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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.........
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.
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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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.
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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.
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)
... 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
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.
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.
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.)