Slashdot Mirror
BYU Prof. Says University Classrooms Will Be "Irrelevant" By 2020
dragoncortez writes "According to this Deseret News article, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, 'Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living ... today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed.' In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer. Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30."
Right after the paperless office is perfected.
If everyone in the world has access to the information then why bother paying for the degree?
As long as I can prove my understanding of the knowledge then why should I pay a particular university to vouch for me?
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
I don't know what kind of classes he's teaching, but when I was in school asking questions and having some sort of discussion as part of the lecture was just as important as the textbook.
Hearing perspectives and having those perspectives challenged and evaluated by your professors and fellow students is an integral component of the college experience. I doubt listening to iPod lectures would be nearly as useful.
Giving out information for free is a great idea, but the electronic media can't replace human interaction.
All of my classes use Blackboard or Moodle, I barely take paper tests anymore (all online) .. and I regret buying 3 of my books because all of the text is online. I just finished up Cisco Netacad which had everything online, and am currently taking Redhat Academy. Not to mention, about 2 weeks ago I had a virtual lecture in Second Life!
I still think going to class is essential however ... in some cases if I don't at least sit myself down in a class I begin to lose track and miss out on some of the more convenient information.
www.squizzi-designs.com | graphic & web design
Books and lectures are going to be digitised, but the one thing we truly need teachers and professors for will not change: Answering questions. Everybody understands information in their own way, and therefore, it takes a human being to pick up where the books and lectures leave off.
Unfortunately, most college professors do not interact with students. Lectures were made obsolete by the invention of the book thousands of years ago, but still today we have professors lecturing from yellowed notes.
I hope technology will finally force them to change their ways, but I doubt it will.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Hadn't we heard this all before? `TV is going to replace lectures.` God knows they probably said the same thing about radio replacing the classroom.
Science labs - biology especially - can't be taught digitally. You need to go out and do. Chemistry is another lab that can't replacedThat Dr. Wiley thinks they can shows more his ignorance of subjects outside his own.
And when it comes to lectures, there's just no substitute for human interaction. I've seen people at both my current institution, and my alma matter offer their entire course on MP3, video, and other media formats. Making a purely un-scientific guess, 95% of students don't use them as a replacement, but as a supplement to lecture. People seem to prefer the face time, and the ability to ask questions.
We're social mammals. Classes are sticking around.
I sort of agree with what the professor is saying. Already, lectures are available online (including the very awesome, Hulu-like site, Academic Earth), and the use of iTunes to distribute lectures is already taking place.
Despite the usefulness of these technologies, I only think these things expand the reach of the classroom, but I definitely don't think that classrooms are going anywhere anytime soon. The use of websites and iTunes to reach people is no real difference than what books have done for a very long time. The people who are going to take time to watch the videos would have read the books.
Additionally, I *highly* disagree with the idea that "today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed." I went to an engineering university, and the amount of technical stuff going on there was absolutely awesome. All you had to do was attend one of the many seminars, working groups, or even a classroom to see amazing work that students were doing. Being around other students also spurred my own ideas towards various projects.
Last of all, I'd argue that the teaching received in the classrooms really is very little about the college experience. Sure, someone may be able to "learn" a lot about physics from a podcast, but he or she is going to have little real-world experience. This, to me, was the most valuable experience I received from my college career.
Basically, I think these technologies will help reach more people, but they aren't going to make the current world obsolete.
When will people learn that you go to college to prepare for life, not just a job or career. You go to learn how to be self sufficient, to go to bed so you're not dead for classes, to show up, and generally learn to be an adult. College is an environment where a lot of people fail at that at first, but most, by the time they graduate, are capable of living on their own and holding some sort of job. College isn't just basic engineering or english or math, its basic life. If their parents can afford it, kids need to be out on their own in a forgiving environment like a dorm or college community where they do their own laundry and feed themselves.
On the other side, merely showing up to classes, paying attention, and doing homework is another large part of being an adult. Meetings and work do not happen "whenever you get to it", I'd be sad to see classes go by the wayside if only because what you learn outside and around the class is just as vital in the long run as what you learn in class.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Nothing beats human interaction. Anyone can listen/watch a lecture recording, but participation requires genuine human interaction.
The only thing that can really provide that is VR tech so good it fools the brains that it's real. Our understanding of how the senses really work is nowhere near there yet.
