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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.'"
Then Kahn Academy will replace all the schools given enough time.
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.
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.
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
As a professor, allow me to say "Ha ha ha!" Or, "Yes, that sounds great, but...." The most common question asked during the last final exams I gave was "Do you have a pencil I can borrow?" Sadly, we're not allowed to treat students as responsible adults who will "get all the passive shit done at home." I wish we could. Otherwise the good students are being penalized by the slow-down necessitated by the chuckleheads.
I, for one, am an Aural learning type.
This review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.
Another issue here is that although the article is specifically about learning physics, you seem to be talking about learning in general. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is simply an ineffective way to teach physics in particular.
Find free books.
... 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
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.
One of the biggest problems I have found with students from India and China is not that they don't know their material. They have memorized what they were required to know and passed their tests, but the real problem I have found is that is all it is. Trying to understand something new is difficult, if it just involves memorization it seems to go fine, but coming up with their own concepts seems to be difficult. In computer science since most of what we do is not memorization, students have had a great deal of difficulty if they were in other engineering fields. Talking it over with my advisor, head of graduate studies in computer science, he agrees with me on the way things are done at least in india where he is from. Now, we still have issues in the US education system as well, not meaning to say that it's too much better here than there.
The issue is of course education systems that focus more on remembering facts rather than understanding facts and coming up with new concepts. Since I have a poor memory, I never could do well at memorization, but on the other hand, due to my problem, I became better at understanding the data rather than just remembering it so that on tests I could figure out what the answer should be.
Blah, I prefer teaching people to think rather than what to think.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Well, Anonymous, I don't know where you're going to school, or what that 3.93 is actually worth. You might be a genius. But you're definitely a slacker. I was too. Until I hit grad school and finally had to buckle down and learn to study. I'd love to make grades dependent upon students coming to class truly prepared. But the reality of the current university climate/system and its funding forces me to choose between that and keeping my family fed (ie, keeping my damn job). I'm too tired to go into the long explanation now, and it's depressing as hell. But basically it boils down to the same thing we've seen in high schools, a sort of "no child left behind." And there are all sorts of carrots and sticks to incentivize not holding students to too high a standard. Given time and energy, I could muster up a good rant on how this seems to have emerged from the increase in administrators and the MBA-style management theories that drive universities and state/federal politics. But, again, I'm facing a day of meetings tomorrow, including, I shit you not, enforced cheering from the faculty about the greatness of our institution.... I think I'm going to go climb into bed and sulk now. (On the slacker thing: the point isn't that silly-shit more or less worthless number but what you actually learn. I made the mistake of not learning enough, caring about the number, the girls, and the beer. Now I wish I'd spent a bit more time in the labs and library.)
Wait tell they figure out that they can get a guy in India to do the lecture on video for 1/2 the price. Then we will outsource the professors as well.
No, no -- when the professors figure out they can get good lecture videos for their classes for free, they won't bother each writing their own lecture slides on the same dang material. They'll be MCs and curators -- presenting others' material and spending more of the lecture time actually interacting with the class. And the world will be a much better place all round for it. (Lecturers are generally promoted for research not teaching, so the best way get them to improve their teaching is if it also saves them time.) Seriously, if you were an AI lecturer this year, would you spend another hour writing your own ten PowerPoint slides to give a basic introduction to particle filters, or would you just show your class Sebastian Thrun's videos about it from ai-class and then talk with them about it? The second option gets you a clear understandable explanation in much less preparation time, and moves your class onto more interesting more advanced discussion faster...
--
The Intelligent Book
Twitter: @wbillingsley
The goal should be that a high percentage learn the material. Folks that don't learn the material should get a failing grade, those that do should get a passing grade.
If a technique increases the number of people in a class that can learn the material, and increases the proficiency of those that would have learned it anyway this is a win/win.
So given that a pass should indicate that a student learned the material, yes it should be the goal of a university to have a high pass rate. We have advanced degrees and harder curricula for those that need softer classes to be able to pass (i.e. if an artsy type ends up in a hard physics class, the failure has already occurred elsewhere).