Slashdot Mirror
When Getting Rid of College Lectures Makes Sense
timothy writes "NPR reports that Harvard physicist and professor Eric Mazur has largely gotten rid of the lecture in his classes, after finding that in lecture-based classes, students tend to commit to memory formulae and heuristics, but fail to develop deep understanding of concepts. Mazur has tried — and seemingly succeeded — to cultivate deeper learning with a combination of small group peer-instruction and a tight feedback loop based on in-class polling about particular problems. Joe Redish also teaches physics, at the University of Maryland, and says, 'With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it. ... Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.'"
Joe Redish also teaches physics, at the University of Maryland, and says, 'With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it. ... Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.'"
College get rid of YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
We cant have students memorizing formulas and heuristics.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
My Father In Law has been getting classes on DVD for a while and loves them. I have watched a few and I think they're just as useful as any lecture I ever had. What they should do is provide the video lectures along with class notes and assignments and meet to ask questions and give details. If the videos are done well (I think a live studio audience with a few plants that ask common questions might be a good idea just to make it feel organic) then it should ultimately cut way down on professor time in large lecture halls and give them more time to have individual or small group interactions. Plus videos can we watched again! Either for studying or maybe even recapping later on in life.
And no, the answer is not video lectures from Khan Academy or MIT Open Courseware.
The very first contact is most easily done by lectures, you simply gather more information than by group work within the same time. Memorize stuff is important. Actually when teaching maths to fellow students I often discovered that they even lacked the formulas and never came far enough to use understanding to calculate something by quantity. The author is true on one point although: To gather real understanding you need to get involved into problems and discussion. Thats why normally you get homework after lectures and are encouraged to sit together with friends to solve them. But without lectures I do not see people progressing fast enough into new topics.
Then Kahn Academy will replace all the schools given enough time.
I, for one, am an Aural learning type. Lectures have served me very well, even to the extent of "deep understanding of concepts." For those that share my learning type, Lecture is often all that we need to ace exams and retain important knowledge. During my studies at the University I attended every single lecture that I could attend and took excellent notes. No amount of reading assignments or labs (also appeal to different learning types) had the same educational impact on me as watching an expert describe the concepts, illustrate them in a live environment, and respond to questions that the students actually have on the subject. A little bit of homework to cement the knowledge was all that was necessary.
Even amongst techies there are those that stay fresh by reading the latest books and others that stay fresh by attending conferences and just listening to what others are doing. There are still others that learn best by grinding away their own personal experiments.
I realize that it is proposed to record lectures once and just make them available. That may help considerably. But my guess is that Humans are naturally tuned to listen to other Humans (oral traditions) and recordings may not bring the right level of engagement.
My favorite class in college was, where the professor assigned us a chapter or two to read, and a few things to pay attention to. Then in class we discussed them, and asked questions. It was a lot better than simply listening to him lecture on the topic.
Some professors engage their classes in discussion of questions raised during lectures, others just throw up overheads and blab the same speech as the past five years.
I've always been a proponent of class discussion and group learning as opposed to the dissemination of information from on high as being fact.
The most important things you can do in University are to take courses in Logic, Philosophy, and Critical Thinking. Those will teach you to learn and to argue like a civilized human being, preparing you to convince your boss to implement your ideas, your customers to engage your services, and the government to hear your concerns.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
dating from the 18th century in their current form, except the slide projector/powerpoint. Ever since my college days 10 years ago, many students were recording sound in lectures rather than take notes. The better of our lecturers put their slides on our network before class, as students who are copying the slides from the screen are really not listening to the lecturer. Now I teach my own classes, this approach allows me to talk around the slides, in a much more open style, following the message rather than the words of the slides. In a way, this style goes back to the lecture style before the slide projector. This story describes the next step. If we could do the talking part before the class, we could use class time for more interactive activities and group/seminar work. However, I maintain that we need a teacher or a TA working with the groups, as many small groups get lost without a little leadership. Maybe these guys have found a better feedback system. My one problem with the recorded lecture is that students can't stop to ask the speaker questions in lecture. While most students never do this, those who do really help understanding and moving the class forwards.
Why not get all the passive shit done at home - like watching a lecture and taking notes. Then come to class and do all the hard shit in class? Anything not finished in class is then required to be taken home.
Look-- the vast majority of students learn because they have no choice. Slashdoters that say "public education only held me back as a child" and "I learned more outside of the classroom" are not the norm. The normal person "accidentally" gets caught up with friends, watching movies, and trolling Facebook instead of watching these lecture videos. Those normal people then fail (or worse, cheat).
Too bad for them? No... because if they end up being useless, YOU will feel the consequences. Be it in skilled labor shortages, increase poverty/crime rates, dumbed down video classes to make up for the poor previous education of your cohort, or the removal of funding due to the low passing scores, YOU WILL FEEL THEIR FAILURE.
Real education isn't a plug-and-play option. It's work. Teachers need to work in the classroom and do their best to make sure the students learn as much as possible. It's adaptive, changing, and sometimes will digress to related, but more entertaining, topics to keep long-term interest. These things cannot be done by video.
