MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated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 A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match.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."

Comments

Idiots

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Idiots

[Richard_at_work]

The point of a structured educational degree is to give you a damn well rounded knowledge set of the topic, giving you a reasoned idea why the individual components of the topical area are important as a whole.

Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...

Sometimes a students individual educational "needs" (rather, the term in the summary is wrong, it should be "wants" - the student "wants" to study the fun stuff, and "wants" to avoid the drudgery) is not the same as the "needs" of society as a whole as society would benefit more from graduates with a well rounded knowledge base rather than an enhanced specialism straight out of university.

Re:Idiots

[Charliemopps]

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.

But then you actually arrive at college, and as part of your degree in comsci, you're required to take an accounting class. During that 12 week class you spend about a week learning a couple of formulas that you realize will be very helpful when coding accounting software, but just as you're getting into it they switch topics and start teaching you about business management and then spend 4 weeks on "How to use Excel"...

Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession? ...and that's the point...

Re:Idiots

[PvtVoid]

Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession?

You do understand the idea of a liberal arts education, right? There's a very good argument to look at coding as a trade, but that's not what universities are for. If you want to be educated like a plumber, go to a trade school.

Re:Idiots

[gweihir]

There are some people that can do this successfully, but it is rare. Even for those that can, things do often not work out so well with larger gaps in areas that they never got around to looking at or missing basic stuff. Still, for some this is the best way to do things.

Personally, I went to courses, checked whether the lectures added value and if not, I learned the material by myself and only attended the exam. For about 80% of the courses, being there physically was worthwhile.

Re: Idiots

[lwriemen]

Well rounded is not about jack of all trades in your field. It's about exposure to the soft skills needed like communicating to others, economic skills, and triggers for innovation (outside of the box thinking).

Re:Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

That is entirely not the point of a university degree, especially at lower levels.

Bachelors -- are you able to learn and apply basic concepts
Masters -- are you able to learn and apply advanced concepts
PhD -- are you able to discover novel, interesting concepts

And (of course) modules would have prerequisites (just like courses do now) to ensure that an adequate understanding of necessary basic concepts has been obtained.

Finally, some of the most influential people in history were thrown in a library and self-educated. Leibniz, for one. I'm more concerned with their motives; education has been commercialized in the US and this could be a way to allow indecisive students to register for fewer courses, taking longer to complete a degree and adding wealth to the university's coffers.

The idea seems foolish to me, personally, because students already have this ability. It's called attendance.

Re:Idiots

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In the specific example given there's arguably a complaint to be made because someone wanted a CS focus and got an exciting month on 'clicking buttons in Office 2007', which is at least as narrowly vocational, likely more, and not the right vocation.

Schools can, and do, have courses and course requirements that just aren't very good at delivering what they are supposed to. I suspect that dithering about whether they want to be trade schools or not can help cause this; but complaining about it isn't really exclusive to wanting a vocational education or wanting a liberal arts one.

Re:Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear lord, I hate working with people who are "specialized". They don't seem to grasp how their decisions will affect others above or below them. They're a great bank of knowledge for what they focus on, but they have a hard time applying their knowledge in a useful way because they don't understand how their knowledge fits in the grand scheme of things.

This is especially important when talking about computer systems. You get someone who knows about databases and can tell you the optimal page size for a certain database work load, but has no concept of how that will interact with their IO specialized system that is different than normal. Because their IO system is "specialized", they don't grasp how their optimal page size will now be different.

There are many other examples. When you have a bunch of specialized parts coming together, you need a jack of all trades to understand how to coordinate those parts and how to identify and convey important information that each group can understand.

Re:Idiots

[Connie_Lingus]

For about 80% of the courses, being there physically was worthwhile.

sounds suspiciously like life in general.

"80% of life is just showing up" - woody allen

Re:Idiots

[Richard_at_work]

As the other poster says, well rounded is not jack of all trades, its just well rounded in what you do - so a web developer knows about HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, the Dom, interacting with the server side, and the various aspects of the server side part of the equation, so how to handle requests, state, database accesses, design patterns, data structures etc etc.

What I fear MIT will do is producing someone who graduates from their Web Developer course being absolutely excellent in HTMl, JS etc but knows sod all about caching, state management, design patterns, UX etc.

Re:Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

80% of people can't self teach. You're the exception. You're like the child of a billionaire trying to understand why people need to have a food budget. Food is so "cheap".

