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.'"

Comments

Great idea if you don't care about students!

[eepok]

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.

Re:Great idea if you don't care about students!

[brillow]

I think a hidden problem is that these people are not fundamentally capable of doing the things the economy needs. All the jobs these people could do are now done by machines, and the phase-space of things a machine cannot do is shrinking rapidly.

What we are currently doing is forcing the incapable into systems they cannot compete in and compensating by lowering standards. These people end up with degrees, but no robust competence.

What we will have to do in the next 30 years or so, when machines are able to do very advanced things (like diagnose disease and perform surgery), is rethink our economic paradigms.

Re:I disagree; Lectures are valuable

[bcrowell]

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.