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MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated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 A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match.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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Context is everything. For MOOCs. This makes perfect sense. For degree work? Not so much.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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The poor courses I've seen were not so much hampered by the format, more either by sub-par lecturers and/or poor, outdated materials.
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”
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.
Choose the letters you like, it's only $99 each!
(Oh you need the alphabet to understand books? Well, sorry mate...)
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.
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.
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.
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.