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The Problems With Online Math Classes
dcollins writes "As a college instructor specializing in statistics, I felt compelled to survey one of the massive-enrollment online education courses that are all the rage these days. This summer, it seemed a perfect opportunity when Udacity unveiled Introduction to Statistics by founder Sebastian Thrun (of Google autonomous car fame). Having taken the entire course through to the final exam, my overall assessment is: It's amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for college lectures encountered by many students during their academic careers. I've tried to pick out the Top 10 problems with the course structure and address them in detail."
I've taken both online and classroom survey-level math courses at my local technical college and have to say I would much prefer the online courses. Most of the instructors for the classroom courses basically just go through the problems in the book anyway, and don't contribute nearly as much as they think they do to the actual learning (I can read the book just fine myself, thanks). And the online courses not only save me on gas, but they're also a helluva lot more convenient. You can basically take the unit tests anytime before the deadline, meaning you can finish the course early if you put in the effort. Now those were survey-level courses. And your mileage may vary with more advanced courses. But my experience was generally positive.
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course. Once an online course is in place, it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention. So I seriously doubt they're paid as much to supervise an online course as they would be to teach a traditional classroom course. What's more, there is also a matter of ego involved. Most of the instructors I've had love the idea that you are forced to come listen to them twice a week, and blanch at the idea that any course could be effective without their brilliant classroom contribution. It's funny how they don't notice that half of the students in the class are asleep or zoned-out through their "brilliant" lectures, and the other half are bored out of their minds (the students like me who can learn just fine without having you read to us from the book).
So I would personally be very wary of any evaluation of online courses from a professor or instructor. Keep in mind this is a guy with horse in the race, and a lot of reasons to hate online courses that have nothing to do with their effectiveness.
Sounds like the author took one bad course, and is blaming online classes for his bad experience. Any of these complaints could apply easily to a poorly instructed statistics class at your local community college.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The author puts forth very few actual problems with online math classes in general; his article focuses on one particular course (Udacity Statistics 101) and gives us a top 10 list of problems with that course. None of these problems are intrinsic to online courses, except perhaps the lack of natural feedback that one does get when teaching a class face-to-face, allowing for continuous improvement of the course material.
In other words, the author bases his assessment of online math courses on a sample size of 1. ("Based on my review of the Udacity Introduction to Statistics course, I see some compelling strategic advantages for live in-class teachers, that will not be soon washed away by massive online video learning.").
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.
How is an online course any different that a textbook? To me it has some benefits over a text book like you don't have to read as much, you can just listen. I like to be able to flip back and forth or scan chapters in a textbook -- that's a bit harder in a video lecture. So why aren't instructors and professors calling for the ban of textbooks and criticizing them? Why don't they lynch each other when one writes a really good textbook?
Once an online course is in place, it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention.
Listen, man, I'm glad this worked for you. But it's a one way communication channel. The way you say "it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention" is pretty indicative that you think teaching is someone shouting at you with your mouth taped shut and your eyes pried open. You should maybe read the article before saying the critique is biased, he talks about what I'm mentioning:
Throughout the course, lectures and exercises veer rapidly between utterly trivial and nigh-impossible. I think this is a reflection of the one-way communication channel, such that Thrun can't have any awareness of what counts as easy and what counts as hard to the students.
Yet you say:
Most of the instructors I've had love the idea that you are forced to come listen to them twice a week, and blanch at the idea that any course could be effective without their brilliant classroom contribution.
I'm pretty sure that's in your best interest. If you're one of the gifted students that hasn't ever needed a professor's help then congratulations but you're not the normal student. If what you're saying is true, the government would only need to dispatch sets of textbooks to each home and stop paying tons of money on public education altogether. But what you're saying isn't true ... anyone with an education given to them by several other humans will know that.
My work here is dung.
I've had math professors who could barely speak English because they were foreign countries. And the ones raised speaking English still had trouble communicating. It's a difficult subject and there are often big disagreements over the best way to present the material. Some think you should start from a high-level theory and work your way down. Others think you should start with basic examples and eventually get to the theory. Naturally, I've found that professors in one camp think those in the other camp are "bad". This guy just sounds like a tenured member of the college industrial complex who is deathly afraid that people will stop subsidizing his way of life. I wouldn't be surprised to find that 90% of the people taking college calculus don't need the material and never use it again. Math departments are kept afloat with distribution requirements. There's a lot of money at stake. If these big online courses catch on, the professoriate will be out on the street. Of course they're going to hate it.
From TFA, "In surveying the course, some nights I personally got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for the college lectures encountered by most students during their academic careers." It was for me. Most classes were absolutely awful.
The guy is in 'statistics', a sample size of one is all he needs.
Especially when his career is at stake!
Silence is a state of mime.
How much math do most people really need?
I think most people right now are taking to much of it and a some of what they are taking is not needed.
Maybe we can be better off with a cut down math plan for most people and the people who really need the high level stuff can take it in a smaller class where they can get help when they need it better then a big class with little help from the staff.
It's a very clear article about the one course he took. At no point does he claim it a general critique of the medium. That's being propagated by the /. headline on the article.
I'm not sure what the larger lesson, if any, is at all - except the old standard, "Content is King". Cool new technology and celebrity professor alike are worthless if not presented with a well-written, well-rehearsed, well-produced content. Combine the production values of, not so much million-dollar-a-minute national TV ads, but just the production values of local TV news - where a team of several work all day on each half-hour produced - and it would be a whole different experience.
What bewilders me about most teaching is that it isn't ALL at least that good - what other content in our world is tested on live audiences so repetitively? There should by now be wide agreement on what kinds of topics and approaches and sequences work best for something like basic stats.
Take a "World History 101" course at any large university, in a huge lecture hall with 350 of your closest friends, delivered by uninterested, overworked grad student TAs.
