Commentary: Crowdsourcing, foldit, and scientific discovery games

What qualifications are appropriate to teaching biochemistry, either directly in lectures or indirectly using computer delivery? Managers of educational institutions need to make it appear that their staff are homogeneously capable and trained teachers. My university simply asserts excellence in teaching to prospective students. Yet all my colleagues know that individuals vary in their teaching ability from indifferent through to outstanding. My colleagues have qualifications and experience that ensures that their background in science is solid. Teaching is the bit that is tacked on and may or may not make a difference in promotion. I have no doubt that people become better teachers through training, and I can envisage a future in which a teaching qualification will be mandatory for confirmation of tenure. One observation suggesting that good teachers can be created is that the majority of teachingaward winners at my university have formal teaching qualifications and often have experience as school teachers. This recognition for success in teaching is out of proportion, because only a miniscule fraction of the staff at my university have a formal teaching background or qualification. My vice chancellor (chief executive officer) has asserted that, “the best researchers make the best teachers. ” This illustrates only that what is desired politically can result in blinkered perception. What makes a good teacher is a highly vexed question, as is the question of how people can best be taught to be better teachers. At least there is a long tradition of providing support for the specific skill of lecturing, and most universities have established centers of education to upgrade the teaching ability of the staff at their university. The central unit at my university offers many attractively titled courses, e.g. “Good lectures: how to plan and deliver them” [1]. However the staff that teach the teachers are not themselves active in teaching, and I am not aware that any have moved from a background of achievement as science teachers. I took a number of the teaching courses offered by my university last year and felt that much of the matter failed to extend me, because it was almost all based on hypothetical scenarios. My fellow students were mostly in their first years of university teaching and may have benefited from a catalogue of approaches. Certainly there are benefits from simply making time to focus on teaching. What I would like to see universities foster is a hybrid person with shared appointments between a teaching department and an education unit. Most discipline-based teachers would be reluctant to take up such an appointment, because it would be prejudicial to the traditional route of promotion through research. So we are left with teachers of the teachers who mostly command only qualified respect from their clients. Although my colleagues might take a course to become a better lecturer, none that I know of are taking courses to write better computerassisted learning courses. Many of them are writing materials intended primarily for computer delivery but with scant regard to any body of educational research that lays down principles of presentation, let alone evaluation and maintenance. There are, of course, many generalist instructional designers who have qualifications from excellent courses, and in my experience they have largely been employed in private enterprise. One reason for the relative rarity of instructional designers in universities is the grantbased, ephemeral nature of most employment in universities. There are few instructional designers to work with us or to teach us how to best use multimedia at present. Multimedia is a generalist field, because anyone and everyone is doing it, but it may mature into a specialist field requiring the application of principles that are becoming established [2]. Some day computer-based instruction may displace lectures as the primary delivery mode, and such a paradigm shift will leave a void in the objective competence of current staff.