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MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated
jyosim (904245) writes People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match. The report imagines a world in which students can take online courses they assemble themselves from parts they find online: "Much like a playlist on iTunes, a student could pick and choose the elements of a calculus or a biology course offered across the edX platform to meet his or her needs."
The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your ignorance. It's not to teach you everything about the subject, it's to tell you everything that you may want to learn within a subject so that you can then pick the bits to study in more detail yourself. If you let students pick the modules that they want, then you may as well just say 'here's a library, go and learn some stuff' and you'll get more or less the same results.
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rewriting history since 2109
Context is everything. For MOOCs. This makes perfect sense. For degree work? Not so much.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I remember going into Manchester University / MMU/ Salford. (MA courses) The course I was looking at had 2 out of 8 core modules the other 6(+2 if you wanted) were electives and depending on the combination that you chose your masters qualification would be named differently, it could change from MSc to MA or MEd.
It is a good thing that calculus, much like a playlist on itunes, can be learned on 'shuffle' because none of it involves using results you arrived at earlier...
It sounds superficially appealing, letting people choose what interests them or what they think they need to learn. But there's a couple of problems.
Firstly, if we stick with the music analogy, how many artists or tracks have you discovered by random, and in doing so expanded your listening choices?
Also, if you follow a well-structured course, you're getting what a subject-matter expert knows from experience you need to learn. Case in point, I would not have studied stats by choice, but now I'm damn glad it was hammered into me.
The poor courses I've seen were not so much hampered by the format, more either by sub-par lecturers and/or poor, outdated materials.
Go browse the internet for stuff to learn!
That will be $100,000.
"No".
Courses serve a purpose that customized "modules" do not, will not, and can not - They force you to learn the less "fun" parts required to properly understand the material you want to learn. If you allow students to only eat ham cubes, they'll never touch the broccoli. If you don't take five ranks in metallurgy, you can't open the "intelligent liquid metal" skill tree.
Realistically, this would mean they'll just require a long chain of prerequisite "modules" for anything students actually want to take. Almost like structuring "modules" in to a "course" - Imagine that! Except, without the advantage of having a single professor aware of your progress through each step. You think the current semester-long course structure has a lot of duplication? Wait until each module needs to basically spend the first half making sure you actually know the half a dozen prerequisites, and still remember it enough to apply to the present topic. "Oh, yeah, I took module X two years ago to get into module Z. Something about derivatives, IIRC... Don't worry, I have it!"
and waaay overpriced. an MIT 'cafeteria' degree? at 0.5% cost of a regular one? ok.
This.
I guess it applies in education too: "The first generation builds the business, the second makes it a success, and the third wrecks it”
What percent of engineers are self taught and moble? Is this a plan for every programmer?
What is the point of I taught my self. You you believe everyone should and everyone can?
How exactly would someone new to calculus or any subject *know* which modules they needed or wanted to learn? Having modules itself is not a bad idea though. The teaching institution could perhaps assemble lists of modules for specific purposes, say Programming for Game Development. But just to dump a load of modules on a student and say 'pick the ones you like' makes no sense.
'Cause depth is the enemy of progress.
Or at least marketing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
We'd all like to get a la carte cable service instead of buying sports and shopping channels we don't want.
But picking and choosing your favorite "songs" from the University album? Nope.
It's like watching a movie based on a novel instead of reading the novel for your English class (or book club -- I'm looking at YOU Costanza).
Listen, for the rest of MIT's history, the experience for the core students on campus will remain the same: Dorms, semesters, course sequences, grades/evaluations, professors in classrooms, papers, projects, parties, etc.. Why am I so sure? Because MIT is an elite school, and elites will want their kids to get the classical education which made them elite. It's just as much about soaking in the culture, encountering other people, putting together a study crew, a party crew, having a shared experience that includes a bit of hazing, etc.
Sure, MIT will also have a mass education system for the plebs, and they'll brand it with their elite name. But that stuff is not for the "real" MIT kids, except as a supplement. I'm confident that if they design the modular multimedia tutoring system well, many plebs will learn a lot from it. But the only effect of this will be to learn the material. They won't be transformed into MIT elites, even if the letters "MIT" appear somewhere on their diploma. For better or worse, rich parents will always want to send their kids to universities with dorms, semesters, course sequences, grades/evaluations, professors in classrooms, papers, projects, parties, etc. - in hopes that they will osmotically absorb something like culture. The more it reminds them of Hogwarts, the more money they'll be willing to pay. MIT would be stupid to get out of that business, and they're not stupid.