Get it through your heads. The education of the masses must be done in person by skilled individuals. Preferably in smaller groups.
Qualifier: Distance/video learning can help to enlighten. It can even help to educate people who genuinely want to learn (typically, this works better with adults). Just please understand that kids 4-25 are crap learners on their own. They NEED others to help them learn or else they just won't bother.
Careful where you go with that line of thinking. And if anyone says, "there's a difference between a physics lecture, and something creative like music," I would respond that you've never had a good physics teacher. Physics is very creative, once you start getting into the upper levels.
Eric Mazur gave a talk here at the University of Waterloo, and his talk was not about getting rid of lectures, per se. That's something the NPR reporter seems to assume, to the point where (s)he inserted soundbytes from an entirely different physics prof. Mazur's focus is about making the classtime much more interactive, to give students feedback about whether or not they really grasp the concepts. Again, it's about guided creativity. And no, you can't get rid of the professor in that situation.
(Yes, I was a physics major.)
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
See: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/whatsdistinctive/experience/the_preceptorial_system/
Or just google it: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=princeton+preceptorial+system&pbx=1&oq=princeton+precep&aq=2&aqi=g3&aql=&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=1334l4298l0l7175l16l12l0l2l2l0l186l1404l5.7l14l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=da70dd10971034b4&biw=1376&bih=790
Well, I liked it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Having taken E&M with him nearly 20 years ago, I can attest that Mazur was one of the best teachers I encountered at Harvard. I have great confidence in the direction he is taking education. For us the response mechanism was some wired hp calculators that would fry when they rolled out the Van de Graff generator. I can only imagine what he is accomplishing today.
Personally I hated a lot of "alternative" teaching methods some of my professors tried during my undegrad years. Small "group work" was the most painful, useless time wasting exercise in my academic life. These "peer learning sessions" usually consisted of the smart students doing everything while the dumb or just slower kids sat there. It was times like these when I wondered why I was paying $20k a year to teach myself and have useless students piggyback off my grades.
That being said, I had a lot of equally frustrating classes where the professor did the exact opposite and taught in the classical face-to-blackboard lecture style. I would sit there frantically copying notes for an hour and realize I had no idea what I just listened to, again wondering why I was paying $20k a year to read condensed notes taken directly from a textbook.
The best classes, however, were a mix of these techniques. One class would dedicate about 1/2 to 3/4 of each lecture to slow, explanatory and engaging lecture with the rest of the time being dedicated to class-wide example problem solving. Another class would dedicate an entire lecture or two each week to solving a number of representative problems from the homework as a class, introducing or reinforcing the thought processes needed to go about learning HOW to solve the problems. These professors took the time to engage the students and walk them through the problem solving, not just quickly write down decades old lecture notes with their backs to the students.
Just buy in someone else's video, spend the savings on better dorm rooms for the Chinese and Korean students who are funding your Dean's yacht. It's not like he really cares whether they learn anything, as long as they (or superficially similar professional exam-sitters) get good passes and keep the school's 'reputation' up.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I attended a small, private university and most of my 3rd and 4th year courses had 7-9 students + the professor. Many of those classes were structured into 3 hour blocks. It was great. There was plenty of time to explore topics together, and in a way that resulted in everyone gaining a fairly thorough understanding of the material.
That school couldn't provide the kind of resources necessary for grad work, but it was great for undergrad.
Discussion sections were the biggest waste of time in college. Get 20 undergrads and one grad student in a room to "discuss". I was a history major and every class had the same two or three hours a week devoted to these tedious discussions.
I did not care what my fellow undergrads thought. I cared what the guy with the PhD thought. My fellow undergrads were spouting off their own ill-informed ideas (as was I, to get credit). Complete waste of time. We'd have been better served to spend those 8-10 hours a week reading.
Advice: on VPS providers
I've had some professors provide their standard lectures on video to watch at our convenience before a class. However what made this a vast improvement is that we still had classes, the class time was used for interaction between the professor and the students. The professor would discuss the lecture, call on students to offer comments, solve some problem, etc. The professor also fostered, directed and refereed discussion and debate between the students. This was so much better than listening to stock lectures that the professor had given many times before. The professors even preferred spending the time interacting, it wasn't just the students.
This interaction between professor and student and between students is what makes the university experience more valuable than just watching videos of lectures. I think it may also be getting back to a more classical university experience, more education, less factory.
I thought their are in universities to write research proposals and get money from public or private funding source like NSF, DOD, DOE, Green Peace, big oils... So the universities can cut a overhead (~40%) from those funding. Teaching and students are just pretentious facades.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Children are voracious learners. Given the chance, they will learn anything and everything they can get their hands on. If you don't disabuse them of the practice, they will carry it on into adulthood.
As homeschool parents know, give the child access to materials - the internet, a CD of dinosaur books, an electronics experimenter's kit - and they will happily figure it out at their own pace, on their own schedule, and in a sequence that makes sense to them.