This just in: most undergrad education is overpriced, and low quality.
The overwhelming majority of the article is specific criticisms about Udacity Statistics 101, not a general criticism of online math classes. The specific criticisms seem valid to me -- I didn't take Thrun's stats class, but I did take the AI class, which had the same issues. I urge anyone who's interested in online learning to read the full article since anyone could make any of these mistakes very easily.
Here are the bits from the end of the article that talk about online learning in general:
My own summary would be "the current state of the art in online learning does not justify the hype, and probably won't for some time".
Visit the
I completed a Masters in Statistics through Texas A&M's online program. The online lectures were simply time-delayed recordings of the same lectures which students on campus sat through, with Powerpoint slides as the visuals most of the time -- the instructors used some online blackboard software which let them jot notes on the slides as they talked, or write freehand on a white screen. The textbooks, assignments, and exams were all the same as those used by on campus students. An online forum was used to discuss problems, and there was a weekly interactive session where you could talk with the professor using a headset/microphone. In other words, the online experience essentially matched that of the on campus experience, except I didn't have to travel or miss work -- though I missed opportunities for collaboration with other students. Upon graduating (it took 3 years of hard work), the diplomas did not distinguish between online and on campus students. Exams were handled through a local proctor which had to be vetted by the program. Overall I was pretty happy with the experience, and arguably received a better education than many others who got their degrees from other schools (A&M has a highly recognized stats program).
Incidentally, statistics isn't really "math", any more than are engineering or physics, though all of them use plenty of math.
Wow, you mean just like a real class with teachers that are absent minded, would rather be doing their research then teach the students, and overall awful teacher experience there are bad online classes too?? who would have thought that possible ...
As for feedback, I am sure this teacher is aware of those 400+ lecture halls of introductory something or other ... realistically how much feedback is the teacher getting (or care about) is this online class better or worse then that?
In an ideal world a teacher would have the perfect student to teacher ratio for the class and all the students in that class would be at the same skill level with the same learning capabilities, I would expect a good teacher to be able to look at something and evaluate it based on what can be done with the tool rather then disparage the new tool for education.
A quote from the Article of interest:
"Finally, here's a core a problem that multiplies and exacerbates all the others. In normal college teaching, a truly > instructor will go through a never-ending process of constant refinement and improvement for their courses, based on two-way interaction and feedback from live students. (I know I do; I've taught my introductory statistics course several dozen times and I still sit down and note possible improvements after almost every single class session.) "
I am positive if hard pressed he would be able to identify not only in the school he teaches at but in his own department the teachers that are not dedicated and that that by and large introductory course go through very little change over 5 to 10 years. (Except the text books those apparently discover new things in introductory math every year).
Here is a better summary
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Online courses may work for a few people, but after having tought high school for more than a few years I can promise you they will not work for the majority. Teaching is essentially a controlled feedback loop (*Yes I understand it isn't ONLY a feedback loop) , and it is the back and forth (continuous) feedback that builds critical thinking skills, and enhances the learning for most people. Online videos can not see the face of a lost student, can't detect someone that is Googling an answer for each question, or in any other way rephrase the question.
load "$",8,1
I could write a review of this one bad class I once took at a brick and mortar school. Does that effectively cast aspersion upon all classroom learning? No.
You can use all the adjectives you want, but from what I went through online classes are superior to community college because they force you to think in basic problem assessment skills.
All the classes I took in college were very, very force fed. None of these kids have the slightest idea what they are up against when they get out of college.
Yay let's spend a week on L'hoptials rule because I'm paying so much!....please...make is stop.
Based on my research, 100% of online math classes are terrible.
Sample size, of course, is 1 statistics class where I apparently didn't learn much.
"college educator myself"
Okay, pronounced bias as his job and livelihood are on the line.
" It is poorly structured; it evidences an almost complete lack of planning for the lectures; it routinely fails to properly define or use standard terms or notation; it necessitates occasional massive gaps where “magic” happens;"
So he is pronouncing it as a typical course offering of a tenured professor. Seriously, that's about the most apt description of most courses I took with tenured professors.
"best example of the lack of planning is how radically off-syllabus the course went from its initial advertising"
Once again, can we say typical of many college courses, especially those taught by tenured professors.
"neither Thrun nor the system is really “listening” to take note of when a presentation has misfired and needs clarification"
Once again, an apt description of most classes taught by tenured professors. See a trend here?
"half the time a question is actually asked before students have been given the tools to answer it"
Wait, isn't that when the tenured professor retorted "Well it's in your book, you should have known it", to which the student replied, but it's in an upcoming chapter we haven't been assigned to read yet. To which the professor retorts "Well a good student should be reading ahead" rather than admitting any failure.
As a carpenter specializing in horse-drawn carriages, I felt compelled to survey one of the new-fangled "horseless carriages" that are all the rage these days. It was amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed, as I could no longer hear the music of the crickets, frogs, and other nocturnal animals as I rode across the countryside. The smoke generated by this monstrosity obscured vision, and greatly irritated the eyes and nose. It was far too complex and infernal a machine to ever become standard fare for many people.
Better known as 318230.
I relied nearly entirely upon "Statistics for Dummies," took an exam, and got the highest possible score. Perhaps some things are better taught in a book through independent study, instead of a classroom, online or off.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
You sir are a crap at analysis and stats if you think 1 is a good sample size. I mean why don't you look at at least the top 10 online learning programs and make some real observations?
I've done a lot of work looking at online learning and how computers can be better at giving a 'guided discovery' learning model where people are not forced into learning things in a particular order. Instead the computer can let them look at the sullibus more freely and learn things the way they want. The software will know if something has been left out and will direct the student to what they need to learn. For example you can learn different areas at your own pace and if you try to go somewhere that needs some knowledge the learning system will know if you are capable - if it doesn't think you are you can be politely asked to review the precourse material.
