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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."
Why is a 50% reduction in failures a useful stat? The schools want a certain amount of failures in these large "weeder" classes, because giving a diploma to everyone who pays waters down the value of the diploma.
If they wanted to reduce failures, they only needed to move the curve (which was set where it was on purpose in the first place).
Honestly, by the time you get to college, especially ones like MIT, if you can't learn because the environment isn't as cozy as it could be, I'm not sure it is completely the school's job to fix that for you. You might expect that in primary school, but you can't expect it in the world of work, so seems like college is a great place to start introducing people to the concept.
I would have to imagine another flip side of this is the students "don't get access" (whatever that really means in a big lecture) to top professors. Teaching 80 kids at once instead of 500 means you have to run 6x as many classes and professors aren't going to do this willingly. You're probably going to end up with only access to a T.A. (teaching assistant).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yes and no. If you're looking for a lot of individual time and supervision, no, a big school is not the place to go.
But if you're looking for great resources and opportunities, then a big school is far superiour. I jumped into a graduate research lab my junior year for credit, experience, and references that were a huge benefit to me, and that sort of opportunity was impossible for me at the smaller school where I'd spent my first two years.
The gotcha is that you have to go looking for those opportunities. No one is going to try and force you to take them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...but this just happened. I got a phone call this morning from my son, who is a Freshman just beginning his second term in college (math/physics major).
His college requires all freshman to take three credits of social/cultural liberals arts classes focused on diversity, understanding, and rainbows. On the plus side, they focus on writing weekly research papers, which is probably a good habit for freshman to pick up.
In this specific class, the teacher was warning against the perfidious institution of sexism in places of power, and gave the evil ex-dean of harvard as an example. I happen to have had conversations about that with my son, and so when the teacher asked for open discussion, my son spoke up. He said that as he understood it, the Harvard dean was a poor example of sexism, since all he stated was that there was possibly may be some physical difference in brain development between the genders that lead to the male preponderance in hard sciences.
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. Now, he's probably learned a good lesson... shut up and don't engage in free discussion in a class that encourages free discussion, until he gets a feel for the teacher's maturity. It's an unfortunate lesson, but probably necessary. I should stress that he is always polite, and always soft-spoken; there would have been nothing objectionable about his behavior.
To bring this back to topic, perhaps losing face-to-face contact and easy interactivity with the professor and other students is not really much of a loss. Except for the best teachers, most classes are no more educational than spending an hour with a textbook, and sometimes (when personalities get involved) much worse.
I don't know. I was in several classes that size when I was in school (both my Physics classes and 1 Astronomy class). Admittedly, the guy doing the Astronomy class was a joke. It consisted of a slide show for a lecture and the "textbook" was his own book he'd written which came from the bookstore as a collection of pages that you had to add to your own 3 ring binder. Given that I already knew most of what was in the class (having taken more advanced classes on the subject already - this was just an easy elective), after the first 2-3 weeks I stopped going and just checked the website and showed up for tests. Ended up making an A+ in the class.
Now, the two Physics classes of this size were MUCH better handled. The professor didn't use powerpoint at all. OCCASIONALLY he'd use the overhead projector, but not for more than 1 slide. Mostly he used the chalkboard (which had a system of pullies to raise/lower 2 sets of 3 boards as needed so there was plenty of writing space available to him) to work out problems, but he also did a lot of straight lecturing, and hands on demonstrations where he'd bring in equipment, call volunteers onto the stage, etc. If you felt like shouting (or sitting close to the front) he was also more than happy to answer any questions the class might have. He was also a very funny/fun professor (as well as a complete jackass, but in an entertaining sort of way). I honestly found those two classes to be some of my most enjoyable I took, and never felt disadvantaged due to the class size.
In general, I think that it's more difficult to teach effectively to a very large class, but it's by no means impossible.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Is this going towards a future where students do not need to be physical present on the campus?
Actually, the TEAL approach that replaced the large freshman physics lectures at MIT places a heavier emphasis on attendance. In a traditional lecture the professor doesn't know most of the students, and doesn't really care if 50% of them stop showing up after the first week. With TEAL there are interactive portions of the class (such as answering multiple choice questions with a personal remote) which are tracked and factored into the student's grade. In other words, if you don't show up, you can't get an A (no matter how well you have mastered the material).
Personally I don't think this is the best approach, but it certainly isn't forgiving of a student's absence from class.
As a side note, when I was a freshman, many of my classmates did not find the TEAL lectures to be terribly effective in teaching the material. Frequently they would go back into the video archive after class and watch recordings of the "traditional" lectures from years past to actually learn what was being taught. They just went to the TEAL lectures because they didn't want to loose their participation credit.
"Si vis pacem para bellum" -Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus
Um, there are PLENTY of hot chicks at MIT, having brains does not make you unattractive and MIT is the elite of the elite so they can be selective for well rounded very smart people. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of basement dwelling nerds there, but from my campus visits and all of the tv shows I have seen they aren't even the majority. Think head chearleder who was in all honors/AP classes with a near 4.0 while also being an officer of 6-8 other clubs/groups, that's the people that get into MIT.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.