When Getting Rid of College Lectures Makes Sense 212
timothy writes "NPR reports that Harvard physicist and professor Eric Mazur has largely gotten rid of the lecture in his classes, after finding that in lecture-based classes, students tend to commit to memory formulae and heuristics, but fail to develop deep understanding of concepts. Mazur has tried — and seemingly succeeded — to cultivate deeper learning with a combination of small group peer-instruction and a tight feedback loop based on in-class polling about particular problems. Joe Redish also teaches physics, at the University of Maryland, and says, 'With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it. ... Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.'"
This is a wise idea (Score:2)
We cant have students memorizing formulas and heuristics.
Re:This is a wise idea (Score:5, Insightful)
We cant have students memorizing formulas and heuristics.
One way to do this, which is what my school did, was to test based on the theory. Teach the specifics and write the exam such that you are pretty much required to use the theory to solve the problems. It takes more work than the simple recite the formula tests that professors like since they don't have to think much to create them. We quickly weeded out the people who memorized things. Personally, I do much better learning the theory and applying it than memorization.
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Also memorizing something doesn't mean you understand it, when people memorize things and draw conclusions from them that's different from just looking for a grade, but those people tend to be self-motivated to learn, thus the theory is better for them anyways, they'll learn the details themselves if interested. Also helps keep people who don't belong out of fields they wouldn't be happy in to begin with. Then again some people are just looking for a paycheck to feed their family, but still what about adv
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I think that's one of the points of the article: memorization as a learning strategy is doomed to fail.
Just because one professor at a prestigious learning institution cannot teach in a way that fosters theoretical understanding doesn't mean we should throw out lectures. I found lectures helpful because I learn well in them, when backed up by other classwork.) I felt I had to be there regularly to learn. I suspect that many people who focus on memorization miss a lot of lectures. Plus, I don't think I'd lik
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I always paid careful attention to the classes and asked as much as I could. Some people think it's annoying, but I think that's the fundamental part on why the professors are there. Otherwise, everyone can just read a book or watch a video.
So my main concern about this is that we're focusin
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It is annoying, and the correct solution to that is basically to have more seminars as a core part of the class. It's something that we had when I was in college and IIRC they also do them at Harvard as well. The basic idea is that it's structured time during which you can discuss the subject matter and often times you get to use the information you've been studying to see sort of how it works.
Obviously that's inferior to actually using it in the real world, but it's significantly more useful than sitting t
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The main point here is that lectures are less beneficial that peer study groups, many colleges call these groups normally led by post graduate students for undergraduate subjects tutorials. Well, duh, that why many colleges and universities have compulsory tutorial groups in the first place.
So why lectures, when tutorial groups are more beneficial, lets call it right wing economics even though it doesn't really work that well it is cheaper to have a skilled person lecture 50 or more students that have th
Have to agree (Score:2)
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Great except that last thing that many professors at a large number of research schools want to do is interact with underclassmen. Heck, most of them don't want to deal with masters students, if you're not a phd candidate or a postdoc then you're not worth their time. I know this is a broad generalization but talking to many of my friends that went to top tier schools or large public research universities this was a common problem, it's
Agree but *keep* the class time (Score:4, Insightful)
This interaction between professor and student and between students is what makes the university experience more valuable than just watching videos of lectures. I think it may also be getting back to a more classical university experience, more education, less factory.
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I agree with you in part. Every class has easier material as well as review of topics thought to have been learned elsewhere. Those should be able to be on canned video. But I think once you get to the main content of the class there is something to be said for being able to interrupt the professor to ask questions or clarify a point. Writing them down while watching a video isn't the same. Not to mention that sometimes other students will ask something you had not considered. What I do think would b
Both is needed (Score:2, Insightful)
The very first contact is most easily done by lectures, you simply gather more information than by group work within the same time. Memorize stuff is important. Actually when teaching maths to fellow students I often discovered that they even lacked the formulas and never came far enough to use understanding to calculate something by quantity. The author is true on one point although: To gather real understanding you need to get involved into problems and discussion. Thats why normally you get homework afte
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They probably don't care too much about math, can't change somebody who doesn't want to. To me though, I'm a kinetic learner, lectures are a real bore. I've been out of hs a while now and guess what, I haven't used a calculus formula yet! (Maybe to impress the opposite sex once or twice :P). I knew I wouldn't care going into IT or w/e so I learned the formulas, but never the underlying stuff, I can get back into it pretty quick this way, I used the book and a worksheet though, the teacher was great for q
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If they are correct... (Score:4, Interesting)
Lectures are good for a quick overview (Score:2)
What's it about. what's it mean.
Some/Many though are write/copy or photocopy/blank stare exercises. Completely useless. The whole point of a human being is interaction.
Just to say, Kahn Academy is a good and could become a fabulous resource, along with Project Gutenberg, Google Books, Wikibooks.
One thing they are all missing is how the elements relate to one another, and to the real world. A complaint I have about conventional teaching as well.
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One thing they are all missing is how the elements relate to one another, and to the real world. A complaint I have about conventional teaching as well.
That's my point. If your options are Conventional Teaching vs Kahn Academy then Kahn Academy will replace Conventional Teaching. Small group peer instruction is far too expensive for anyone except the wealthy to implement, and they already get it and pay for it with private schools.
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People seem to make this assumption that "conventional teaching" is just an idiot in front of the classroom reciting the same lecture from ten years ago. That's bullshit; the problem there isn't the lecture the problem is the professor. Even in a large overcrowded classroom for first year calculus the profs can keep the class engaged during a lecture. If some profs can't do this then dump those profs; you will just make things worse if you rely on prerecorded lectures.