Not to discredit, but to clarify TFA:
We're talking two subway stops. Or they can rent a bike, which are all over the place and very well maintained: http://www.thehubway.com/stati...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Even if you were to adopt this more modular structure (which just seems to me like you'd be picking 12 'things' a semester instead of 4-5), the business model breaks down if you use it universally. After all, the student might not have to waste two years taking all these classes they don't want to (that are irrelevant to their major). Mechanical Engineering major? Go take Accounting 101 with all the morons from the football team. Business major? You certainly need two semesters of chemistry. Unemployab^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Art history major? Go take Rocks for Jocks.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The unintended favorable consequence of going to a university/college and/or the military is structure. Some folks simply lack the mental fortitude to follow a simple set of instructions daily. We've seen very bright individuals in the computing industry without degrees though I recently left a company where many of these people were savages in terms of their behavior. Now granted, bad habits can be adopted at any point, but one has to wonder whether or not an environment such as college or the military plays a favorable role in leadership and concepts as simple as following thru with your assignment.
I recently decided to go back to graduate school, but witnessed the horror that I would need to retake every single course I already took for my masters in CS. Instead of complaining, I'm doing a ridiculous experiment and trying a whole new subject. I downloaded the catalog from my alma mater, in chemistry, and am proceeding to learn the whole chemistry degree on my own. >50% of the traditional degree is general ed. Among major requirements, ~30% is math and physics that I have already taken. The remaining course requirements amount to just a few semesters worth of full time study, which I expect to take less than a year taking advantage of offerings online. I expect to take the subject GRE next year and pass with flying colors. Everything I hated about college revolved around deadlines and paperwork, but I am experiencing nothing but enjoyment even though the pace of this experiment blows away the traditional path. I know I'm not a typical high school noob, but isn't that the point of all this? Next year I'll be standing in the ring with opponents that spent four years getting drunk, seeking mates, and worrying about mom and dad paying for it all. Degrees are designed to take four years in a best case scenario, regardless of how fast students can be taught. This might be that "internet moment" where instead of killing brick and mortar music and video stores, the whole system of higher education shows its cracks.
Choose the letters you like, it's only $99 each!
(Oh you need the alphabet to understand books? Well, sorry mate...)
Hi, I'm matt and I've got a PhD in a-little-of-everything
My view of university education (having an MSc, a separate BSc, and a PhD) has always been that up until MSc (or until BSc, that very much depends on the country and on the followed traditions of education) the point is to get a fairly diverse _introduction_ into as many related [to your main subject] topics as possible, from people who are somewhat knowledgeable in the area, with more deeper knowledge in a lower number of specific areas. Not to make you a jack-of-all-trades in CS for example, but to prepare you to know where to do and where to look and where to start if you'll require deeper knowledge in some other area of your field than the one in which you got deeper intro earlier. That, and survival, i.e., get you acquainted with an environment where you don't only have to learn and be good in one specific topic, but be able to quickly pick up superficial and sometimes deeper knowledge in a related field as well, and be able to produce some results in a short time period. Plus, add the networking possibilities, the opportunity to meet people and gather connections for your later professional life (if you get lucky). You don't get these if you get your degree by doing online courses and from libraries.
Given the above, I don't think longish courses are doomed, they have their places, but one has to have the ability to judge which ones do, retain them, and complement them with some others which have shorter periods and get you more diversified knowledge, which don't necessarily require face-to-face presence or on-site experience. They have to find the proper balance.
I wouldn't support to give total control in the hand of the students when preparing their courses and modules, since that might result in a too diverse graduate pool - some which have very narrow and deeper knowledge, and some who only have very shallow knowledge in several areas but none actually usable for anything. They simply don't have the necessary experience to be their own guides.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Buying a song instead of an album, or reading an article instead of a newspaper is not akin to picking up one module of a course instead of the course.... that would be more appropriate of an analogy for picking a course instead of a degree, which is already available. After finishing my masters degree, I went back to my undergrad alma mater and decided to take a few classes, here and there, that I wanted to take.
If they want to maintain academic rigor, they just need to make sure they offer items to individual levels, which is what many universities have done, so now you have:
- undergraduate certificates
- associate degrees
- bachelors degrees
- graduate certificates
- masters degrees
- post-graduate certificates
- doctoral degrees
- various post-doctoral options
Probably more.
You pick courses that you want to take, take X amount of hours and are awarded a degree. In theory, students specialize in areas the school doesn't offer degrees in, to thereby personalize their education that much further.
