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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.'"
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.
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.
We cant have students memorizing formulas and heuristics.
One way to do this, which is what my school did, was to test based on the theory. Teach the specifics and write the exam such that you are pretty much required to use the theory to solve the problems. It takes more work than the simple recite the formula tests that professors like since they don't have to think much to create them. We quickly weeded out the people who memorized things. Personally, I do much better learning the theory and applying it than memorization.
I don't know, but it works for me.
He's trying to teach you how to think rather than what to think. Fail.
The only lectures on Artificial Intelligence on Youtube are by Indian professors, but I couldn't understand them through the accent. With lectures on video, you could listen to the best lecturer in the country instead of some third rate professor. They can do a frequently asked questions list and update the lecture according to the questions. Electronic books can be both much shorter and longer. That is, if you can follow the quick example you can move on, if you can't, then you click a link for an expanded explanation. I don't think we should be wasting $50000/yr and the mind of an intelligent person to blab out a lecture like a video projector. One on one or small group help would be a much better use of those resources.
PLEASE, don't give them any ideas....it was fucking hard enough to understand they back when *I* was in college!!!
I swear there was an Oriental guy teaching one of my calculus classes...maybe Chinese. But it was the hardest thing to not laugh when when he was trying to describe getting the area of a tube from a flat sheet of metal/paper.
He kept over and over doing "Ok..first you roll the shit....then, you take the shit and..."
If Indian instructors are nearly as hard to understand at the tech phone supports I've had from "Bob" lately....well, it will surely degrade the already failing US education system. Hard to learn if you can't understand a damned thing the instructor is trying to say...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, really....what IS the value of a college education today?
With the recession, so many people have gone back to school for graduate degrees that the Masters is rapidly becomming (if not already) the new Bachelor's degree.
But the reality of it all...it is complete bullshit. Going to college doesn't guarantee success, or even a career. Hell, it doesn't guarantee you sweet fuck all...you have taken 4 years and god only knows how much money that got you a piece of paper that suggests you should be able to do some task with some level of competency.
Now, if you're my doctor...yeah, I want you to have that piece of paper that says "M.D." on it. I want my lawyer to be able to read and interpet legalese (although, quite frankly, I do a better job of it than most of the lawyers I know). I want the engineer designing the bridge to have a P. Eng. and actually understand that shit, since lives are on the fucking line. But for a netadmin? You come in with a 4-year Bachelor of Science in CS looking to get an entry-level netadmin post I'm going to see you as vastly over-qualified and probably reject you flat out. Fuck, in my home province, it is mandatory for a librarian to have a minimum of a masters degree for a job that paid in 2004 less than 40K a year...make sense out of that fucker. The poor person we hired at the city the one year had something like $100K in student debt & pratically cried when she saw the offer.
The education bubble is the next great crash to come, where people finally stand up and realize that getting fleeced for $40K a year by an institution so that little Timmy can have a degree in Mediterranian Art which will serve him well while he cooks fucking fries at McD's for the rest of his life just isn't fucking worthwhile, and you will see a re-surgence of cheaper "technical schools" that teach you what you need to know in your chosen profession & fuck all the pretentious bullshit.
Of course, they (the schools) have "educated" us all on how special and unique and wonderful the fucking college experience is, and how shallow and empty your life will be if you don't go to university. Well seriously, fuck that shit. I drank beer, fucked girls, and even made the occasional class when I was in college. I could drink beer & hire a metric fuckton of whores for the prices universities charge today.
Education is an over-hyped over-valued industry, and it is just a matter of time till the public tells universities to go fuck themselves.
(As I funnel absurd amounts of my pay into college funds for the kids...yeah, I'm a fucking hypocrite)
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Students won't, but employers will. Having a degree from a respected institution of higher learning is one way in which employers can screen applicants. Which is a shame because going to Harvard or Yale doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things.
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)
Dude.. we get it. You don't value college education (except for those "Ivory" league doctors and lawyers and such). Some people do see value in it, otherwise they wouldn't bother putting the checkbox on the application.
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?
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?