.: Max Romantschuk
I absolutely concur. It's also worth noting that being forced to sit in a room with other students and hold discussions is an immensely valuable experience. Otherwise, you might as well purchase a textbook, study on your own, and avoid the cost of tuition.
...If their parents can afford it, kids need to be out on their own in a forgiving environment like a dorm or college community where they do their own laundry and feed themselves.
Part of being an adult is not depending on your parents for money.
Nothing prepares you for the "real world" like balancing two part-time jobs and classes.
This is far from being an artificial barrier. A good portion of the in-state / out-of-state difference is contributions from the state's general fund towards the college. Why would taxpayers in Colorado want to contribute towards the education of a student in Virginia taking an online class 'at' a Colorado state school?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I find the difference between the two, certification programs and universities, is that for the former you're required to remember a body facts (which may or may not change) and in the latter you're required to understand the material and apply it to new situations. The difference is subtle but important. Having a certification informs your employer that you are a replaceable cog; that you have the exact criteria to do the job, no more no less. A university education (at least at the higher levels) would tell the employer that you have some body of knowledge but also the capacity above and beyond the minimum. This would allow them to invest in a partner rather than a replaceable cog.
Now my views on this are probably limited, but that is my impression of what the two types of programs offer. Particularly from seeing all of the TV programs which advertise 'Get your degree in x-months to get a high paying job'. It all seems focused on teaching you the 'what' of learning instead of the 'how'. Ah but, maybe some ITT Tech graduate will prove me wrong.
I don't get it - what would be a "respectable title" in order to comment on the future of instructional technology? Something other than a PhD and tenured position in Instructional Psychology and Technology?
Have you actually been to college? In college I learned how to procrastinate, how to pull all-nighters and still manage to take a test the next day, and how to avoid classes that I deemed unnecessary. As for learning self sufficiency, I lived in a dorm where food was prepared for me and bathrooms were cleaned for me.
The most important thing I did learn was how to teach myself, because most of my professors weren't there to teach and weren't much help. This valuable lesson has helped me greatly in the real world, because nobody is going to hold my hand in the corporate world either. Everything else I learned in college, I've had to unlearn.
That isn't to say the University experience should be dead. There is much to be gained by bringing people together physically as well as virtually to improve the learning process. At school you often learn as much from fellow students as you do from the professors. And lets not for get the research that good universities do.
However there is little place in the modern world for a room where you sit and listen to a person "spout" knowledge at you. It is probably the case that that was NEVER a good approach to teaching anyway.
Think Deeply.
I can't accept the argument that a degree in Psychology is necessary to predict the future of higher education in the U. S.. You are questioning the credentials of a person on the basis of your particular perspective. It sounded snippish to me...and snobbish. I question the validity of your suggestion that he visit a neuroscience lab. The future of higher education will not be found there either. Wiley actually has pretty good credentials to say what he said.
I'd almost mod you up, but "classroom training [is] a time waster" is an exaggeration. (Well, unless you had shitty teachers.) The whole point of going to college is to engage in interaction with faculty, students, everything. You're only in class a few hours per week. The rest of the time is just as important. For that reason I wouldn't give much credence to someone with a degree from the University of Mom's Basement.
You shouldn't give credence to someone with a degree from the University of Mom's Basement. Nor should you give credence to someone with a degree from anywhere else. You should look for experience if you want to know that they're skilled, and people should learn on the job.
Personally, I kind of look down on people who stay in school. They're insulated from dealing with real world problems and they're treated like little children, so they never develop responsibility that isn't arbitrary, contrived and without real consequence. From what I've seen, most of them are really there because they're lazy and it gives them an excuse not to work.
Unless and until you do something meaningful, education is no different from masturbation.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Putting a metric buttload of students in a classroom and saying information in their general direction is very close to pointless, a pointlessness hardly restricted to college level. Smaller, interactive workshop-type classrooms, where there's actual feedback between the professor and students, though, are still very much relevant. I'd say it's more the "I talk at you, you write it down, you regurgitate it later" paradigm that's irrelevant, rather than the setting in which it is presented. Dumping 50, 100, 200, 500 students in one big room serves little purpose other than to push as many students through some required class with the lowest staff expenditure possible.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
...they are training simulators, but not "labs." While you can virtualize a server, and teach useful concepts to someone studying to be a certified technician or a computer scientist, you can't effectively virtualize a physics experiment or a dissection and call that a lab experience. Sure, you might teach some of the underlying concepts (which you could also do with, say, a slide presentation), you can't teach some kinds of muscle memory, nor can you convey things like subtle telltale odors (useful in chemistry), or subtle changes in the texture of certain tissues.
