MIT Moves Away From Massive Lecture Halls

eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."

Comments

remote learning

[escay]

Is this going towards a future where students do not need to be physical present on the campus? they would attend classes from home (or basement for some) and graduate with professional degrees. while that may be well and good for knowledge and proficiency what does it do to learning about social coexistence?

oh well, i guess they could take a class for that too.

Re:remote learning

[Bigjeff5]

Social Co-existance? Why in God's name would you need to learn that at college? Those are life skills, and can be learned in *drumroll* life. Sure, college is a great place to do that, but I would not say the social attributes gained in college translate 100% to working life, more like 50% or less. There is a lot of stuff kids do in college that would get you fired in a heartbeat at a real honest to goodness job.

Social co-existance is not a good reason to go to college, IMHO. Apparently they teach that at some schools anyway (which is completely retarded).

Re:remote learning

[Anonymous Coward]

Lecture halls have nothing to do with being on-campus.

They fell out of the middle-ages mentality where the large lecture was the best way of disseminating knowledge to a group of individuals, specifically because multiple copies of a book were not often available. The "Lecture" format was originally much like the sermon you get from a preacher at sunday services.

Of course, for most of my "lecture" classes, if there were more than 30 students, all the "lecturer" did was read his own damn book (which we had to buy at way-too-high prices) to us for 3 hours every class anyways. I wholeheartedly support the end of the "lecture" format class on this basis.

great

[po134]

I've been in 2x150+ classes at my university and it's really a good idea to move from those as the best the teacher can do is read the slides (God they love those at the university) which every student can do on their own at home, there's no "plus-value" of going to class especially when you have 45min of bus each way to get there.

Re:great

[SatanicPuppy]

I always loved the question part(sarcasm/irony). A lot of my lecture profs would ask this question like, "Everyone who doesn't get it, raise their hand" and if enough people raised their hand, he'd go over the topic again, and if that didn't do it, you had to ask the TA anyway.

My brains a bit odd: when I don't get it, I don't get it differently from most people, so I always had to ask the TA, or figure it out for myself. At that point, there ceases to be a reason to go to the class. Add to that the psychological torment of being the only moron who has to raise his hand twice...Ugh.

The best educations often don't come fro the bigge

[stokessd]

The giant schools are not the place where the best educations come from. Sure they often have the biggest research budgets and thus are in the news the most. Smaller schools with smaller class sizes are where it's at from a value for dollar spent standpoint.

My biggest class was intro psych and it was 75 folks. My Hydrodynamic instability was four students and the professor. Just try to hide when you haven't prepared with only three other peeps to hide behind.

Sheldon

Re:The best educations often don't come fro the bi

[reddburn]

If one happens to be a self-directed learner, then the research U's ARE the place to be, with far better resources available to students. I went to a SLAC as an undergraduate, then to Giant Research University for grad school, and I can promise you that I'd have given anything to have the resources of GRU as an undergrad.

Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures"

[Animats]

MIT doesn't work that way. If you can get into MIT, you should be able to get through MIT.

Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures"

[fropenn]

Why is a 50% reduction in failures a useful stat?

It's useful because it shows that many of the students in the class were not learning anything...which is the point of education.
Having a larger number of people with a bachelor's degree does not make it worth less. Having a large number of people who don't know anything have a bachelor's degree makes it worth less.

Good.

[SatanicPuppy]

Massive lecture halls were completely pointless in my experience. The only correlation between attendance and my grade was actually a negative correlation: the less I went, the better my grades got.

I had one class, a planetary geology course, where I was told in the first class that there was no way I could pass without attending class (to watch his boring-ass slideshows, which were going to be on the exam). That was the last class I went to, and I aced the class and the final.

Likewise physics, and all the gut CS classes (everything up to the 300 level). If you have a question, you're fucked anyway, because with 200+ students, you'll never be able to ask it...Half the time they put you off to the end of the lecture anyway, and then they tell you to ask the TA during the practicum or the lab.

After I graduated I heard that they'd put in this system where you had to "rent" this fricking remote control, register it (unique serial number, so they could track you attendance) and use it to input multiple choice answers to questions the prof put on the board. I can only imagine the benefits felt by the students [/sarcasm]

Save your time for the practicum, keep on top of the syllabus, and let the prof drone on at 8:00am while you get an extra hour of shuteye.

Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures"

[Dynedain]

Bullshit. If I'm paying $40,000 a year to get an education, I expect that the university do all in it's power to facilitate the education.

Note that they're reducing failures by 50%, not because of aptitude or student ability, but purely by changing the delivery format. Hands-on small classrooms with a low student to professor ratio has been proved time and time again to be a good thing. This is true at all levels of education, from grade school through PhD programs.

In a big class, if you don't understand something, and aren't given the opportunity to discuss it with the professor for clarification, you're far more likely to lose interest and motivation. There's a reason why every university when recruting high school students tries to brag about low student to teacher ratios.

Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already moderating this thread so I can't post except as AC, but I went to MIT.

In my living group we had 18 freshman my year. 1 graduated early, 6 of us graduated "on time," a few more graduated in 5 years and the rest never graduated.

