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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."
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
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.
MIT doesn't work that way. If you can get into MIT, you should be able to get through MIT.
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.
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.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
This means your chance of getting into MIT just decreased by over 9000%.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
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.
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!