In reality it is a junk degree awarded to D students and sports players who don't want to take anything above a 300 level course.
nothing is necessary. I for one like to see ignorance and arrogance that so nicely combines in US folk to be extended and deepened by these new systems. Not they need that but it is fun to watch.
are flying low today, it is going to rain I think
Well rounded is nice to have
But stuff like needing to take PE classes where 1 CLASS costs way more then buying a 2 YEAR gym membership is not needed.
Also why should have to take art history to work in IT?? art is nice to have but not at that cost.
For tech / IT we need more tech / trade schools.
Also the college time tables suck as well.
I think there are competing interests in higher education, and we might be ignoring the contradictions it creates. We model the university as a machine that puts courses into students, usually including a per-course score. It is arbitrary how those courses are divided, otherwise schools on a trimester system or something more unique would create a world of confusion. More confusion comes with the scores, where some schools aren't on a 4.0 scale. From this angle, schools want to produce as many high scores as possible, and the want those scores to be meaningful. The contradiction comes from the university as a whole, getting paid per course and only assigning real value after enough has been paid. Just try obtaining a broadly respected degree using credits mostly obtained from another source! We have granted a monopoly on verifying knowledge to the same institutions that also sell that knowledge. Is it any mystery why phrases like "well-rounded" and "comprehensive" are used so frequently? SO, if roles were reversed, and we could evaluate someone's knowledge without relying on the institution that sold them the knowledge, would universities even make sense? Imagine that MIT went into the business of verifying knowledge obtained elsewhere, and of course they would still try to say the knowledge they sell themselves is better. If MIT wants to give away the knowledge for free in any sized chunks, I don't care. The real issue is that there is nobody verifying knowledge independently, except fly-by-night degree mills that also charge money.
The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago. Specialization and people who are that passionate and WELL educated (have become "gurus") about specific areas are what is valuable today.
Specialization with no understanding of topics outside of the area of specialty is Not-A-Good-Thing (tm). Specialization is important and obviously useful but there are plenty of cases where a generalist is more useful. You need people who can see how parts of a business fit together and can fill in roles that may don't justify hiring a dedicated specialist. The bigger or more specialized the company, the greater the need for specialists but he need for generalists never goes away, particularly if you want good managers. Technical specialists as a crude rule of thumb tend to run into their Peter Principle limit a lot sooner.
I'm not an IT guy per-se but I often am asked to fill that role. I'm have the skill set of a generalist. You can find better IT guys than me but you aren't likely to find IT guys that are also certified accountants or non-IT engineers of which I am both. In my company our IT needs are relatively modest so hiring a dedicated IT guy doesn't make sense right now. As we grow that will (hopefully) change. On a weekly basis I handle work in IT, HR, engineering, accounting and purchasing. Someone who only is an IT guy would undoubtedly do a great job with the IT stuff but might struggle with stuff outside his/her specialty. The important thing for a generalist to understand is where his limits are and to not exceed them. I know a lot about IT but the most important thing for me to know is to know what I don't know.
on their hands. Trying to find some way to justify their astronomical pay and benefits.
The British Open University had this approach back from the 1960s, and it was picked up by many other universities. Maybe not to the level suggested here, but you could mix and match modules until you gained enough credits to graduate with a degree
cable thing is different the sports channels have high costs meny times more then the other channels we at least want ESPN / FS1 / NBCSN / ect's and other RSN's to get in there own pack and not in the basic pack. Most channels cost $0.20 or less per sub.
University classes cost the same and unlike cable they force to take stuff you really don't want vs having it but not tuning in to it. If schools still made you do the same time / hours but let say dump the filler / fluff classes and take more classes in your field it will be better then today's system.
90% of what they teach you in any University or College is useless drivel. I mean did I really NEED to take sociology? An a la carte option would have appealed to me way back then.
We should simply change higher education to what it really means today. Each institution should offer a fixed amount of "degrees" and offer then for auction to the highest bidder. No education or classes are required. The winning bidders could be simply be born rich, or put themselves in lifelong crippling debt to finance their purchase at auction. Finally employers can recognize higher education for what it finally has become in modern America "See, this guy was willing to plonk down 100,000 dollars to get a piece of paper to purchase the opportunity to get a job interview. This makes screening applicants much easier."
