As I conclude my Optics course this week (40+ hrs, ~80 physics majors ), I have an opinion to express. There is no substitute for in-person human interaction and learning. This form of interaction is not to downplay the role of technology in education, but somehow, as humans, we still connect better in reality than in virtual space.
I have been formally teaching for the past 14 years or so, and for a couple of semesters, I have also taught online courses during the pandemic. During these years, I have learnt that technology can add significant value to teaching but cannot be a substitute for a teacher or a student. As we teach a class with a reasonable number of students, we experience live feedback from each other, which has no equivalent during an online interaction. Humans take this feedback for granted and assume we can replicate it in a virtual space with limited success. Such feedback may have a deeper connection to the evolutionary biology of human beings.
This feedback loop in a live class does not make teaching or learning a perfect act of communication. But it brings in a form of dissipative coherence, which indicates that the whole class, including the teacher, is thinking synchronously at the moment of exposition. I have deliberately used the word ‘dissipative’ because there is always some intellectual noise in the background. The beauty of this noise is that it adds up with the information under discussion and amalgamates with the topic of exposition. This combination is the uniqueness of learning. At that moment in the class, we are all thinking about a topic, but noise in an individual mind combines with the issue at large and possibly emerges as a new thought. This divergence of thinking at a personal level, combined with real-time feedback, makes a live class alive.
And at that hour, it becomes a single living entity with a single meta-brain.
VISMAYA - History & Philosophy of Science 