Re:Idiots

[gtall]

Yep, you as a mild-mannered undergraduate are able to leap tall theories, run faster than a locomotive, and who, disguised as beguiling innocent, are able to use your Super-XRay vision to totally predict your future life. Let no man in the organizations you work for attempt to get you to contribute to areas not in your chosen field of tunnel vision. There hasn't been a subject yet devised that could aid your future self in ways you cannot predict.

Re:Idiots

[RevWaldo]

Exactly. College shouldn't just teach you what you know you don't know. It's also supposed to teach you what you don't know you don't know.

.

Re:Idiots

[jythie]

University is what you make of it. If you go in with the attitude that you are just paying for a name and otherwise are in a social club then that is all you get out of it. If you go in with the plan of utilizing the resources, the professors with years or decades of experience, the research labs, etc, those things can really pay off if you will work with them. If the education itself is just that personal experience, save the money and open up a seat for someone else who will actually make use of the education.

Re:Idiots

[plopez]

"The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago"

The push for 'DevOps' seems to contradict you.

Re:Idiots

[plopez]

Hmmm... let's see. The English classes I took help me write on a daily basis. Accounting came in handy when I worked for a non-profit that had to do fund raising; I use Psychology, Sociology, and Political Science daily; the art classes I look help me judge the usability of web sites, I took Differential Equations which came in handy when I worked for an Environmental Engineering firm, foreign languages gave me a better grasp of grammar and and foreign cultures, my Physics classes give be a better grasp on electrical and electronics concepts (which is handy if you want to work with hardware), Statistics comes in handy when I have to prepare quantitative reports, and Chemistry was also good to have when I worked for an Environmental Engineering firm.

None of those were 'core' classes but the fulfilled part of my graduation requirements. You had to have a certain amount of hours in Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Arts, and Literature at my Uni. I would probably not have studied them unless I had been told to. A well rounded education is priceless.

Re:Idiots

[VorpalRodent]

I was talking with a friend who recently went back to school. He has a degree which doesn't remotely relate to anything he wants to do, and decided that he wanted a computer science degree. But then he shifted gears - he was saying "I could stop after getting the minor, and save all the extra money from the additional year I'd have to go". His logic is that all the interviews he's gone to have asked him whether he's had SQL, Unix, etc. experience. Now that he's been exposed to those, he figures that's it, now he can be hired as a professional software engineer. There seems to be this misconception that if only he had these couple checkboxes ticked, he'd be fine.

Being well rounded isn't about hitting all the checkboxes (or in the case of the summary, getting the appropriate modules). It's about everything that isn't explicitly in those checkboxes. It's about seeing how all those things relate to one another in useful and sometimes unintuitive ways. It's about being able to take everything and go and do something new.

In school, a professor told me that what they were teaching wasn't for our first job out of college, but for our third. It's a bit oversimplified, but it's more or less valid. You get well rounded not so you can handle the stuff that they hire you for initially, but so that as you advance along your career path, you have some scaffolding on which to put all the other things that you learn along the way.

MOOCs, not degree work.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Context is everything. For MOOCs. This makes perfect sense. For degree work? Not so much.

Ah, how sensible...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Great idea - forget it.

[Bearhouse]

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.

Invoking Betteridge's law in 3... 2... 1...

[pla]

"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!"

Re:Invoking Betteridge's law in 3... 2... 1...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that you usually take your choice of courses(subject to certain constraints depending on the degree you want to go for) a 'course' is a 'module', just not a terribly granular one.

And there is room to tinker with granularity, some schools already run on quarters rather than semesters without apparent incident(at least in my experience quarters are nice for 'niche' things that you want to take a look at, because you get three per academic year rather than two and the proximity of midterms and finals did focus one's attentions a bit; but what you did in three sequential courses for, say, 'a year of calculus' was pretty much identical to what you would take in two sequential courses at a semester school); but the idea that online attention spans prove that knowledge is fundamentally fine-grained...not as much.

OB xkcd

[PvtVoid]

This.

education is a business...

[silfen]

I guess it applies in education too: "The first generation builds the business, the second makes it a success, and the third wrecks it”

We're only talkin' two Red Line subway stops

[SpzToid]

Not to discredit, but to clarify TFA:

While students at MIT and Harvard do cross-register, the logistics of travel from one campus to another limit the extent to which this is practical. Online makes it possible for students to take classes from across universities more conveniently.”