Telling the student that these subtle cues exist is not good enough. They need to experience some things first-hand so they know them in their bones.
Cadaver labs are indispensible, not just to nurses and doctors, but even to massage therapists! Knowing how real muscles and organs look in a real body (and not some sanitized or idealized textbook), or even how they feel, is a necessity for doing your job well. Shortchanging students by taking away real dissection labs is a crime, because they are learning how a synthetic representation of a living thing is put together, not how a real living thing is put together. Trying to sell the removal of dissections from the science curriculum as a win for compassion might gain you some traction, but it will make future generations even more out-of-touch with the skills they'll need should they want to become doctors. I see this virtualization trend in colleges as an extension of the trend to take real chemistry, biology, and physics labs out of high schools.
Computer simulations of physics experiments? Those are useful for predicting the outcome of a proposed experiment that nobody's ever done before... but not so much as a teaching tool for well-known science. A simulation will likely only behave in the way it was programmed to behave. Real-world experiments, on the other hand, give you data that isn't always clean, and sometimes give you results that are totally "wrong" and require diagnostic skills for debugging the experimental apparatus. You might call making a student use these virtual labs a form of training, but you can't call it science. Ultimately, there's no "grounding" when you use a computer simulation -- how is the student supposed to understand that the science is real and has real-world practical implications? How is the student supposed to know that it's not all just some cooked-up fantasy? We have enough grief with flat-earthers and YECs trying to get real science taken out of classrooms. Moving to this style of education for "the masses" will only exacerbate that problem, creating a whole class of people who potentially don't believe anything or don't understand anything about the technology that is used all around them.
College isn't just for the lazy, but also for the mediocre ... and anyone who intends to get into research.
Would mod you up if I had any points left. I think you have the right idea. I'm in research and I don't think any amount of "seeing the real world" would have helped train me in the rigor that my physical science profession requires (12-14hrs a day 6-7 days a week of enjoyable work is rarer than rare in the so-called "real world". Besides, in this day and age, people who think academic work (again: in the hard sciences) is bookworm material are out of their freaking mind. Running a lab (or even being partly responsible for one - as a lowly grad student) requires a scary breadth and depth in your skill set (I like to think of it as having to be "jack of all trades and master of a few", to turn that hoary old cliche on its head :P)
In my experience, people who tout 'real-world' experience are usually masters of resume-padding and self-delusion (not necessarily referring to GP :P). This is ESPECIALLY true in professions that don't deal with tangible end-products (this doesn't include software :P - to me that is tangible).
The only things I DON'T have to deal with (that the real world has aplenty) is boredom with repetitive tasks that a monkey could perform and dealing with assholes (imagine how many abrasive idiots a customer service rep has to deal with). If that's the real world, you can have it. Life is too short to WILLFULLY embrace such madness :P and then further, to brag about it as so many people are wont to do. Celebs are the worst at this - just because a famous actor or basketball player or a self-made millionaire "made it" in the real world doesn't mean that everyone can or should drop out of school and have silly adventures just so they have good stories to tell at parties :P. Prodigies are usually sensible enough to know when their accomplishments are due to their special skills and when they are simply due to lots of hard work (and then again, sometimes they aren't and give out advice that would lead average people to drop out of high school/college like lemmings off a cliff - in pursuit of that indefinable ... coolness is the only word for it ... associated with successful people.
Besides, that leads me to another thing that tfa missed entirely: you can't do research "at a distance". And only a "real-worlder" would believe that research is the domicile of grad students and postdocs and professors. These days, more and more undergrads participate to a greater extent than ever in research (without necessarily staying in academia afterward) so that brick and mortar universities are gaining MORE relevance in the hard sciences.
Disclaimer: please don't give me counterexamples OUTSIDE the hard sciences - I have nothing to say about that. I've stated my domain of interest (for this post) very clearly. A final observation: as society gets ever more technical, the BASIC level of competence that a potential employee needs (in a field that is at least a little complex) simply becomes too deep to be tested for at the interview level. In essence, a college degree (in theory) attests to THIS basic competence. Now, you may well argue (sometimes justly) whether this is satisfied in practice. I don't disagree. But that is not a reason to throw the entire thing away and start "going with our gut" every time we want to hire someone. That only works in cheap novels and sappy movies :P.