The title of this post marks a phase transition in
the emergence of Euglena's educational program.
The goal of this post is to explore new ways of scheduling courses & workshops in a more participatory, self-organizing way, w/ an online component.
In the past, I've simply decided what courses were going to be taught for how long starting when, posted the schedule, & waited for people to show up.
Usually it's been some combination of intro courses (for example, "complexity 101", now called the Level 1 core sequence) & advanced courses (now called level 2).
Sometimes it worked. On a few occasions, I've had as many as 40 - 45 students in three or four classes. The largest single class - an advanced course about thermodynamics, no less - had 22 enrolled students . That was good. It allowed me to pay rent & overhead, buy food & even drink good beer.
Sometimes, too often in fact, it didn't work. I'd wind up with only a few students spread out over 4 or 5 courses. It was not financially stable (too many months in a row of not knowing where rent was coming from) & - equally important - there was often not a critical mass of minds to make discussions flow in an engaging, sustained fashion, especially when some missed class.
So this year, I'll do things differently. I'm trying to invent a new way of setting up the schedule that will fill classes with a "reasonable" number of students, where reasonable is usually 10 - 20 for intro courses & 8 - 16 for advanced courses. (Some very advanced reading seminars may fly w/ fewer than 8 as long as overhead can be met in other ways.)
This isn't about inventing new courses (although some new ones may come out of the process), but about most expeditiously scheduling existing courses, both introductory (levels 0 & 1) & advanced (level 2).
I'm dreaming of a much more ... organic, a process of self-organization - a main principle of what we study at Euglena - whereby a group of students makes a consensus decision about what course will occur from a menu of potential courses, then participates in attempting to recruit others to the course, maybe even engaging in pre-course discussions about the material.
One process (among potentially many) involves announcing a course (or two) a month or more in advance to be offered on a particular night. People then vote for the course of their choice. If a critical minimum threshold has been reached by a set date (say, two weeks before start time), then we start the course. If not, then participants get an extra week to help meet the minimum threshold by either recruiting more participants (or potentially supplementing the course fees to secure the minimum).
I can also envision an online component to course organization. Perhaps a page describing the content & process of the course where people can sign up (so that others can see who's interested), make comments, ask questions, etc.
Advanced students will act as teaching assistants in said courses, helping with class organization & communications. Under my council, some will actually teach or facilitate discussions in my absence (say if I'm in PDX or in a woodland near a desert).
I'm going to use this space to explore this process, along with some gatherings at Euglena EUG over the next few weeks. Hopefully, a process will emerge.
I can see this being directly linked to the emerging Cozmic Pizza/Euglena Academy collaborative series.
More soon ....
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