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New Google and CMU Moonshot: the 'Teacherless Classroom'
theodp writes: At the behest of Google, Carnegie Mellon University will largely replace formal lectures in a popular introductory Data Structures and Algorithms course this fall with videos and a social networking tool to accommodate more students. The idea behind the multi-year research project sponsored by Google — CMU will receive $200,000 in the project's first year — is to find a way to leverage existing faculty to meet a growing demand for computer science courses, while also expanding the opportunities for underrepresented minorities, high school students and community college students, explained Jacobo Carrasquel, associate teaching professor of CS. "As we teach a wider diversity of students, with different backgrounds, we can no longer teach to 'the middle,'" Carrasquel said. "When you do that, you're not aiming at the 20 percent of the top students or the 20 percent at the bottom." The move to a "teacherless classroom" for CS students at CMU [tuition $48K] comes on the heels of another Google CS Capacity Award-inspired move at Stanford [tuition $45K], where Pair Programming was adopted in a popular introductory CS class to "reduce the increasingly demanding workload for section leaders due to high enrollment and also help students to develop important collaboration skills."
Google translation: Find a way to lay off more faculty and make existing faculty work a lot harder for the same pay.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yeah ... wow ... why the hell would someone pay tuition for something like that?
That's not an education. That's a web site or PBS.
This doesn't sound like it will improve education, just let Google co-opt university education with their crap.
I'm pretty sure there is no other area of education in which private corporations and interests are so heavily involved.
The new corporate vision of "every learns teh CS the way we think it should be taught" sounds like a bunch of crap to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Its is a peculiar computer science conceit - that people, with their biases and foibles, can be replaced by sufficiently sophisticated computing resources.
The conceit shows up everywhere - from users with 'system says no' responses, to Google's algorithmic approach to everything, to OLPC talking of heli-dropping laptops into remote villages, to apps for everything: no matter how unimportant.
Unfortunately, instead of augmenting humans tech tries to supplant them
For $200k just hire more teachers.
If you include benefits, overhead, and the amortized cost of the pensions, that would get you two teachers, who on average would be average.
I have taken several MIT Courseware MOOCs, most recently Patrick Winston's AI course. It is better than anything I was taught at the univ I attended. With a MOOC, everyone can see the material presented by the best instructor available. Asking questions in the forum generally gives better and more thorough answers than a rushed professor would give if you interrupted him in class.
If you step back and think about it, mediocre teachers regurgitating the same material over and over is a dumb way to educate people. We can do better.
If you step back and think about it, mediocre teachers regurgitating the same material over and over is a dumb way to educate people. We can do better.
The one place where conservatives refuse to acknowledge market forces - public employees. If you want exceptional teachers you have to pay exceptional salaries. That's the nature of labor markets. If you're clamoring to slash pensions and benefits you're lowering the quality of teachers, not increasing.
When you can replace a teacher with a video lecture you're admitting that you've had substandard teaching all along.