Perhaps the degree will have a dollar amount printed on it, so employers can simply pick out the applicants who spent the most money. This will give an outcome that matches real life, without the pretense of their being such thing as equal opportunity. If a billionaire's son has a degree with $500,000 dollars printed on it, he will beat out all the other applicants who only spent 120,000 dollars who also are applying for the same position at rich daddy's company. Rich daddy's son will say that he "earned" his position and that it wan't nepotism. Instead of job postings claiming X degree or higher, than can simply state, 300,000 dollar value degree or more.
And they will always make the right decision.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I shudder to think that i am now an "older" engineer. I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon in the mid 70's which means that my curriculum was was developed mostly in the 50's if not earlier. Yes, I did take The Calculus (four classes including a second class in partial differential equations). I was even part of an "experiment" where freshman year Physics and Calculus was taught as a "single" class. The math and physics profs shuffled the class time by first showing the physical phenomena and then the math behind it. This class was 5 hours/week of lecture and 4 hours/week of recitation.
This rigid formatting has worked for me. I have spent a lot of time with R&D and was never showed by the math. I have a lot of simulation experience with FEA as well as chip and circuit design, embedded system compilers, and some real-time testing of mechanical stuff ranging from tires (small) to 17 ton compressor rotors.
More importantly, I learned how to deal with change. I was the first student on campus with an electronic calculator. The acceptance of the technology was instantaneous, the profs just added more problems to the tests. The simple act of "doing more stuff" has followed me during my entire career.
The greatest irony has been my lack of "formal" computer training. I had a single programming class in high school. Yet, my entire career has been computer-based. My computer usage has not been limited to "engineering." I have done a lot writing (trade press) and learned layout work along the way. Doing documentation for a CAD vendor, you learn how to write in a different style and QA just becomes part of the process -- you do want make sure what you write about actually works. Working for FEA vendors, I again learned how to make the stuff work and created simple examples to show the process. (The heavy duty math helps you understand how FEA works). And my coding skills were used in crafting documents with an early flavor of XML.
Learning though a rigid structure has allowed me cope with whatever comes my way.
the NBA and NFL need Minor Leagues.
So we can get rid of a lot of the players on the FOOTBALL team that at some schools get a free pass in classes.
But it's not there fault 100% when the team needs 40-60 hours a week you don't have time for class.
Students don't know what they don't know.
If you have to think about it or study the issue then yes they probably are outdated
I did that 15 years ago.
The core courses- math, physics, and chemistry- cover prettymuch the same material as the 1970s. The style of teaching has changed. Firs they tried "activity-based" teaching like labs or clickers. Now courses are "flipped" watching the lecture videos at home and doing homework problems in class.
From 1970 to 2010, required for all CS degrees, and after 1980 all EE degrees. The explanation was to teach algorithms, not latest fad-itern language. Nearly all the powerful faculty pushing LISP have retired. The new introductory language is a variant of Python.
Nearly all the languages used in my MIT courses decades ago are pretty much gone, save LISP. These include APL, PL/I, AS-360. You learn how to learn instead.
We call them COURSES.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Look, obviously material has to be divided into certain size chunks for it to work in a formal setting. Previously the most efficient chunk size was the term or semester. That's not because it was optimal for the student though, it was optimal for the university due to the overhead of organizing the whole thing. Now that we have more technology the overhead has become lower and it's possible to use a smaller chunk size that's more optimal for students. I'm not seeing a lot of downside there.
Allow me to give a personal example. I took an intermediate accounting class as part of my business degree, it was required since I was taking the finance option. This class was the "weed out" class for people who want to be accountants but there were a few bits that the finance majors needed. One of the things we learned was the purpose of the statement of cash flows and how to construct it in depth. That was critical information for me to have and I definitely needed it, however we also covered a ton of things I had no need or desire to learn. If they could have chopped that course into three modules and allowed me to just take the part on the statement of cash flows it would have saved considerable time and effort.
So what about the requirements to manage this modular system. It's not as easy as just splitting up courses into modules and letting students pick and choose. There have to be requirements for a degree, progressions built into learning in terms of difficulty and complexity. History, for example, is better leaned in some sort of chronological order. Immagine studying the beginning of the second world war with no understanding of the treary of versailles because you "didn't want to take that module". So now we're talking about having to add pre-requisites and curriculum requirements to these modules in order to manage learning in a way that makes sense. Wait...that's what we have now!! I think this idea does have some merit. However, to say that it can be implemented for all learning, at all levels, in person or online may be somewhat crazy.
I just want to learn about the Structure of Computer Programs. I don't care about their Interpretation.
This sounds like a perfect idea for a trade school. Maybe a little more ITT Tech than MIT, but hey, they're both Institutes of Technology after all!