Also discussions and problems can be managed more effectively and the 'answer' (FAQ's) get improved over time and are then stored for future students. So you see this improves on the classroom model.
and completely wrong. The Stats course was a disaster. Mr. Thrun should stick to advanced level instruction. I owe a lot to Udacity. Some of the courses there are great; a few are stellar. David Evans is magician. Wesley Weimer was stellar. And Steve Huffman did a great job. The classes are only as good as the teachers.
Why did the title state that there's a problem related to math usage? Statistics is not math.
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.
Online courses are not a job threat to faculty at research universities. We only spend a fraction of our time teaching and the rest on research and service. If online courses reduced our teaching load this would mean more time for research (which is a motivation for teaching online!). Opposition to online teaching primarily comes from the position that the quality and/or diversity of teaching will suffer. This is not an unreasonable concern.
Personally I am all in favour of online teaching but I think it is still in its infancy and we need better tools before jumping into wholesale online courses. For example a good solution for exams as well as labs needs to be found. My concern is that in the rush to go online important things like quality seem to have been forgotten. There is also the issue of interactivity. For higher level courses it is not enough to just present students with material for them to learn often complicated concepts e.g. Quantum Mechanics, require discussions with students to ensure that they understand. Yes, technically these can be done online but you loose the non-verbal communication and it is frequently the case that I will explain a concept to a student for them to say "yes I understand it now" while their body language indicates far less certainty. I can then either re-explain or test them by asking a question to see whether they really do.
I enrolled but it could never engage me. It was poor in depth and structure. I tried on it my children (11 & 16) and they found it boring and a bit too slow. I guess it could pass for 6th grade content but never for a university course. I guess I though I would be getting something similar to Downey's Think Stats or the Heads Up Series - which I don't like but is generally well thought out and well pitched. I can't help feeling that this is like everything else out of the google stables - well hyped but half baked - Yes if this is the way forward I can only feel content that my education was a cut above the rest and there will be plenty of highly paid work available for me right until my death.
The author is dead wrong about asking questions before he's told you the answer. He says this is bad because you haven't been told the answer 2-5 mins before, therefore this is offputting to students.
Having done some of the Udacity courses, I believe the exact opposite. When he asks a question that goes beyond the taught material, you are forced to think about the problem and solve it, instead of parrotting back what you were told a few minutes ago.
I'm sure being challenged with a difficult question is beneficial for learning, whether or not you succeed in answering it.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
So..... in what way does the fact that this particular online course is exactly as shit as all the courses you took make his points about the shittyness of this particular online course invalid?
It's like responding to bad review of a restaurant by saying that you've heard there are a lot of bad restaurants. Well... yeah... and?
While these online courses are not as rigorous, well structured and of the same quality as Stanford / MIT / Oxford / whatever courses, I do think that most of them are much better than what students usually get at standard universities in poorer countries. Does anyone from Romania want to contradict me?
Even though there is enough room for improvement, there are many students in other countries who don't even have access to courses such as Machine Learning, Cryptography, Quantum Computing, etc so any introduction to such topics is most welcome.
I think that in a few years they will only get better, based on feedback received from the forums as well as from the quizzes. Also, they should implement some mechanism to determine which segments of the videos are re-winded over and over, since those might need clarifications. A term index is also welcome.
Just think about it: if an online course doesn't live up to the expectations of the students, then it will just die out when they will stop following it. Now, compare this to a professor who teaches poorly a certain course: generations upon generations of students will be forced to try and make sense of that course, because they have no other alternative.
I personally followed Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning and, while it wasn't rigorous regarding the mathematics, it did offer me a really good intuition on how those algorithms work, as well as the required terminology to be able to start reading a book on this subject. I also followed Jennifer Widom's course on databases, which was really, really good and Dan Boneh's course on Cryptography helped me get a decent understanding of this subject for my current job.
So, we should encourage them to improve the courses instead of just yelling that some of them doesn't really live up to "the standards".
"Math departments are kept afloat with distribution requirements" -- What?? Can anyone on this board honestly say that there are too many required math courses in a college curriculum? Anyone in a STEM field can't get enough math, ever. And all those students who are in fields which don't require it and are taking math only to satisfy distribution requirements aren't getting enough either. Everyone claiming a college degree should have at least enough math to understand the statistics and economics which are argued over during every election, plus compound interest, renting vs home ownership, and a host of other subjects relating to personal and societal issues. These people are voting for God's sake! Criticize the universities for providing lame, boring math classes all you want but not because the students are getting too much math.
Mod parent up, he's key on. I remember an issue with a professor in one of my C++ classes, which happened to include a large programming project. The project took about four weeks of intensive programming, and I was really proud of the quality of my code, comments, structure, etc. Only problem was that in one section we had to determine the actual type of an object using dynamic_cast after having received a base type object. We had like 10 derived objects and I've used copy paste to make life easier, but forgot to modify one entry with the appropriate type. That is, ONE word was wrong. My mistake failed in one of their tests (which I didn't have in advance), which cascaded four output missmatches. This ONE word cost me 40 points out of 100, ending up with a D for this project. One word, lots of effort. I've talked to the professor and his answer was a lame "if I fix your grade, I need to fix everyone's".
When I was a TA during grad school, I always looked at the work flow. If a student made a mistake in part (a) of a problem, I didn't simply give him zero points for parts (b) (c) and (d) that used it as a base. Instead, I've assumed that part (a) was right and looked at the process. It took me more time to grade, sure. But it is fair and if a teacher can't contribute with some human touch, let's just replace them with computers.
There are introductory A-level statistics books in the UK which do a much better job than this - this is the kind of stuff a student would study at the age of 16 or 17 in the UK.
