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MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated

Posted by timothy on from the $43,210-for-9-months dept.

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 A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match.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

14 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Idiots by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    1. Re:Idiots by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Idiots by PvtVoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re: Idiots by lwriemen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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).

    4. Re:Idiots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Idiots by RevWaldo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      .

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      Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
    6. Re:Idiots by plopez · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  2. MOOCs, not degree work. by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
  3. Ah, how sensible... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  4. Great idea - forget it. by Bearhouse · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. OB xkcd by PvtVoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    This.

  6. education is a business... by silfen · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  7. You need both generalists and specialists by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Interdisciplinary and Badges by mx+b · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.