Forcing kids to learn your subjects at your pace by forcing them to sit still and quiet while you drone on is hard work, and it only teaches one thing: learning is not fun.
For example: How many English classes require students to write book reports, on works which are considered "classic" but not really relevant or interesting? This only makes an association between reading and hard work. It's rare to see an adult who likes to read for enjoyment after a highschools' worth of treatment this way.
I see this all the time in adults. The vast majority think of any type of learning as "tough", "boring", and "not worth the effort". They won't try anything new unless it's forced on them by life circumstances. They have lost the joy of learning.
Learning new things is an evolutionary survival trait, yet we spend 13+ years of a kids life teaching them not to enjoy it.
The standard teaching approach by lecturing has been in use for over 2000 years. Do you suppose that maybe there are more effective ways? Perhaps by experimenting or using our new technology we can raise our adult productivity.
Some professor is experimenting with different methods. I applaud his attempts and eagerly await the results.
As a college senior, I've taken my share of lectures in various disciplines. One thing I've noticed with lectures, especially math lectures, is that when you are sitting there watching the professor walk you through the problem steps, it is very easy to overestimate your grasp of the subject. You follow all the lectures and do well on the homework, so you figure your good to go for the final. Then there comes the exam, and you find out all you really knew how to do was some textbook assisted string manipulation, and you are screwed on the questions that would be easy if you understood the intuition better. It's difficult to teach the intuition behind things to a room full of students, because each one will have a different "Ah-Ha!" conceptual explanation. For example Partial Differentiation. I got it when it was explained as a cross section of a higher dimensional shape. My friend, when working with gradients and vector fields in physics. (It boils down to the same thing, but it's the way you start to attack the problem that matters) There is no way to give a room full of students individual intuitions, so most professors default to proofs. (Which are probably intuitive enough for the professor anyway...) But since you can get the proofs from the book, there is not really a good reason to go to proof lectures, unless you like things read to you. (Which is probably helpful to some, but useless for me)
It's nothing new. It has been around for years and it has been (correctly) advocated as a much better way to teach and learn over conventional lecturing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-based_learning
What's it about. what's it mean.
Some/Many though are write/copy or photocopy/blank stare exercises. Completely useless. The whole point of a human being is interaction.
Just to say, Kahn Academy is a good and could become a fabulous resource, along with Project Gutenberg, Google Books, Wikibooks.
One thing they are all missing is how the elements relate to one another, and to the real world. A complaint I have about conventional teaching as well.
Deleted
... and it's okay.
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago. The students meet in a room with small tables and maximum class size of 42, three times a week for two hours each. The room has equipment at all the tables, so that students can quickly set up small experiments which may not take the entire 2-hour meeting.
I taught in the traditional manner for about seven years, and in this manner for an equal duration. Does the workshop have advantages? Sure: students are less likely to fall asleep because they are often working examples, and because they are in a small, well-lit room. I can walk around and talk to individual students for a minute or two at a time, so I can find those who are having problems and try to help them. It's easy to introduce a concept, give one simple example, then ask the students to do another example, within a span of 20 or 40 minutes. In some cases, this cycle of introduction - observation - action may help students to understand or remember the material.
But there are disadvantages, too: in a workshop, it's difficult to move away from the median student. I can't go too much faster or deeper, because it's clear that many students are not getting it; so some students are held back. I can't slow down for the slowest learners, either, because it becomes obvious that the majority of the class is bored. This approach is MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE than the traditional one, because we need to offer 10 or 15 sections of the class each quarter; that means a lot more faculty time. The rooms can't be used for any other classes, and the AV requirements are pretty steep -- we need to spend around $10K just on projectors each year. We need more equipment than we would have in traditional labs, and that stuff isn't cheap.
It's not clear that this approach causes students to learn any better; some are helped, some are hurt. It's difficult to compare student achievement in workshops vs. lectures, because at the same time that workshops were introduced, we changed the content of our classes as well.
My summary, after years of experience: not a silver bullet, a lot more fun to teach, more expensive overall.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
We don't need universities or schools anymore. I have learned more about historic European and Russian firearms (something I find iteresting) and Linux (something that helps me earn a living) from youtube videos and online blogs and meetups than I have from countless books and experts who have come out of academia.
Respect the Constitution
The Moore Method is an effective way to make students think. The class meets regularly, the students each must have some proofs they've done at home which they must present to the class instead of the professor lecturing, they instead, along with other students critique the presenter on their proofs, pointing out flaws and holes. Further students must compete with each other to present enough proofs to pass the class, and each proof can only be done once.
Outside reading is discouraged, and the class is selected based on having the right experience in the subject (not too much, and not too little) to ensure fairness.
The result is a grueling, yet often very interesting class, as every problem that a student presents, you've probably already worked on and as such have intimate knowledge of the problem which leads to further understanding and new insights.
I am a graduate student in Astronomy and part of my dissertation is studying these active engagement techniques. It seems that many people on here are quick to jump the gun and give an opinion before understanding why we say the lecture doesn't matter anymore. Teachers in the workshops I help with also get confused as to what these words mean.