And I thought our education system was backward.
No, our education system is backward compared to much of Europe.
America, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Please remove your idiots from both sides of the political spectrum and refill your education system with people who love nothing but to educate.
The math courses are generally pretty good. If I had to rate them, I'd give them a solid B. I like the approachable style of the teaching, but sometimes the instructor just flat out gets things wrong. Most times they use the annotations on the Youtube service to point out the corrections. But for a subject as exacting as math, where you are literally trying to rewire the brain into assigning logical meaning to [initially] foreign concepts, it is a huge break in continuity. The problem is exacerbated given the fact that these new concepts come so quickly - sometimes every single 10 minute video.
I can appreciate that they are doing a free service for the betterment of society. I hope they go back through their catalog and clean up the production and content. That and the limitations of Youtube indexing are quite aggravating at times. The instructor will be narrowing in on a subject and then suddenly reference a different video that goes into more detail. The lesson notes don't have those which I find frustrating.
I don't think interpersonal teaching has anything to worry about for quite a while. As others have continually said, teaching is more about 2 way communication that just a dump of knowledge. Even computers, which are almost their own perfect teaching device, don't do well in cases of learning that require more than the instant feedback loop. The mark of a really good teacher is somebody who has such a command of the subject, is able to present the material in many different ways to aid the building of the internal connections of the brain.
The guy makes good points. But he extrapolates them from a single anecdote and calls them data. And this guy calls himself a statistician. Phail.
After having read the initial round of comments regarding this posting, I have to say I'm disappointed that the /. crowd isn't somewhat more circumspect regarding the author's effort. He took the time to survey a course he's qualified to critique by both his background (Masters degree) & experience (teaching at NYU). He offered valid points regarding the instructional design, execution and attention to detail by Thrun (who was most likely hired by Udacity more for his name than anything else). The majority of posts in response seem focused on defending the promise/potential of online courses, in general, rather that dealing with any insight the author offered.
Too bad.
I've had the pleasure of trying to teach, and I've been worked with professionals involved in developing online educational materials as well as one who headed a company that delivered professional training courses over a private proprietary network. My own teaching attempts were probably mediocre (it was en education research project exploring the use of virtual reality systems in classrooms & we did an intro to the tech, 3D modeling and attempted to facilitate 'world building' (focused on allowing students to present a limited curriculum they were learning concurrently in a traditional classroom).
What I learned is that professional educators are responsible for an incredibly diverse set of activities and knowledge that go well beyond the subject matter. Online course should IMHO be treated as professional presentations. You can't just wing it, was obviously the case for Thrun's Udacity course. (I say obviously taking for granted that Collins critiqued Thrun accurately).
All the elements of good instructional design have to be present and course materials that support the curriculum need to be included, ESPECIALLY for online courses because students don't have the immediacy of classroom contact with the instructor or their virtual fellows.
I've heard great things about Khan Academy, though I haven't spent any time 'attending' classes 'there'. The distinguishing characteristics I've heard applauded most center on the love for the communication of the materials. Some people have that gift others don't. But if a group like Udacity gets together to attempt a parallel to the efforts of someone who has the gift, it's important they make sure that the presentations they deliver are well thought out, well presented, accurate and constructed in such a manner as to meet the needs of people with various learning styles.
The web, in this regard, holds greater potential than television, but it will rarely be delivered by people who don't take the time to polish their efforts.
Apparently Udacity and Thrun failed in this attempt.
I took Prof. Thrun's & Prof. Norvig's course, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" when it was first offered. I'm pretty big on self-study, and I rely on instructors to provide efficient direction (a syllabus, specific reading material), a mechanism for self-evaluation (exercises, means to validate results, etc), and finally, a source of answers when I have questions. In a perfect world, online courses seem to be a good fit for my personal needs, so I dove in with relish.
However, I found some of the same general problems the blog post referenced;
- the content (speech, writing) was often sloppy and confusing, it did feel unplanned.
- concepts that were introduced were not explained in their entirety.
- the vocabulary used to describe a new idea was fairly mutable, or inconsistent.
- there were often instances requiring sizable leaps of intuition combined with formal mathematical knowledge to complete exercises which had previously only been provided in a "fill in the numbers" format in previous examples.
In addition, I found no clear mechanisms for self-evaluation. We had to wait a week just to see the results of previous tests, etc. I also thought the quiz interface was childish and poorly done, but that's mostly just a look and feel issue.
I also took Prof. Ng's "Machine Learning," class at the same time. In contrast, I found that Prof. Ng provided:
- Writing was clear, dialog was polished, vocabulary was explicit.
- Concepts were introduced, explained (in both a practical and intuition-focused form), demonstrated and expanded upon.
- Exercises were given to students in the form of example data, algorithms to implement, and with additional suggestions on how to 'play' with them to produce different results and gain an intuitive grasp of the information. Unlimited resubmission of exercises with an automated grading system made evaluation of different mechanisms simple.
- Quizes were more polished.
I felt like I got a lot out of his class, well more than the AI class.
I feel that the difference between the two was pretty obvious. Prof. Thrun was teaching as if he had a live audience in front of him, and did not modify his instruction style for the lack of interactivity. On the other hand, Prof. Ng taught in a way that minimized the deficiencies of video learning, while leveraging the benefits of online, automated instruction.
In conclusion, I don't think the AngryMath blogger is correct in the assumption that live, in-person instruction is needed. In fact, I'd say the opposite was shown: the closer you get to the style of live instruction, the worse it seems to be to me, and more so when it's online. Of course, I have specific needs from education, and others may prefer different styles.
Of course, because expertise is biased - towards excellence.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Okay Mods, here I go, this is coming from concerned frustration and is not intended as flamebait! I'm using a couple of rhetorical flourishes, so let's hope I don't misfire them.
