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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."
These aren't just online courses the article is talking about here, it's massive online courses, a completely different animal IMO.
I agree with the cautions on trusting an instructor, yet at the same time a student is not a good judge either. If I am learning something for the first time, how am I to know that what I've been taught is good until I have a chance to put it to use?
He backs up his arguments with actual examples and provides a foundation for rational discourse about the class he took. I don't think one could ask for much more.
That said, all this proves in general, is that if all his arguments are valid then it is possible to have a terrible course on-line just like in the traditional classroom. And his worries at the end about the value of having finished the class really misses the point of free on-line education.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
Not even remotely true. My wife is a professor at a community college, and if anything her on-line courses take as much or more of her time than the same course taught traditionally. Additionally, each time she re-teaches on-line course she spends considerable time revising and improving the content to reflect her learning curve.
The OA's plaint is doubtless valid, but does not really contradict the potential of the approach. The real goal is not some free part time implementation of a bad stats course, it is the hope for wider distribution of the really great ones.
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.
Exactly! One could imagine that a professor teaching statistic would know better than to base conclusions on a limited data set (N=1).
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.
Seriously who mods this shit insightful every bloody time.
There is no big conspiracy of teachers wanting to make everything hard to maintain in iron grip on on some hypothesised education-industrial complex as one uninsightful poster named it above.
I'll let you on in a little secret about university lecturers. They generally fall on a spectum between two extremes.
1. Ones who really like research. Teaching gets in the way and anything which means they have to do less teaching (like someone else preparing online courses) is a serious bonus.
2. Teachers who like teaching (amzing that, really). Basically, they have a passion for the subject and letting others know about it. Anything which helps studenst get it is considered a bonus. Therefore good online courses are a real bonus because they bring more studenst to the world of their favourite subject.
But you know what, neither camp is in favour of por quality online courses. In the case of 1, that means fewer well educated students to act as future research monkeys. In the case of 2, the teacher will get sad at what passes for education and may well have to deal with the consequenes of confused students, or worse, students who have been put off and never cease to even be students.
Whenever education comes up, there seem to ca a carde of deeply cynical posters with a chip on their shoulder the size of Mt Rushmore who delight in wild education based conspircy theories and telling the world how they are so amazing that professors are unnecessary and they taught everything to themselves anyway and/or didn't even go to nuiversity but are amazingly super-awesome anyway and don't professors suck because they're in it for the money and want to keep the man down because professoring is such an amazingly lucrative career and they ave to hold onto it tight otherwise the money will become spread around or something.
It's crap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.