Ken Bain - Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning

We are in the midst of a profound revolution in teaching and learning. This change has come in the form of a new breed of Super Courses that have emerged in the humanities, social and natural sciences, arts, professional fields, and other areas. While these new experiences have appeared in all stages of education, they have made their biggest difference in undergraduate colleges and universities. These dramatic changes have also appeared in high schools and medical institutions.

These new kinds of courses are altering the nature of what students encounter in school. While fostering deeper and more widespread learning, they have redefined what it means to become educated and the conditions most likely to produce that end. When Harvard University Press published our What the Best College Teachers Do in 2004 and What the Best College Students Do in 2012, the nature of this revolution had already become somewhat clear, but it has continued to grow, transforming itself and the landscape around it.

For decades, many educators simply focused on finding superior minds and helping them to develop. These teachers assumed that the best way to educate was to give students facts to digest. Yet the innovations of which we speak are now demonstrating that traditional classrooms have too frequently left most students far short of their potential, even those who score the highest marks. Furthermore, our methods of measuring learning have long been inadequate. Its tough to detect and appraise the changes that go on in peoples minds when they learn. Sometimes students have received praise for largely empty accomplishments. Other times some marvelous progress has gone undetected by our antiquated methods of assessment.

In the traditional classroom, instructors might laud the power of comprehension, critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving but often test for memory. Only with improved understanding of evaluation can teachers from grade school to the university focus more clearly on deep learning, adaptive expertise, and the ability to take an idea and realize its implications in a large variety of settings, some far distant from each other (what we sometimes call far transfer). Only then can we appreciate the importance of living at the edge of our own cultural perspectives and constantly exploring the problems we might face in accepting whatever we believe.

New technologies have certainly affected change, but they have not been the driving force that so many observers assume. The strongest influence has come instead from research on human learning. True, we have often pinned our hopes on our machines, and a variety of technologies have made it easier to create transforming learning environments. Yet sophisticated gadgets do not create better schools without advances in how we comprehend and measure learning and motivation. Indeed, the emphasis on technology as a savior of education has led to some false starts and pedagogical dead ends. Even in the spring of 2020, when a pandemic forced thousands of classes to go online, insights into how our minds grow, not computers or the internet, determined success or failure.