I believe the professor's comments are tragically flawed, starting with one reason. They might have worked for *any other subject*, combined with a more constructive goal of "how do we refine next year's class for the best experience" etc. But what is the subject here? Wait for it ... Statistics. The art of studying a Sample from a Population, right?
So in this evaluation, the Sample Size is One Class. Sorry Prof, you mentioned *three* other sources of online classes, namely OpenCourseWare, Coursera, and edX (I'm leaving off Khan Academy, it's structured differently). A glance at Wikipedia lists even more. So my first concern is why that sample class is being equated to free statistics courses in general and even worse, online learning as a whole. Some examples:
https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1 - Coursera's version of Stats 1.
Then for the criticisms:
1. Lack of Planning
2. Sloppy Writing
3. Quiz Regime
4. Population and Sample
5. Normal Curve Calculations
7. Bipolar Difficulty
8. Final Exam Certification
9. Hucksterism
10. Lack of Updates?
Let's separate those out into Badly Written Course complaints, that can apply for *any* course, including traditional ones. Those are:
1. Lack of Planning
2. Sloppy Writing
4. Population and Sample
5. Normal Curve Calculations
6. CLT Not Explained
So for my fellow Slashdot Readers, the ones for us to thrash around are the ones dealing with the Online Concept.
3. Quiz Regime
7. Bipolar Difficulty
8. Final Exam Certification
9. Hucksterism
10. Lack of Updates
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Okay, pronounced bias as his job and livelihood are on the line.
Bullshit. His job is not on the line. There is no subsitute for in-person teaching (e.g. tutorials) and there's also the job he was almost certainly hired to do, namely research, which he probably doesn't get to do nearly enough of because of all the teaching.
If you think that video lectures are going to put universities out of business, then can you please give me the name of your dealer, because that's some amazing stuff you're smoking. ... stuff ...
If that's your experience then you went to a bad university. It does not match my experience.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...25+ years ago at a major Midwestern state university was that calculus was just one of those classes they expected you to figure out on your own.
3 days a week we had a lecture that largely followed the book. It was in a lecture hall which seated 200-300 people and was usually completely full. There were no questions and answer, straight lecture. These were taught be either "senior" PhD candidates or post-grads, never an actual professor.
Two days a week we had a recitation with a low-level grad student T/A. In every case in every class I had this T/A was foreign born and spoke atrocious English. In one case, the T/A appeared to speak NO English, getting by on grunting and pointing.
The student paper ran lots of articles about the T/A English proficiency issue. It boiled down to "It's a global world, why should they be expected to speak English?" to "These are undergrads in the Midwest, I didn't see Urdu, Hindi, and Mandarin as class requirements." Basically there was just nobody left to teach the classes and the professors couldn't be bothered.
Anyway, my assumption is that they don't really want to teach math. They want to make a kind of gesture towards teaching math, but really either you sink or swim. Online education just seems an extension of this mindset.
A friend of mine, an experienced programmer, got out of the business for 10+ years to assume the role of Stay-at-home-Mom. She has been taking classes once again to familiarize herself with the new styles of programming, the languages and beyond. She has primarily been frustrated with the on-line classes and listening to her, I can see why.
During my academia years, every class I took had a professor in the room. I remember the extreme benefit of asking a question of the professor that involved a real-time discussion. And it was through those discussions, that would prompt more excellent questions from the student body thus expanding the ideas and principles being taught to us. Also when we had questions out of confusion, we could stop a professor and again discuss where our confusion was. This always provided feedback to the professor as to how to better improve his lesson. And I also remember, one of my favorite aspects, was when a teach either accidentally (or even intentionally) stated something incorrectly and a student would question the teacher, this also showed where people didn't just accepted information blindly, but questioned accuracy for the best learning experience.
With on-line classes my friend has talked about, she has found that the classes lack structure and the text books don't really compliment the lectures and worst of all, teachers don't promptly answer students questions, instead she's stuck in forums where the information being discussed goes awry.
Its sounds like instructors / professors are taking an easy way out, and slapping crap together. I'd like to believe this is truly not the case, but after listening to my friend, I fear for our education system more and more.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I'm a parent of high school twins and recently went to one of their teacher's classes. Amazingly, shockingly awful. The good thing about the videos is that they are like movies. If they suck, no one will go see it and someone will make a different one. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of an unsuccessful school teacher. The videos and classrooms give us two choices and we are better off. I find these rants about one of the two choices, either public school teacher or video replacement, to be stupid because either one offers a choice against the other.
Gently reply
I originally thought the reviewer was focusing on one course. This would justify the use of a sample space of one course. However, the reviewer seems to tint his review by inferring that the flaws inherent in one course are endemic to all online courses.
The bulk of the review does focus on the flaws of a single class. And the flaws were, for the most part, the same flaws that can occur in any massive (defining massive as "more than one-on-one") environment. A disclaimer: I spent ten years teaching at the college level in Ivy League and similar schools. So, are the flaws present particular to online courses? I'll argue, "no."
My main concern is that the reviewer has the undercurrent of extrapolation to all online courses. Hence the words, "...to assess their general quality..." in the second paragraph. And, in the third paragraph, leaping from one course to "this might be standard fare for the college lectures encountered by most students during their academic careers". Finally, in the summary, "I see some compelling strategic advantages for live in-class teachers". However, I must return to my central concern: The reviewer is drawing these conclusions from sampling one course. And, as a statistician and a teacher of statistics, he must be well aware of the danger of drawing such conclusions from such a very small sampling.
wow!