The duration of a semester *does* put some strange, artificial restrictions on classes. In the introductory physics classes I teach, we have two big units during the course of the year—mechanics, and electricity & magnetism—but there are also smaller topics which get shoehorned in wherever there's room in the schedule: waves, optics, thermodynamics. Then there's topics I never have time for, like relativity. If we had more flexibility in course length, we could set up those extra topics as additional month-long classes instead of cramming them in at the end of the semester.
The notion insinuates Professors themselves are obsolete.
I think it may not be as bad as you guys think, depending how this is implemented.
Definitely, especially at the bachelors level, it needs to be a "guided tour" to help students learn about subjects they didn't even know they existed. They need exposure to certain important topics to serve as a base, allowing the student to go forward.
I think where this module idea can help is that, under the current system, you get a very direct track through basic major courses, then a bunch of liberal arts requirements to satisfy (arts, philosophy, etc.). There is not, in my experience, a whole lot of in-major electives. Everyone takes the same track. Degree programs are largely the same across the country.
I firmly believe our future Einsteins will come from the ranks of those trained in interdisciplinary thought -- the people that DON'T just take the same track, but go a little off script too. If a student understands the basic concepts of a field, but doesn't like it, why waste the student's time with more of that just to fit in 3 semester hours of a class to meet a checklist, when the student can switch half way through a semester to another field and see if that is a better fit? As long as the student understands the basics, I see no problem of letting the student explore a little more rather than trapping them in the class for another 6 weeks.
I think this would be the idea of a badges system -- rather than a degree and classes, you get badges when you show levels of mastery in topics (a novice badge, an intermediate badge, master badge, etc.). A bachelors could be awarded when X number of badges are obtained.
The music analogy is more correct than they realise. A huge proportion of music is poorly served by cherry-picking the most appealing tracks; any kind of suite or conceptual work is much better understood when you experience the whole structure. If you can pick a couple of tracks from an album and get a comparable or better experience than someone who listened to the whole thing, it probably wasn't a very good album to start with. Similarly, a course with light depth and populist subjects might be well-suited to cherry-picking, but this would be a symptom of a shallow course.
The solution of course is to create analogous "Double A-Side" and "EP" courses, which are short, stand alone, and add some breadth to the student experience at a reasonable level of quality. The standard should still be the LP.
Somebody people at MIT are seeing the world as needing fixing with their hammer so they are turning everything into nails.
MBA thinking is ruining society. Just because MBAs are interchangeable does not mean that their worldview is applicable to EVERYTHING. Students are NOT customers! When are they ever going to get out of their destructive tiny little perspective?
A student doesn't know what they need to know; if they had the skill to know they won't really need to be there in the first place. (Ignoring the huge issue of thinking college degrees should be certifications for job training since corporations have stopped doing that for so long people don't realize the on the job training used to exist! Now you do it on your own and both the MBAs and the employees are looking for some 3rd party to fill the void.) I'm in a university and there is increased pressure to ruin university and turn it into job training -- even pressure from outside and top/down to offer courses specifically catered to a big employer in town! (who got rid of their in house training program decades ago.)
this sounds like the right approach for a technical/vocational oriented school where the goal isn't a liberal arts type degree but rather a high functioning engineer/technician...possibly in a very specific domain/field.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I am amazed by how these people doing online courses don't realize that people have been picking up a book on topics they want to know about, without taking formal courses, for a long long long time before online courses even existed. It's like online courses somehow created the dawn of self-directed education from scratch or something. There are tons of cheap books on any topic you want to know about.
That is so nice! Students will enjoy learning quantum mechanic or general relativity without having to deal with petty calculus course first. Oh wait...
Every comment that I read (3+), seems to belong to 1 of only 2 schools of thought. First is the standard model for colleges/universities, and the second is Total Chaos.
I know I'm not giving a complete model here, but perhaps we can get some ideas. How about a middle ground. These modules would probably be a limited selection relevant to each other for a particular class. It wouldn't be just a master list of modules, and then, Go For It!
Food for thought.
I agree that at the bachelors level the student needs some more structure, and it is up to the professors to keep up with the contemporary subject matter. However, at the graduate level most STEM schools already do this with dozens on one hour courses that can be mixed and matched. I took ten of these one hour courses, some of them self study, some of them classroom work. Having already been exposed to the subjects at the undergraduate level, I had a good idea what I wanted to learn.
I was going to design a system very similar to this concept with Disney, when Eisner fired Jake Winebaum, and that was that. That was 20 years ago.