People learn in a variety of different ways yet lecture is the most common form of material dissemination. This is wonderful for the people who can soak in all of the information and draw conclusions themselves. This leaves many people behind if all they have time for is writing down facts and attempting to keep up with the basic material. Since most courses in high school and college no longer require intense critical thinking, a quick memorization of facts will allow most students to succeed and think they "KNOW" material. When asked to apply it many are unable to. Interactive engagement techniques do not require the removal of lecture from the learning process they just put less emphasis on it. Lecture is the ONLY way to present enough material in a college course and is critical to the active engagement techniques. Students must be given the basic knowledge before they can be left to begin their own critical thinking process.
We know from research that people learn by linking new concepts to concepts they already have a model for. Most of these models are incorrect when it comes to astronomical and physical phenomena. A student who has misconceptions may still think they understand the material and be able to respond correctly to some questions. However, when a question specifically calls out a known misconception, the model the student is using to reason through the question will lead them to the incorrect answer every time. What active engagement techniques employ is social conversation. Lecture tutorials are one form of this learner centered engagement. Students are given a 20 minute lecture on a topic such as the seasons. Then they spend 20 minutes with a partner working through a socratic dialog (in their lecture tutorial workbook made up of research validated questions and "fake" student responses). The pair works on coming to consensus and discussing the reasons for their answers on each question. As the students work through the dialog the concepts become more challenging and the misconceptions are challenged. Often students are required to look back at previous answers (known to be commonly incorrect) after some misconceptions have been challenged. Students are engaged in their own meta-cognition and are forced to confront their own and others ideas. This active form of discussing and defending your ideas allows for misconceptions to be overcome and new concepts to be better rooted in the brain.
For those of you who think this is useless. We performed a study of lecture tutorials in our classes. We split the classes into the top 50% of students and the bottom 50% of students. Before lecture the top students are scoring 50% on concepts not yet covered, those at the bottom are near 10%. After lecture BOTH groups are around 50-55%. This means lecture is helping students catch up with the basic information they may not have had. However lecture only got the class to FAILING! After a lecture tutorial in class, both groups are now performing at the 70% level. TWO WHOLE LETTER GRADES BETTER!!! This is why we say lecture is not the important part of the course because the student engagement is helping everyone.
So if lecture is only a means of giving out the information then there is not a critical need for professors to stand in front of the classroom at this time. We can hire actors which are far better at the job of dictating and making material exciting and record it. The professors job becomes important later when students have questions not for being the talking head.
"Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty."
Yeah, right! He does not seem to realize that most professors spend the large majority of their time doing research (or rather writing proposals to get grants to fund grad students/postdoc and a large part of the university budget through ridiculous overheads). At research universities professors with active research programs generally teach 1 course/semester. But even then, there are office hours when students have questions. Can it be replaced by the web? Certainly not. What if students have questions during the course? Well, the web fails again. And what if the undergrad is interested in getting some research experience? Well, no faculty, no research.
The slashot summary isn't terribly accurate, and even if you violate the social norms of /. and click through to read the article, the article is pretty sketchy as well. We're already getting comments from people who think this is about substituting video lectures for live lectures, and that's totally inaccurate.
This method is not new. I teach physics at a community college (not at Hahvahd like Mazur, alas), and I've been using methods similar to his for about 15 years. I learned about them from Mazur's book, which was published in 1996.
It's also not just some guy's opinion about how to teach. It's solidly backed up by research.
Let's start from the evidence. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is a terrible way to teach physics. The classic studies work like this. You give students a multiple-choice test at the beginning of the semester on very simple, basic concepts of physics. What hits the ground first, a larger rock or a smaller rock? What forces act on a book that's lying on a table? They do badly, but you expect that, because most of them haven't had high school physics. Then you teach a semester's worth of physics to them and give them the test again to measure how much they've improved. The usual statistic used to measure their improvement is the gain, G, defined as G=(final score-initial score)/(100%-initial score). In other words, if they haven't improved at all, G=0, and if they've improved as much as it was possible for them to improve, G=1. With classes that use traditional lecturing -- even by experienced, award-winning teachers who get glowing reviews from their students, are enthusiastic, and put a great deal of effort into their lectures -- you get about G=0.25. In other words, the students have developed very little conceptual understanding beyond what they came in with. On the other hand, if you use interactive teaching techniques that force students to participate actively and talk about concepts, you can usually get much higher G's.
