“What we have to do as teachers and educators is to understand and read what we already know about good teaching and learning practices and incorporate them into an online learning space,” says our instructor Kunal Chawla to Charlie Chung from Class Central, an online course aggregator. In a recent interview, Charlie asked Kunal about Udacity’s teaching philosophy and some of the design decisions behind his new course Programming Foundations with Python.
You can read the text and view video clips from this conversation here.
Kunal explains the steps involved in creating a course at Udacity, which include identifying the learner and determining the learning objectives. This is where Kunal “spends a lot of time” in the design process. “The kind of learner I was going for,” says Kunal, “was someone who wanted to learn how to program but was somewhat intimidated by programming.”
He goes on to explain the other stages of the course creation process which include iterative improvement while using paper prototypes as well as writing scripts and creating course videos.
Kunal also highlights one of the ways in which his students can demonstrate their mastery of new material – by teaching it to someone else. Kunal regularly asks the students in his course to learn by explaining new ideas to others; he proposes that it is in this process that “the gaps in [one’s own] knowledge get illuminated.”
If you are inspired by this teaching philosophy, we encourage you to take the Programming Foundations with Python Course.
