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Hoping To Fix College Teaching, CMU Open-Sources Trove of Software (edsurge.com)
Wednesday CMU announced the open sourcing of its adaptive-learning software platform -- plus analytics and dozens of other related tools for improving college teaching -- as part of a national push "in an unusual move intended to shake up how college teaching is done around the world," writes EdSurge.
Long-time Slashdot reader jyosim shares their report: Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars. The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start "learning engineering," the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms. If it takes off, the effort could result in a free, open-source alternative to a growing number of commercial adaptive-learning and learning analytics tools aimed at colleges. One of the biggest concerns by college leaders about buying such tools from commercial vendors is whether colleges will have access to the underlying algorithmic logic -- or whether the systems will be a "black box...."
"We need a scientific revolution in education akin to the one that we had in medicine 150 years ago," said Michael Feldstein, coordinator of the Empirical Educator Project, in a statement. "This isn't a silver bullet, and it isn't charity. It's an invitation to the educators of the world for us all to solve big problems together."
CMU's Nobel prize-winning economics professor Herbert Simon once argued of colleges that "we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is... [W]e find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them."
Kenneth R. Koedinger, a professor of human computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, now argues that "we need to change higher ed from a solo sport to a collaborative research activity."
Long-time Slashdot reader jyosim shares their report: Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars. The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start "learning engineering," the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms. If it takes off, the effort could result in a free, open-source alternative to a growing number of commercial adaptive-learning and learning analytics tools aimed at colleges. One of the biggest concerns by college leaders about buying such tools from commercial vendors is whether colleges will have access to the underlying algorithmic logic -- or whether the systems will be a "black box...."
"We need a scientific revolution in education akin to the one that we had in medicine 150 years ago," said Michael Feldstein, coordinator of the Empirical Educator Project, in a statement. "This isn't a silver bullet, and it isn't charity. It's an invitation to the educators of the world for us all to solve big problems together."
CMU's Nobel prize-winning economics professor Herbert Simon once argued of colleges that "we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is... [W]e find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them."
Kenneth R. Koedinger, a professor of human computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, now argues that "we need to change higher ed from a solo sport to a collaborative research activity."
Separate research/publication and teaching as distinct abilities and reward each for what they are.
Sounds like a golden opportunity to set up some learning portals/schools for highly specific fields or niche pursuits.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Parents and others have been sold a bill of goods that without a college education, a person is less than worthless. So they will pay any price. And spend a hundred K for a bachelors degree.
And since the goal has morphed from a saleable skill to mere posession of a degree, ridiculous majors like philosophy and gender studies graduates ant their parents are expecting the graduate to be firmly emplaced in a 6 figure career right after graduation.
Research has become the raison d'etre for the Universities while the parents are expecting the kids to get that valuable degree.
There are so many layers of middle management being added that one would think that the main purpose of Universities is not education, not research, but middle management.
Finally, having spent several decades at a University, they have really become pretty toxic environments for around half of the population, leading to over-representation of the other half, and unfortunately many of that half are not pursuing degrees that lend themselves to financial solvency or paying back that 100 K loan.
Nw tell me about how open sourcing software is going to fix this?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If we want to improve learning and teaching at universities, the first question that should be answered is: what is the purpose of a university?
Universities make most of their money off of either contract research and social networking, and those areas may be where their biggest contribution to society is. If we need universities to focus on education, should we split the education function out from the contract research and social networking functions?
This is similar to asking whether retail banks should also be allowed to perform investment banking. There is a potent financial and cultural pressure to optimize activities like research grants and NCAA sports. While it is possible to also be excellent at education, generally more attention, oversight, and effort is put into other activities.
No blockchain? Count me out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
College teaching is not broken and does not need fixing.
The cost of college has skyrocketed, student debt has soared, and graduates are not prepared for the job market.
Our current system of higher education is broken, and absolutely needs fixing.
What does need fixing is the insanity of administrators who look at student results and blame the faculty for them.
The bad results are happening broadly, so it clearly is not the fault of a few faculty. It is the "system" that needs to be fixed.
Costs need to be reined in. Students need to be counseled so they have realistic plans and expectations. We need to change our values so that completing a trade school education in welding or plumbing is at least as socially prestigious as a degree in journalism.
The cost of college has skyrocketed, student debt has soared, and graduates are not prepared for the job market.
Our current system of higher education is broken, and absolutely needs fixing.
Yes concerning the costs and debt. But teaching has not changed (which is the complaint of the article). So why does teaching need fixing?
Regarding the last point: this of course is the problem, but it is one caused by branding and sales pitches. And this is precisely what needs to change.The point of the university is emphatically not to train employees.
is going to be helped by releasing more code?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What is the purpose of a university? Is it a professional research organization? What is the difference between places like Salk and Broad and their academic neighbors?
If education is what distinguishes a university from an institute or professional research organization, then improving educational methods and metrics should be a goal of universities. The problem is that many people working at universities would rather be working at research institutes.
Really, many of those folks should be at research institutes. Universities need to understand how the focus on research over the past few decades has impacted the economics of time spent teaching. Fees are higher in part because the non-educational activities of universities are so lucrative. There is a market rate for professor's time, and students have to pay that market cost.
If that were true, it would be a problem. It is not true. May as well say standardized components have killed the market for mechanical engineers. It has not.
What has killed the software engineering market is a flood of really cheap but really bad coders and management too stupid to see that you cannot do engineering jobs with amateurs and expect a good outcome.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Professors are not always enthusiastic about teaching because much of the expectation is to get out research. That's the "something else" they'd rather be doing or more so realize they really have to be doing.
Research universities have these two sides: research and teaching -- the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. The research is critically important and it's believed that those who do research consequently have more to offer learners. However, there is a great deal of pressure to produce -- even after tenure. Tenure is essential for political reasons. Research needs to be free of political influence because those pressures are present and strong without tenure and even try to persuade with tenure. If college deans or chairs could influence the results of research then they would. Similarly, if grants were dependent on the outcomes of research, this could ruin science.
That said, I think professors could be better utilized as guest lecturers and mentors. They already do act as mentors and most tend to do a good job of that. But the whole conventional system of teaching has been long broken or substandard. Your learning is far more up to you -- the student. And in some very real ways, the chaos of the academic system actually provides a rich learning environment for a student who takes charge of his/her own education.
Research in education has actually shown clearly that structured education, such as colleges in places like India that designate all your classes and the order you will take them for you, are less effective than random chaos. Learning out of order actually yields better recall and comprehension.
Something I first wrote in 2001: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
So, CMU has been creating an artificial scarcity of the fruits of $100 million dollars in charitable donations in hopes they could make money for themselves out charging people for access to what they build with those charitable dollars. Of course we should be happy CMU has apparently now seen the error of their ways. But doesn't anyone else here see both the foolishness of the donors (including the government) to give money under such terms (see for example the "Bayh-Dole Act") and the previous immorality of CMU (and most other research universities)?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.