I went through Bruce Edwards Great Courses math videos and they were incredible. They also have one on Discrete math and another on the art and craft of problem solving; all great. A few of their others that I tried weren't so great. But for the ones I just mentioned I contrast them to the crap teaching I had in school and there is no comparison. I would love to see an experiment where a teacher who knows zero math uses these lectures in a classroom setting and then compare the results to regular so called math teachers(yes I know there are a few great ones out there but very few). I suspect that it would be night and day. This would only be enhanced if these video courses were made more interactive.
These are early days for online education. The bar is generally set very low. But I suspect that slowly but surely there will be a "best" intro to stats lecture, a best calculus II lecture and so on. Where this will get really interesting is when you are able to mix and match these courses and their credits to assemble a degree.
Where I suspect that many institutions are going to get murdered is when they will take the lectures of their most politically connected professors and only let them post their videos. These institutions are then going to be puzzled when the students are all off watching Stanford profs instead.
The thing that makes me sad is when all these Baby Boomer professors are using their soap boxes to attack online education. It seems that the main thing they don't like is the students having a choice and that the choice won't be they and their surly attitudes. I hear attacks like "You shouldn't spoon feed the students." "The students don't have the discipline." "It is the Disneyfication of education." "You can't have just a few institutions dominating education."
There will be a place for a few of the best local professors working with graduate students. But those run of the mill glorified high-school teachers are doomed. As for grade school education I can't imagine the storm of change they are going to be resisting. I can't imagine how angry they are going to be when a certain percentage of their students will access this world of knowledge and basically be sitting in a grade 8 classroom having just finished an online Stanford degree/certificate. What excuse do you have to even pretend to teach grade 8 math to a student who might have just completed a course in tensor calculus? Or even just Pre-calculus? I suspect the school system will fight this like the Germans in the last days of WWII Berlin will be surrounded with the shells landing every few seconds while they keep planning the 1000 year Reich.
What this reminds me of is the early days of the automobile. Before Henry Ford cars were handmade creations that weren't generally very good and were for the very rich. Then Henry Ford figured out how to make a good car for everyone. Technically there were a few better handmade cars but every technological improvement was put into mass produced cars very quickly and the whole car industry took off. Education has been in the hand made stage for 1000's of years... Until now.
What a glorious change it is going to be. I just hope the scammy scummy companies don't screw it up.
Problem Number 1 out of 10: I no longer have a job.
The comments to this topic are the very thing that is wrong with the educational system, how it is perceived and what the skewed conception of what education even is.
For the price, I cannot complain, but I really appreciate the interactive tutorials. Khan Academy had one where (for example) you had to change the distribution of widgets to match a desired statistical description. The numbers involved were trivial, but it was amazing how much manipulation was required to obtain the desired distribution.
I agree with an early poster who said that he preferred to read a book over listening to a lecture. I agree. I'm not sure what someone could say in a lecture that a well-written book would not say. Has anyone Creative Commonsed a public domain statistics book (if that is allowed) and improved it for readability and perhaps improved the illustrations?
I wouldn't mind reading an updated 1920s stats book on epaper as I move coal around on my tablet to meet a desired distribution and maybe do some scratch arithmetic on a spiral notebook.
Thank you for not lecturing!
Their they're doing there hair.
I three classes when I was studying for my BSCS that are an excellent example to me of how well or bad lecture versus online can be. In my linear algebra class, the professor would just come in and lecture the whiteboard as he worked the book examples. Beyond the third row in the classroom, he sounded a lot like the teachers in the Charlie Brown cartoons. There was no value add from listening to the lecture and the only way I passed the class was by reading the book In my calculus 3 class, the professor was so good at explaining the concepts that I almost never had to crack open a textbook. And I was able to do well on the math department produced exams. In my statistics class, we only met for the course introduction and to take tests. The rest of the material was either textbooks or online. The online lectures and textbooks were well written enough that I was able to get a good grade in the class. In my opinion, the linear algebra material and the statistics material were of equal difficulty. I got a C in linear algebra and an A in statistics. This shows to me that an online class can be done very well and a lecture class can absolutely suck. IMHO online learning is here to stay and is only going to grow. The teachers and professors need to accept that fact and adapt.
I teach at a university. I make the same for an online class as I make for one that is classroom based.
But once the lecture is recorded, the administration can hire anyone (even grad students) to teach (TA) the course. You're extraneous until they need an updated recording. Of course researchers would love that...
The recorded lecture is only part of the class. My micro and macro economic classes had recorded lectures that we could view at our convenience prior to class. Class time was then spent entirely on discussion. Discussion including being called on by the professor to explain some concept, discuss a concept in the context of current events, etc. My fellow students and I liked this format much better than more traditional classes even though it probably increased our workload.
Using class time for a canned lecture is a waste. However increasing discussion time yields a better educational experience and the professor is quite critical to this discussion process. Well, a good professor.
"college educator myself"
Okay, pronounced bias as his job and livelihood are on the line.
" It is poorly structured; it evidences an almost complete lack of planning for the lectures; it routinely fails to properly define or use standard terms or notation; it necessitates occasional massive gaps where “magic” happens;"
So he is pronouncing it as a typical course offering of a tenured professor. Seriously, that's about the most apt description of most courses I took with tenured professors.
"best example of the lack of planning is how radically off-syllabus the course went from its initial advertising"
Once again, can we say typical of many college courses, especially those taught by tenured professors.
"neither Thrun nor the system is really “listening” to take note of when a presentation has misfired and needs clarification"
Once again, an apt description of most classes taught by tenured professors. See a trend here?
"half the time a question is actually asked before students have been given the tools to answer it"
Wait, isn't that when the tenured professor retorted "Well it's in your book, you should have known it", to which the student replied, but it's in an upcoming chapter we haven't been assigned to read yet. To which the professor retorts "Well a good student should be reading ahead" rather than admitting any failure.
Bitter much?
