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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
...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 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.
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.