Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
Try to get natural feedback or face-to-face communication with an instructor in a class of 400 students which is pretty common now. For intro classes in any sciences this is no different than what students already have.
Smaller classes can definitely be better (they can also be spectacularly worse) but for the large lecture classes you have for intro physics, chemistry, biology, math through calc 1, calc 2, calc 3 and diff eq the online classes are really no worse.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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.
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
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.
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.
A bachelor's degree should be structured to enable the student to make more money upon graduation than someone without that degree (or at least enough additional money to cover their insanely high student loan payments). Do you really think that hiring manager considering you for a programming job cares if you took and passed a Sociology class which is so brain-dead easy as to have no value whatsoever?
You are right, we should all be cogs in a machine not people who try to understand the world around them. There is no profit in that. Best stick to our vain attempt to accumulate wealth rather than pursue things that can actually make us happy.