So sorry, at least in my small sample, MIT does work that way.

sink or swim

[Kartoffel]

I had a couple monster lecture hall classes as an undergrad. They were usually either introductory courses or weed-out courses. TFA is right that by the end of the semester addentance is cut in half. Students either don't need to attend anymore (introductory course) or they have already dropped it (in the case of a weed-out course).

Big U's are THE place to be for grad students and researchers. If you can manage to keep your head above water as an undergrad you will be better acclimated.

Failing or burning out?

[Auraiken]

A bit on that note is that the kids who are going to MIT might usually be very intelligent and might have high grades but what may happen is that they start to burn out around this time or go through some sort of identity crisis where they want to party and relax. So this might be a big factor as well. I mean how many of you want to learn things all the time no matter how cool they can be? I know I've gotten sick of even the things that I was interested in if it was a common routine.

Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps...

[Colonel Korn]

Remember that you learned this preposterous story from your son, who learned his concept of reality with you. Your acceptance of this obviously falsified or wildly embellished story as reality shows that your understanding of reality is deeply flawed. This, in turn, implies that your son's understanding of reality is similarly flawed. By the time the story gets to us through you two highly imperfect filters, it's pretty much meaningless.

Re:It saves money

[KovaaK]

Clearly, there is a balance of cost and effectiveness. You can't have infinite students to one professor because very few students would get anything meaningful out of it.

What Firethorn is arguing is that one of the major benefits of having smaller classes is the individual student-professor interactions that occur such as the ones he listed. I tend to agree with him. When a professor can hear a student's (incorrect) thought process on a problem, he may have heard similar issues before and be quick to correct them. There are plenty of incorrect ways to look at problems, but it wouldn't make sense for a professor to approach a class of 300+ and say "Don't do these problems this way - this is wrong. Also, don't do them this way. This way is wrong too."

Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps...

[timholman]

The teacher turned red, started to stammer, so my son stopped talking. By the end of the day, he had been notified that he had been removed from the class.

I've been teaching at public and private universities for many years, and I have yet to see or hear of a undergraduate class where a professor could arbitrarily drop a student from that class without that student's permission, just because the student said something politically incorrect.

So tell me, what university was this? And what reason did your son claim was given for this supposed drop? And why didn't he raise holy hell with the administration for such a flagrant and prejudicial abuse of faculty power, assuming such power even exists?

I call shennanigans. I suggest you contact the dean's office and find out the real reason your son dropped the class.

Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps...

[exploder]

Yup. No way the OP's son got removed from a class for that. I've seen plenty of *actual* misbehavior from dumbass freshmen that never led to their removal from class.

This sounds like the kind of "look what the libruls are doing *now*" sort of email that circulates among my Christian/conservative acquaintances.

Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures"

[exploder]

Most people who think they can teach themselves a subject, even to the level of a four-year degree, are overestimating their own initiative and discipline. You may be the rare exception, but if so, the system isn't designed for you anyway.

You don't pay for a cozy environment. You pay the university to certify that you really *did* learn the material to their standards. You pay for access to experts in the field. You pay for use of facilities. All things you can't get on your own, even if you can learn everything independently.

Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures"

[Anonymous Coward]

I have taught at a MAJOR university of the MIT class and at a couple of state universities. When you have an MIT with its extremely high admission standards, weeding out extremely capable students is not necessary, although you may have a "project" in getting some of them adjusted to the pace of the real world. A lot of them played with science, doing what they wanted, prior to admission but in the real world you have to do things in a more focused and directed way (unless you are a professor, ahem). Many don't take to disciplined thinking and working, and are weeded out.

In a state university which has to admit anyone with a high enough class rank from high school, if you want a respectable degree for your graduates, you are bloody ruthless in weeding out your unworthy freshmen. That's life. I have not noticed in the two state universities I have worked in anything like "eliminating the worthy" taking place. I teach in the hard sciences, and if you are going to be worth a damn to an employer (for instance), you have to be able to take the pace of meeting large demands on your time and brainpower. At commuter schools, you have the problem of people working -- in one I am familiar with, over 70% of the students work over 30 hours a week, and it is hard for the faculty there to work students hard enough (i.e., homework) without putting the students on an 8 year plan to graduate.

What you are seeing here with the MIT changes is an adaptation to a lot of research going on in the teaching of physics (one area I know a bit about). There are ways to re-organizing your teaching methods, and the clickers play a very large role in this if used correctly, and with properly set up support by TA's students show a 30+% improvement in standard (conceptual) test scores versus standard teaching methods. The debate is over teaching problem solving skills which can only be trivially tested on 1 hour standardized tests. Better understanding of the class overall of concepts does not mean you have helped the small percentage of real problem solvers which will be in any class in any school, the MIT's included.

So, there is clear evidence that the modern teaching methods, used correctly, provide much more competent C students, it does not necessarily mean the two or three percent of students who are the real future of your field are getting anything more out of it. The improvement in conceptual understanding of the better students is much less dramatic, and may not even be measurable in the few you want to really get to. And, you have made a choice to not emphasize problem solving in order to increase the average conceptual understanding. Those of you out in the real world will understand that solving real problems is ultimately where it is at, not scoring well on standardized tests.