When I read this:
I thought (wrongly, I suppose) that this might be an indictment of college courses in general. Most of the issues he found are, in my experience, valid for live college courses as well. It is "standard fare for college lectures" to have very little student feedback, gigantic jumps in difficulty, and missing definitions of key ideas. To me, though, it does not follow that online courses are inherently inferior. Obviously Delta thinks every teacher gives at least as much effort to teaching as Delta thinks he does himself. Online courses are supposed to solve this problem by creating access to supposed rock star teachers, and at worst (i.e. this Statistics course) they are simply as bad as live mega-lectures, but no worse.
Also, while this is a clear example of poor teaching, I'd like to suggest that the quality of the teacher is not the biggest factor in crummy classes. That factor, I've been thinking lately, is actually the administration. Currently, most of the best k-12 principals simply get out of the way of teachers; the worst create a hostile work environment and undermine the motivations of the student body. While college administrators typically do not exercise the kind of direct control over classes, they do set priorities for the university. Good lesson plans simply are not a priority, perhaps because students don't pay more when they do better. Research, in contrast, is highly lucrative, and working harder at it is likely to produce more research grants.
I'm not suggesting that universities shouldn't do so much research. Research is good! Rather, we're starting to get to the point where we need some level of education between (current) high school and college. In many places, community college provides that level - student-focused instruction of introductory college-level knowledge. I don't think a person should start studying at the university level until that person is learning things that research faculty will actually find engaging to teach (how many math professors love teaching basic calculus?). And once one is studying with those professors, the student should be ready to engage with messy intellectual ideas instead of clear-cut facts, and that's what research faculty deal with all the time.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Because, the mantra of the article, and why an article like this even exists, is as an argument about the inability of "online" education to provide satisfactory results like an in classroom experience.
But the truth is, it can...in many situations, offer an equivalent experience.
(Seriously, and anyone failing to realize that was the point of the author's article is in denial. Because you won't find an article written on Southern Connecticut State University's statistics course's poor teaching quality.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
As the statistics instructor, the author of TFA should've known that ONE sample may not be statistically significant.
Having taken Andrew Ng's online machine learning course (the Stanford version, not the Udacity version), I will say that one of the biggest problems with that crowd is notation. Machine learning has painful notation. Is this superscript an exponent or an index? What's the precedence of this new operator? Where was that operator defined/ The course desperately needs a one-page summary of the notation used.
Actually, the university I was thinking of was Yale. No, didn't really go there. I went to smaller schools, with smaller class sizes for most courses. But evne in small schools, major freshman/sophomore courses were often fairly large 20-40 folk.
And if you don't think the over-priced, under-value, present college system is in significant risk of a shake up that will likely put half the schools in existence today out of business. Than you're not very good at seeing the future.
But hey, lots of people didn't pull out of the dot com bust, the housing bust, or 2008 market crash, nor did they buy Netflix at $10-$15. I did all those things. So I when my brain sees a likely future outcome, I usually give it the benefit of the doubt.
So? He didn't indict all online learning (although he certainly cast aspersions that way). Consider this a review of one course, or one course taught in this fashion. One can review a movie and say "this movie is bad" without making the judgement that all movies are bad.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The 10th problem, "Lack of Updates," is the one inexcusable issue in the review. Whatever other problems might exist, they could all be corrected over time if the authors of the course pay close attention to students' and reviewers' experience with the course.
Given the ability to record interactions, quiz results, and test results, the key strength of online instruction should be, in fact, that the course can undergo a process of continuous improvement -- constantly learning from students how to teach better and capturing those lessons in constantly updated course material.
An online course without a vigorous review and improvement process is simply a wasted opportunity to do better and a waste of some portion of the time of all students who follow those who have already gone before.
We need, I think, to transition from thinking about a course as something that teaches students and, instead, see it as an opportunity to learn how to teach better. For instance, when we collect "grades," we should view them as measures of the course's success rather than simply the success of the students. An ideal course would result in all qualified students successfully mastering at least the minimum level of understanding. Thus, the real reason for testing should be to determine the weaknesses of the course and the need for improvement in the course -- as indicated by students who were not successfully taught.
So in this evaluation, the Sample Size is One Class. Sorry Prof, you mentioned *three* other sources of online classes
I think this is the crux of why this article needs to be taken with a grain (or larger dose) of salt. After reading TFA, it is obvious that a math professor listed a bunch of actual competitive threats, but surveyed a brand new and relatively unknown new class and based his assertions on that.
From TFA: "Based on my review of the Udacity Introduction to Statistics course, I see some compelling strategic advantages for live in-class teachers, that will not be soon washed away by massive online video learning." He goes on to say things like "you get what you pay for and this is a free class" and so forth, but never really gives a compelling reason why his experience at Udacity is representative of every massive online learning coarse. In TFA he calls out online schools that are "sponsored by top-name schools such Stanford, Harvard, or MIT," but he doesn't review ANY OF THOSE, nor give any sense of how many people attend the school he reviewed vs. the ones he called out earlier, or how they might be similar or different.
Sneaky.
I remember quite a few years ago there was a college calculus class (what the local university faculty of engineering called honours calculus 2). Someone asked either the prof. or one of the TA's, "Can't I just buy the book and read it instead of paying for the whole course?". The reply was: "When teaching this stuff, first, with calculus you need to work at it for about 30 minutes, then stop for about 10 and let your brain rest, then go again for another 30 minutes. Second, every once in a while, you will get stuck. Now if you get really stuck, you will spend much more than 30 minutes on a problem. It might take hours and hours and you will go through many sheets of paper trying to figure out what to do, and it will most likely all be wrong, and you will get depressed and want to quit the course. Instead of all of that, you need to talk to someone who will "Patiently" walk you through it, watch as you try a problem, point out things that must happen, give steps of what to do next, and ultimately get you "un-stuck". That's why you pay people. I don't know if online courses offer that, I don't believe they do (although there are usually a set of FAQ's that might be helpful).