The evidence is that it doesn't really matter very much what specific interactive technique you use, as long as it's interactive and deals with concepts. Mazur pioneered a technique called peer instruction. Just to be concrete, I'll describe his specific technique. You require the students to read the book *before* they come to class. You enforce this with reading quizzes given when they walk into lecture. The class consists basically of a bunch of multiple-choice conceptual questions. You pop up one of the questions on the screen and ask students to show you their initial opinion about which answer is right. This can be done with expensive electornic "clickers" or with cheap pieces of cardboard marked A, B, C, and D. If you see that almost everyone got it right, you briefly confirm that, and then move on. If they didn't, you have them break up into small groups and discuss the question. You walk around and listen a lot without saying much. Then you have them vote again again. The theory is that the right answer is supposed to win out over the wrong answers in the discussion. When it's time to give a test, you make sure that the test includes some purely conceptual questions, because otherwise students will tend to resist dropping the "plug and chug" approach they're used to and switching to focusing on concepts.
Mazur's book shows data where he got G~0.5 with this method. Nobody has ever gotten a G that high with traditional lecturing. Over the years since 1996, many of us who use interactive techniques have refined what we do, and it's not uncommon to significantly higher G's. The average for three of us who teach freshman calc-based physics at my school last semester was 0.7.
A common concern is that if the teacher d
Find free books.
They note the importance of reading before the class in the article but don't follow up much on that. This is crucial.
This problem presents itself when teaching interactively: If students don't prepare ahead of time, the lesson totally stalls. Then they are trying to figure out problems with no basis for it. What happens? The professor often ends up lecturing. Then no time is left.
My intuition (based upon TAing Statistics as a PhD student and being a high school teacher of history, philosophy, and information technology) is that very few students read before lecture. I often didn't as an undergrad. Why? Because as long as the lectures re-tread text material, student can get away with using the text only as a reference, not as a primarily source of information. If students are required to be active participants, they HAVE to read ahead of time. Otherwise they have no way of actually figuring out how to use the knowledge from the reading.
I agree with the poster who mentioned the importance of assessing theoretically. A lot of students think that theoretical assessment is easy -- they don't have to remember a lot and can just use their brain to figure out the test. At least in the Stats class I helped teach, this simply wasn't true. Whenever we had problems sets or exam problems which were more or less plug and chug, the students did GREAT. However, when we started asking theoretical questions (which statistical test is appropriate here? Why? How do you test assumptions...? Critique this statistically informed research piece.), students really struggled -- which means they don't get it. That tells me they weren't really ready to use statistics.
I bet this could have been alleviated significantly if we had spent more time in class really working through problems which asked tough theoretical questions in groups as a class. But alas, we lectured, then I had 50 minutes weekly to try to answer their questions -- never enough -- and the quality of work struggled. Many students never really seemed ready to work independently with the concepts: I think a big reason for this is they were taught by being talked at... so when it was time to show they knew stats, the brightest did fine but the majority freaked out.
That is certainly the way to do it. Reminds me of the work of Dr. Ed Prather........ GO WILDCATS! ...lol
I cautiously agree to reducing lectures. I found that in getting my BSEE I learned much more doing hands on labs in small groups than I did in the lectures for the class. Further, what I learned in labs and doing student jobs on various programs stuck much better than the lecture material, and cemented the lecture material better.
Sadly, lab are less and less hands on these days, and most new engineering grads have never held a soldering iron and had pathetically little hands on lab work. I would argue that having good well funded labs is more important than changing the style of lectures.
Lab reports, at least the ones I did, were also overrated. Shorter reports, and few of them would be preferred if it allowed more hands on lab work.
there's a school system that has the lectures watched at home, and then time with the teacher is reserved for problem-solving, discussion, and the like - the traditional matter of homework. makes much more sense (and is similar to classes with 'reading assignments' and then in-class work).
the lecturer does not need to be present for people to see and hear the lecture.
to answer questions, and explore the problem area, yes.
what you lose is the ability to interrupt, ask questions along the way; if you never could do that, you lost almost nothing.
While these were all smart people, and not average, my point is that while lectures maybe aren't the best for all disciplines, they are a proven method.
I think an unappreciated point is that with the increased societal goals of getting everyone into college, the average IQ of college graduates is steadily declining. Used to be, only very intelligent people went to college, now everyone is expected to go. Therefore teaching methods have to adapt to teach to lower and lower students. What I am unsure of in this article is if after these methods the students still have deep understanding, or are just better at answering questions they've already been asked before and been given the answers to in these discussions. Essentially it seems these discussion based methods are just out-sourcing the teaching to the students who do read the material.
I've heard someone say that intelligence means that someone is able to absorb and grok information in the form it is given. College education has been based loosely around this. There is some required reading, there is a lecture where you can ask questions, there are office hours/labs/recitations where you can ask more questions, then there is an exam. In this situation the burden is open the student to assess their own learning. Competent students can do this, and do. This new idea seems based around forcing students to think about the material and assess their own understanding through required discussion groups rather than learning to do this on their own. Consequently, I studied like a freak and spent a lot of introspective time asking myself if I understood this material.
In general I think the goal of the university should not be vocational. The goal is not to teach in such a strong way, but to merely make information available and have students learn how to learn. They've always done this with required readings, problem sets, etc. I'd be interested to see how many of these physics students who do so poorly actually do all their homework to the point in which they understand it. I had a labmate once (who was not cut out for physics) complain at how he did all the homework, but wasn't able to get the right answers. To me it seemed that he didn't really do it at all. (note: I am not a genius, but I am appropriately intelligent for college.)
