to take it with me as a side project, with the caveat that it could be tough, and we'd simply be spurring each other to do the reading and homework, and getting together weekly to review.

Only one person took me up on it. But awesomely, it turned out she had actually lead a Udemy course herself, and was a researcher at Renssellaer. So it seemed like a rich opportunity!

So we agreed to do something experimental: each alternating week, one of us would "lecture" on the material to the other (who should also have done the work), the idea being that having to teach something provides deeper learning. This worked great for a few weeks, until her research demands didn't allow her the time. 

I might recommend this "pair-agogy" as a low-barrier, incremental approach for people to get involved in peeragogy.

Steve

[Joe Corneli]

Hi Steve / all,

Nice model.  Someone I know at Oxford Brookes University (where I work) was suggesting that we might want to rethink the way we deliver our curriculum, along the lines you described.  Given that MIT OCW (and others) have lots of great lectures with technical content, why should we "duplicate" that work, but worse?  Instead, why don't we run tutorial groups that add value on top of the MIT (et al.) lectures?  Then we might legitimately say that the Oxford Brookes experience has something that MIT doesn't.

Joe