A flight control system system will go through a QA process, his mistake will be easy for the QA person to spot and have the programmer fix. Most professors still grade based on a punch card world. (My data structure Professor made this observation)
more motivated students get higher grades. News at 11.
A sample size of 1 is not sufficient for a high confidence in the resulting statements? Not sure if this is taught in Statistics 101, but I'd expect a professor teaching statistics to know that.
PortHaven seems to have a chip on his/her shoulder about tenure. that's too bad. there are lots of tenured profs who provide excellent pedagogy and empathetic support for students. I find that a hard-assed attitude correlates most strongly with the size of the class, since no prof teaching 500 students in a class can spare a lot of time for handholding. it's also impossible to deny that student entitlement correlates strongly with student dissatisfaction.
"You get what you pay for" is just an asinine statement. If he really believes it, then I hereby offer up Statistics classes at (pinky to mouth) One MILLLLIIOOON Dollars! Obviously he acknowledges that my classes would be better than his because "You get what you pay for."
Clearly, TaoPhoenix needs to move "Hucksterism" to the list of complaints that apply to traditional classrooms as well.
Thrun's AI class. Both are garbage. I'm speaking as a Mechanical Engineer and Computer Science degree'd with just a few credits short of a Mathematics B.S. and EE B.S. He's an awful professor. His book on AI is riddled with poor explanations, dull language and tons of grammatical errors. Nothing beats being there or if not directly with a butt in the lecture hall and at his office hours, at least via the Internet in real-time to watch his lectures. This is not the future of teaching.
Seems that someone didn't bother to read the actual article...
Where in the article did you find the generalization of his experience on all online courses? The only generalization is in Slashdot summary. He is not responsible for that.
From the icking article: "I personally got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for the college lectures encountered by most students during their academic careers."
If anything, he took it as a possible example of "college lectures " students see "during academic careers". The rest of the post is strictly about the one single course.
The 'bipolar difficulty' I don't really see as a problem. A lot of the questions are just there as checkups to see if you have been paying attention (and keep you paying attention). Others require you to think a bit. I did the self-driving car course, and I also noticed this, however I found it useful. I don't want to get bogged down in a hard question every 5 minutes of lectures, but I also like quick checkups every 5 minutes. The quick checkups don't have enough depth to fully test some components, so there will be harder questions. If it's a big, complicated concept, the question will be big and complicated. Big deal. Get over it.
So, down to 4 problems.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Guy who has his job at risk to new paradigm dislikes the paradigm and finds it to be inadequate.
Who would have thought?
...used *one data point* to make an assessment.
By implication, he did, and that's the problem.
'The prospect of massive-scale online schooling seems to be all the rage at the moment. Recent competing initiatives include Khan Academy, OpenCourseWare, Udacity, Coursera, and edX (the latter ones sponsored by top-name schools such Stanford, Harvard, or MIT, or else founded by ex-faculty members). The idea of universal and free access to college programs from top researchers has fired the imagination of many in the blogosphere, and some have predicted the imminent collapse of traditional universities in the face of this âoetsunamiâ. '
He's not even talking about "Statistics Courses". He's setting his problem domain (is that the word?) to *all* online courses.
Then watch what happens in this line:
"As a college educator myself, I felt compelled to survey one of these courses, so as to assess their general quality, advantages, and disadvantages."
"As a (appeal to authority), I felt compelled to survey one (singular) of these courses, so as to assess their (plural) ...."
I looked over some of those myself a few months ago. Between them, there are *Hundreds* of courses. So the *Statistics Professor* picks a representative sample size of ... wait for it ... ONE!
If this were written up in Academic Paper language we would all be laughing hysterically.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hi there, you basically nailed a coda to what I was getting at. And yes, it is sneaky, because if a lil' ol Humanities bird like me found this many fallacies, one you brilliant types could find 300% more of them.
I do indeed feel that the coming of online education is going to send formal education reeling. The first thing we need to do is to fight screeds like this one.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
> I would guess that as much as half the time a question is actually asked before students have been given the tools to answer it, being used as a means of introducing a new section.
One of the article author's big complaints. Also one of the methods statistically proved to increase the students' chance of remembering.
That's the problem with some people who carelessly complain that things are done wrong. Sometimes they are really done wrong, but sometimes the only problem is they are done differently.
As a college educator myself, I felt compelled to survey one of these courses, so as to assess their general quality, advantages, and disadvantages... This summer, Sebastian Thrun's Udacity unveiled a new course, Introduction to Statistics, taught by Thrun himself, which I felt would be ideal for my purposes – my current job largely specializing in teaching statistics at one of the community colleges in the City University of New York
And that's what he concludes:
the course is amazingly, shockingly awful. It is poorly structured; it evidences an almost complete lack of planning for the lectures; it routinely fails to properly define or use standard terms or notation; it necessitates occasional massive gaps where “magic” happens; and it results in nonstandard computations that would not be accepted in normal statistical work. In surveying the course, some nights I personally got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for the college lectures encountered by most students during their academic careers.
Somehow online education had become a religion for some and any critique of such is taken as a spit in the face... get real, the system "school-college-university-employment" is not going to change any time soon, and no university is going to implode because of youtube. If I want to hire a CS specialist, I wouldn't give a damn about that you learned your stuff by watching videos from Khan Academy or Udacity in your free time -- if you wanted to learn something on your own there had been tons of reading materials around for decades. in fact if you went for a chewed down stuff on youtube instead of a good textbook I'd strike you down right away... If I can't look at your real skills in practice, I'll take a certification from a known authority -- and that's where the "universities" come in... that's how the world works... but it's all just about this new shiny toy for you now, but face it - the world will continue grinding its gears the way it is for a long time ahead