What was once studying is now part of class time. When I was in school we worked in groups to independently form study/discussion groups, we didn't get our hands held by having teachers FORCE us to think about the material. This new method is interesting, but makes you think about what standards we expect of a college graduate. Does a degree mean that you know the material? Or should it mean that you have demonstrated the capability to learn the material? It would seem that in a job-environment they won't hold discussion groups to teach you how to do something, and a better skill would be to be able to learn on your own.
When I was in undergrad at the beginning of the past decade, the average grade in my physics class was a D, and this was normal. The average grade in organic chemistry was a C, and this was normal. The fact was that these were just very complex subjects and most people would not grasp all of it. The grades were adjusted upwards of course, but it was understood by the faculty that a course which covers the expected amount of material would be very difficult and the average student's raw score would be low, but that was ok.
This is the same issue across all age ranges. Larger classes results in less time for teacher student feedback. But thanks to never ending MBA/economist efficiency demands the classes grows larger and larger...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Why is it such a surprise that the average grade in a university physics class is a D?
If you took a random sampling of the population and tried to teach them a complex subject, do you expect that most of them would pass?
The fact that a lot of students fail, does not mean the teacher is bad. It could be so, but it could also be that the subject matter is difficult and most people are not smart enough to grasp it.
People fail classes. In fact, 50% of the students SHOULD fail (with modern grading paradigms).
Is the goal to have a university where everyone passes, or one where only the capable pass?
When composing music, there is no wrong answer. All music is equally good.
The same cannot be said for physics. It is quite possible to be very wrong in physics.
A lot of these techniques sound similar to how tutorials work at Oxford. These don't replace lectures, but they work really well as an add-on. We have to prepare reasonably long essays (1500-2500 words depending on subject) before the tutorial and then we discuss the topic for about an hour with the tutor (usually a post-doc, lecturer or professor) in a group of 3 or 4. Humanities and arts receive most of their teaching via tutorials, but even sciences (I'm doing medicine) will have a lot of these and they're extremely useful, probably more so than lectures.
In my university (www.uclouvain.be) the engineering students get Project-, Problem- and Exercice-based teaching since 2000 for the Bachelor courses. It actually helps to better understand the concepts. It was implemented after having thoroughly studied the results that the initiator of this pedagogic method got, the Aalborg University
Look http://studyguide.aau.dk/workmethod
It is the work of Dr. Prather and his research group.
He had been at with college for over 35 years and figured it out.
It was a community college, a computer repair course that
had evolved from learning assembly language and burning roms
to learning how to install windows 98, and networking, which was
just plug in two computers letting windows do all the work.
The teacher might of given five "lectures" the entire course of
two semesters not including the first day introduction. I even missed
one due to appointment made earlier, as there was no notice he would
even address the class.
Sitting in his office just off the computer lab the entire time we seriously
wanted something -it was supposed we were to teach each other, and did
as it couldn't be helped in a way. Three people tried to get their money
back but were refused.
A second class or path (industrial processes) we had a choice of taking
after completing the electronics course was taught each day and we were
very envious. Every day we showed up hoping something would be taught,
I'm serious.
One girl who I knew well graduated as being qualified in electronics and computer repair;
called me after college and asked how to install a video card. It was that class
that showed me that at a community college at least you buy a diploma.
Not sure what the article was getting at but (some) classes need to be lectured to,
maybe not all the time, but frequently.
Yes. Since it is talk like an ignorant dick head today, I will honour the occasion and participate. You seem to be a double dumb ass for saying university education is a double dumb jackass waste of money. If you think it is a waste of money, then by all means, don't enrol and waste your money and go back to the jerk ocean where you came from. People on Slashdot are mostly in computer-related fields, a field whose pioneers notoriously start in garages. You could learn programming by yourself so fuck university right? Maybe it is true for your field, but not for others. Do you really want a "self-taught" engineer to construct a 3 km bridge across the strait? Or a "biochemistry-enthusiast" to formulate the medicine you take? You mention technical schools as the panacea, but you do realise there is a big difference between knowing how to do something well versus also knowing the underlying theory behind it? I can drive my car well but god-damn if I can fucking design a new car and build one from the ground up. I fucking need to go to university to learn all the engineering and other gosh-darn difficult words before I can do that. I hope you get what I'm trying to say. If not, maybe you need to go to a university?
Different people learn in different ways. Some are verbal (lectures), some are visual (textbooks), others learn best from tactile experiences. Reinforcing each of these are different applications of performing some task (homework) or discussion groups to rehash the learned knowledge. These are both learning techniques as well as a demonstration of the comprehension of the material.
It would probably be inadvisable to eliminate one avenue of learning that suits a significant group of students. On the other hand, the advent of recording and webcasting technologies can minimize the effort that faculty needs to make in support of lectures. So in the final analysis, getting rid of the lecture component of a class might be misguided.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seriously why do I need a P.E. class? Why do I need to take certain art classes? I believe this was done to make a more rounded person but it has failed IMO.
