Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
My sig has been answered.
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.
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
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
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.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This means your chance of getting into MIT just decreased by over 9000%.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
The schools with the large lecture halls just want your money. They accept everyone, (not MIT of course) and then weed you out by making learning as difficult as possible. They get a semester or two of tuition at very little cost to them. Good schools may have lower acceptance rates, but higher graduation rates.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
Where will students go to take their afternoon naps now?
...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.
"...the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."
Synonymous? Maybe at large colleges, but guess what -- you can get a degree without that experience. It's called a smaller school. Sadly, many of my high school compatriots looked at "name brand" first, and size or cost second, if at all. For any high school slashdotters listening, I have a secret -- it's the same degree. My father went to state school in RI, and was recruited by Raytheon before he'd even graduated. He was working alongside graduates from all the Ivy Leagues, getting paid the same. It doesn't matter what the name on the diploma is, what matters is the effort you put in and the skills you provide for your employer. Save your money, avoid crippling student loan debt, and get those smaller class sizes anyways.
Smaller university equals smaller classes. The largest class I've ever had at my university was 40 students -- hardly unmanageable. Consider these things first, since you're going to school for your degree, not bragging rights, at least ostensibly so.
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.
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."
There's a gigantic unanswered question here: How does this scale?
Under the large-lecture system in place when I was at MIT ('92), 300+ students filled the lecture hall two times a day, 3 days a week. That is 600+ students taking class 8.01 (Intro Physics). This required one professor to deliver the lecture, and a handful of TA's to handle recitations and study groups.
Under the system described in the article, only 80 students are taught at a time. But *each* class requires a professor and a team of TA's. To handle 600+ students taking the class, it would require 8 classroom sessions, 3 times a week, each involving a prof and TA's. That's 24 hours a week the prof is spending in class teaching. (not even counting prep-time, grading papers, or office-hours).
This system, for whatever successes it might have, just doesn't seem to scale. It seems to put a huge load on the prof and TAs.
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.
On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!
On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!
What, is Harvard back in session?
"However, while you can get basic scientific knowledge taught as - more or less - a byproduct of a research development focused program, you cannot get research development as a byproduct of a "good teacher" focused program. "
And, truth be told, I'm not arguing your point either. You're right.
It's just getting awfully dark out here.
When I first set foot on a college campus way back in the early 80s, professors listed their academic affiliations on their door -- Dr. Someguy, PhD, Caltech, Dr. OtherDude, PhD, Stanford, etc.
The last time I spent any significant time on a college campus in the year 2000, I saw entire departments listed by their corporate sponsor. Professors began listing the companies they consulted with, rather than the institution that granted them their degrees.
Yes, it was at the height of the boom, but several professors I heard of -- at a big famous state school of awesome reputation -- had ditched teaching their classes entirely. They literally did not show up to lecture a single class and dumped all teaching duties on their grad students of dubious communication skills, who in turn slashed schedules to a minimum, too busy consulting on the side themselves.
And then we had eight years of Bush. Public schools in this country aren't even a shell of their former selves any more. They're not even a joke. They're just sad and pathetic, cargo cults going through the motions of running a school who have forgotten the substance and barely remember the form.
Most of the "official" communication my kids bring home looks like the first drafts of a high school freshman comp class. I talk to history teachers who can't tell the difference between the battles of Manassas and Midway, science teachers who can't make an electromagnet, English teachers who dimly remember seeing a couple of Shakespeare's plays on video, math teachers who can't take a derivative...
The two people doing the most to educate the American public about science right now are Jamie and Adam of "Mythbusters," and as much as I adore those guys, it's a little like saying our national defense is secured by the good ol' boys of the Buford Volunteer Fire Department.
It's not just our physical infrastructure that's crumbling, our intanglible assets such as level of education among the populace are falling apart as well.
So when I hear someone who calls themselves a "professor" -- and that title literally means teacher, mind you -- talk about how teaching is too trivial a task for them to attend to, how it's not their main mission, it's a little like hearing a firefighter talk about how he doesn't wanna get his hair messed up. It makes me want to grab them by the collar and pimpslap them across the room until they get back into the fight they're supposed to be leading, the fight that we are losing so badly.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."