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...

Re:We're only talkin' two Red Line subway stops

[Rob Kaper]

We're talking two subway stops. Or they can rent a bike

We're not talking about the Netherlands, we're talking about the United States of FUCK NO I WON'T BE SEEN ON A BIKE OR IN PUBLIC TRANSIT.

Re:We're only talkin' two Red Line subway stops

[pz]

Yes, it is two subway stops. And about 30 minutes of transit time each way, once you factor in the time to walk to and from the subway stations, the unpredictability of the Red Line frequency (although I must admit it has gotten heapsload better in the last few years; and major kudos to that skunk works project that brought the T administration kicking and screaming into the 20th -- yes 20th -- century by implementing time-to-next-train displays). While not an insurmountable impediment, it does mean that any given inter-campus class requires an empty slot before and after in your schedule. That too is not insurmountable, but now you're talking about two big impediments, so the motivation to attend physically has to be really high.

Here's an example from personal experience. MIT students are also allowed to cross-register at Wellesley College. As a male student at MIT, the motivations for doing so were really high when I was in school. I registered for an astronomy class at Wellesley, with the additional chance of getting some telescope time that I wanted almost as badly as to be around college gir-- I mean women. Even with all those attractions, I dropped the class because it was such a huge time sink when you factored in travel time (that and the class I had registered for was teaching stuff I had learned on my own as a kid by reading books).

So, two subway stops? Not quite close enough unless you have really motivated students. Internet attendance of lectures with once per week recitations that required physical attendance? That would work better.

Flaw in the model

[BVis]

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.

Learn the alphabet with us!

[rippeltippel]

Choose the letters you like, it's only $99 each!
(Oh you need the alphabet to understand books? Well, sorry mate...)

I can see it in front of me

[mythix]

Hi, I'm matt and I've got a PhD in a-little-of-everything

This is a thing already

[__aaeihw9960]

Most schools have this already, essentially. It's called a liberal arts degree, or a Board of Trustees degree, if they want it to sound official.

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.

cost is to high and 4 years is to long for that

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Re:cost is to high and 4 years is to long for that

[tlhIngan]

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.

IT HAS trade schools. You know them - they're the ones that teach you Java and PHP and all that other stuff. You can learn Cisco, Juniper, Linux, etc in them as well.

That's not a university or college, though, that's a trade.

Just like you have electricians and electrical engineers, one does not replace the other, and both have skills the other doesn't (the EE cannot, for example, wire up a new circuit in a house).

A university or college is used to produce a well-rounded student - someone who can take a problem and decompose it to parts and then figure out a good way to implement them (in Java, or PHP, or Python, or whatever, it doesn't matter), to which they can hand off the solution to someone who knows it better.

PE in university and college? Inactivity, obesity and sedentary lifestyles are a big problem in the western world. Sure you could sign up for a gym membership, but you'd be hard pressed to get a structured environment out of it (most people drop out of a gym membership within a year), so being "forced" to take a PE class may very well be essential. And PE might as well develop the mind further, enhancing student development by seeing parallels between worlds (many serendipitous discoveries have occurred because a problem in one discipline had a solution in an unrelated field).

Art? Geez, humans are creative beings, and sometimes seeing creative output and learning to appreciate them can expand your mind. Heck, if you can't appreciate how people did things without technology in the past, how can you appreciate what technology can do now and in the future? I mean, Michelangelo creating David (a rather large statue in real life) took months to create slowly chipping away at it. And it's worthy of appreciation to see how dedication and hard work produced something so impressive.

Let's just say that people DO appreciate things that look nice. The bondi blue iMac? Geez, that's a rather whimsical thing in an era of beige boxes that were literally boxes. Yes, it can get in the way of practicality, but people generally appreciate form as well as function - they exist as one whole.

If you want to just learn the technical stuff - go right ahead, there are plenty of trade schools to do just that. But if you want to get the mots out of university or college, the soft skills to balance the hard technical stuff are what techies really need to concentrate on. Because really, when you think about it, we techies haven't evolved much social skills over say, general laborers on a construction site.

You need both generalists and specialists

[sjbe]

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.

Do they really know?

[chinton]

Students don't know what they don't know.

Interdisciplinary and Badges

[mx b]

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.