If I can take a test and pass a statistics final then why on Earth do I need to sit in a class room for a semester? So the school can make money.
If we revised some of these items getting an education would be faster and focused on what is really required in the World, math, reading and comprehension, and critical thinking.
Most of us aren't out to be artist or musicians and if we were college would be the last place I would go for that knowledge.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...you might as well be replaced by a video lecture. With that in mind, if you are paying big bucks to go to a school, you should not find yourself in classes of 200 people; if so, you might want to look around for a better school.
Your comment reminds me why I preferred seminar to lecture: we came to class to discuss the state of each student's paper, got an opportunity for feedback from instructor and peers, and got an extra dollop of subject expertise from the instructor.
Lecture gave me 'waaaaay too much leeway to how much material I elected to mentally engage with, or not, and too few opportunities to (literally and figuratively) test my comprehension, and address knowledge gaps.
That there is a weeding out process of freshmen is valid. The usual method of doing it (via lecture) is IMO hideously inefficient. Better to use methods like Mazur or @bcrowell to find who truly can't/won't learn the material, while giving the majority of students who are within the spectrum of those who can/will a better shot at becoming facile with it. As it is, we're obviously wasting a vast quality of mental potential and tuition dollars.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Gutenberg is the right idea, but it has a fatal flaw - the need to abide by the ridiculous copyright laws.
It basically has nothing written after 1920, which is when the Copyright gang has grudgingly admitted that prior works are public domain.
The problem is, there are some 100,000 important books (and millions of "fun" ones) that were written in the 20th century, but they're all locked down by Copyright.
My answer was just to buy stuff for a buck a book at sales, along with some specialized stuff at retail. It was a medium expense.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That is precisely the way the school works, and it has been quite successful!
A 4 year degree involves other topics traditionally and it is not just to employ the less important topics. Broadening student minds and trying to create actual intellectuals who were "well rounded" was the goal of many and for some it still is. Latin is pretty useless but the older schools required it of all students; not only as a filter but there was a traditional perception of that ability being part of being a smart educated man (not as bad as how women had to learn total BS at finishing schools.)
You could argue those traditional ideas were without merit and we should break from the past. I would not. I do not think an intellectual can be narrow in focus; different "modes" of thinking and kinds of intelligence overlap into topics where they are not well suited but can produce great results. NEW thought is quite rare and most papers written contain very little new conceptually; maybe some trivial stuff you can think of if you just put in a little time on the topic. Quite a bit of new innovative thinking involves thinking across disciplines AND CREATIVITY (aka right brain thinking.) Sadly, I cringe just using the word "innovative" or even "new" since those have lost most meaning today. Einstein played music, its possible he wouldn't have done what he did without exercising that half his brain (I'm not solely giving credit to that 1 activity but didn't just use 1 half his brain.)
Bio-mimicry is all the rage today but previously people were wasting time studying creatures at depth; it wasn't a waste in the end was it? Many pointless things turn out to have use or influence another area - its not merely mental exercise with benefits but the work itself often proves useful in unexpected ways later on. Back to bio-mimicry, we study nature/evolutionary solutions to problems and by adapting those solutions to new areas we "innovate" -- surely, you can see how a broad education or intellectual thought is a similar process?? can't you? (The creativity part is especially critical in finding bridges and cross application.)
Interactive lectures can not be compared to a video. Group dynamics differ so greatly and the combinations of factors are so great I won't believe much of anything claimed anymore than I think you can guess my 8 digit password (which is a much smaller domain.)
Costs issues:
Private schools are big business. The loan system is really really big business; larger than credit cards! Naturally the big corps lobby to raise costs so they can rape you further. People seem to forget is that public subsidy for public education has gone down by about HALF in a generation! Also, the few unions left have kept their people's pay from going down as much as other sectors - school operating cost is not really higher its that you are lower!! People bitch about the ones who jumped out of the pot instead of realizing that the pot is slowly boiling them! Then the fools vote to turn up the heat...it is so sad. Just like healthcare, a huge overhead is the funding scam but we can't talk about that instead we have to fight over smaller issues (some are not even issues.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Hawking studied at Cambridge, which combines lectures with very small group instruction (one grad student or Fellow "supervising" one to three undergrads). Einstein studied to be a teacher and did a lot of reading outside his course.
Which takes resources from places like Khan Academy, Gutenberg, Wiki books and turns it into a guided learning system from ABC through to degree level. With the emphasis being on what is this useful for.
Khan try to do this somewhat but their playlists are too broad and appear to be based on an entire (official?) syllabus.
Small group peer instruction is far too expensive for anyone except the wealthy to implement
Depends if you use official teachers. If you had for example an ipad app or perhaps social learning site, students could be required to mentor lower peers on subjects they had scored well on.
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My library is now full and has been spilling over to other rooms for a while.
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Teachers are in for a hard ride. Parents also will be challenged. I have ranted at times about the nation having one eighth grade American history teacher who pipes the course to the entire nation. Most subjects can be easily taught that way. Then the next awakening is that if we only need a handful of teachers to cover the nation it follows that the learning machine-computer could as easily be at home as in an expensive brick building. That is when the strife really breaks out. We will be putting great pressure for families to have one parent at home, a stable home, with adequate income and children that are willing and eager to be educated. What will tend to follow is that any home that can not have a full time parent at home will be called a "bad" home and the pressure will be for the "bad" families to pay for facilities that resemble a traditional school situation whereas the more affluent neighborhoods will feel oppressed if they are forced to support the schooling of less fortunate people. This is a serious cultural issue. Currently we often offer the illusion of education which is not wise or fair but it is in line with the reality that most people will never be really employable as technology continuous to displace labor. There is a tendency to think of those that can not absorb technology as a lost group that will never be self supporting. Once that is in mind the idea of spending tax dollars to educate these folks appears to be completely wasteful of tax dollars.
are as different in their approaches as say, apple and ubuntu. The purpose of an R01 university (like all the University of Californias for example) is to advance human knowledge, largely by grant based research. If undergraduates get educated in the process, its a bonus. The purpose of a college is to educate students, and if research happens at the same time, great.
I don't wanna get into a patriotic fight or compare political programs. I just want to point out that many countries (not USA of course) finance the education of its citizens. It might be good or bad education, don't know, but they do at least consider education to be an essential part of human rights. Some examples that I'm aware of are countries in South America (Argentina) and Europe (Germany, Spain, Netherlands). I'm sure there are many more around the world.
I know that in Germany for instance, until not long ago even foreigners could study for almost free. My understanding is that this has changed though, and now only EU residents have that privilege.
Boy have times changed. Everybody thinks of a CURVE even when they do not use a curve. If the average student gets a D then either its too hard or the prof sucks-- so then a curve is used to raise it up to compensate-- a few old ones adapted by using a curve but most just adapted their systems so it came out close to a curve. All courses are judged the same; its the prof's flaws that cause deviations from the bell curve and only a little slack is given for hard classes. There is no rigid system to enforce it but the perception exists and it has influence over the long term.
The culture has changed. not for the better in most cases; I'd assume this is yet another area of decline.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I have an undergrad from a college with no exams, and no grades. The courses are pass/fail. At first a school with no exams and no letter grades or GPA sounds great right? Well if you take away the crutch of exams and cramming, then you have to actually learn the material and document that learning and have faculty who can also document how you demonstrated each of the courses outcomes at the end of a term. Instead of a letter grade I got a page long written evaluation of how well I had mastered each outcome and what I had done to specifically demonstrate that, and suggestions for improvement or encouragement for things I was doing well. You end up presenting and writing a LOT, creating new research, doing tangible projects with actual outcomes, and being called on the spot a LOT in class. Of course it helped that we had class sizes around 10 most of the time. The workload was higher than a traditional college (I work at one of those now) but I can say I learned the concepts and theory very well. Yes people failed classes, and specific reasons were given as to why (instead of just blowing a test) and what needed to be done about it.
Everybody thinks they are a dentist because they've been to many dentists-- oh wait, nobody thinks that, I was thinking of teachers. Just because you've had teachers does not mean you are qualified to spout off on education-- but EVERYBODY does. Think about it. There are bad dentists and you don't use that as justification to your opinions do you? (I hope the reader is above thinking all opinions are equal.)
Education research, psychology, brain biology, physical therapy, even A.I. work all actually deals with learning and since I like to read in ALL those areas I can tell you that they have plenty of "hard evidence" on these matters--- it didn't take a physics prof to "discover" this stuff that was already known not merely "intuitively" as TFA states!
Did you know that college requires NO education or provides education of its instructors? You only need to know the topic being taught; as traditionally has always been the case-- in large part due to the fact that only a small portion of the population would even go to college, these are likely the 10% who would learn it themselves and will eventually go beyond passive absorption when required. The old methods which once worked with a minority have to be adapted for the majority; education as a subject has had to deal with this forever--- so its now a big deal when some profs rediscover what every public school teacher has had to grapple with forever.
Active learning -- DUH!! Real learning takes more brain power and burns more calories than any other brain activity; its no wonder we've evolved to minimize that!
Listening to a professor drone on and on is not learning, is sheer boredom. While there are some professors that are skilled lecturers and are interesting to watch, for the most part most professors create a lecture plan and then follow it for decades and it is apparent with their complete lack of enthusiasm.
The problem is, most university level professors could not be classified as "teachers". Most are unwilling to spend the level of time and commitment suggested by the article and would prefer to stand up in a lecture hall and remain relatively detached from their "students" and let those students figure it out on their own. Student interaction is what the teacher's aids are for.
I agree a new paradigm is necessary for education in general, more hands on and less regurgitation of facts is a benefit to all, I just don't see many professors with decades of tenure wanting to change the system so hopefully this will apply to a new generation of professors that are starting their careers.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.