Re:Resource (Score:2)
Gutenberg is the right idea, but it has a fatal flaw - the need to abide by the ridiculous copyright laws.
It basically has nothing written after 1920, which is when the Copyright gang has grudgingly admitted that prior works are public domain.
The problem is, there are some 100,000 important books (and millions of "fun" ones) that were written in the 20th century, but they're all locked down by Copyright.
My answer was just to buy stuff for a buck a book at sales, along with some specialized stuff at retail.
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But no colleges do things this way except with bad profs. Sorry all you Kahn Academy fans. Good profs will not just recite the same old lecture, but they will ask questions of the class and tailor the lecture to the questions being asked (ie, if they don't understand one concept well the prof will spend more time discussing it but if no one has questions then the next topic is brought up).
And if you do get pre-recorded lectures that's still less than half of a typical college class. Homework, lab assignm
Re:If they are correct... (Score:4, Insightful)
Students won't, but employers will. Having a degree from a respected institution of higher learning is one way in which employers can screen applicants. Which is a shame because going to Harvard or Yale doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things.
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I disagree; Lectures are valuable (Score:5, Insightful)
Even amongst techies there are those that stay fresh by reading the latest books and others that stay fresh by attending conferences and just listening to what others are doing. There are still others that learn best by grinding away their own personal experiments.
I realize that it is proposed to record lectures once and just make them available. That may help considerably. But my guess is that Humans are naturally tuned to listen to other Humans (oral traditions) and recordings may not bring the right level of engagement.
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1) the idea of different types of learners is not valid
2) the idea is valid but we haven't figured out how to measure it scientifically
3) the idea is close to, but not the actual explanation
Being that our memories are combinations of our senses and that some people do seem to recall certain aspects easier than ot
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Re:I disagree; Lectures are valuable (Score:5, Interesting)
I, for one, am an Aural learning type.
This [sagepub.com] review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.
Another issue here is that although the article is specifically about learning physics, you seem to be talking about learning in general. There is very strong evidence [mit.edu] that lecturing is simply an ineffective way to teach physics in particular.
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The theory of "learning types" has been dubunked, there is no evidence of (and is evidence against) the idea that some people absorb information better depending on format.
The thing is the standard used to be that given some readings, a lecture, and the ability to ask questions, you could learn something.
This article restates that standard into saying given readings, and some required class-time where you are forced to do the kind of work and thinking you used to do in your own time, you can learn something
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The problem with the original article is that it has a flawed assumption that lectures are the only thing in education. It even says "if all there is is lectures". That's just stupid. A typical college class is lectures AND sections AND discussion groups AND labs. The lecture hour itself usually involves much more than droning on, the prof is deriving formulas, working out problems, answering student questions, discussing issues with students, etc. You can not replace that with a video taped lecture!
Ev
Discussions (Score:2)
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Much more common in the soft sciences and liberal arts than in hard science classes.
I had a history class and an English lit class like that.
The history prof just came out and told us that reading the text out loud would be a better lecture than anything the prof could say, or at least thats what his boss, coincidentally the dept chair and author of the text, told him. We all had a laugh over that one. So we were basically forbidden by dilbertian management from having a lecture in that class.
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You can have discussions and lectures in the same class. These are not mutually exclusive, and I have never been in a class that was pure lecture with no student feedback. It sounds like the author of the article is just disgruntled about poor profs.
Careful (Score:5, Interesting)
Some professors engage their classes in discussion of questions raised during lectures, others just throw up overheads and blab the same speech as the past five years.
I've always been a proponent of class discussion and group learning as opposed to the dissemination of information from on high as being fact.
The most important things you can do in University are to take courses in Logic, Philosophy, and Critical Thinking. Those will teach you to learn and to argue like a civilized human being, preparing you to convince your boss to implement your ideas, your customers to engage your services, and the government to hear your concerns.
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When I teach classes, the coursework tends to vary based on the students in the class. I suppose for teachers that don't know their material or have to go by a strict line by line teaching method, eg some schools prescribe exactly what must be taught and how it has to be taught, just recording the lecture once would be fine. For me, my classes, though they do try to teach the same concepts, I try to structure the information in such a way that they students can relate to them.
Is this always possible? No
Lectures are an old technology (Score:2)
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Please, I beg you, since you say you are now teaching, take a class on learning modalities! There are MANY students for whom listening and transcribing is going to be a very positive way of reinforcing what they heard. Audio and Visual are not the only ways to learn. Heck in some classes I learned best by putting my head down and listening and then visualizing the concept, to an uninformed teacher or professor i
Watch lectures at home, do homework in class? (Score:3)
Re:Watch lectures at home, do homework in class? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Watch lectures at home, do homework in class? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Thats why they have the assigned reading in the textbooks (which are like lectures which are written down, amazing!)
Problem is students don't read them, and if you had video lectures, no one would watch those.
What's so wrong with failing students?
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Great idea if you don't care about students! (Score:5, Interesting)
Look-- the vast majority of students learn because they have no choice. Slashdoters that say "public education only held me back as a child" and "I learned more outside of the classroom" are not the norm. The normal person "accidentally" gets caught up with friends, watching movies, and trolling Facebook instead of watching these lecture videos. Those normal people then fail (or worse, cheat).
Too bad for them? No... because if they end up being useless, YOU will feel the consequences. Be it in skilled labor shortages, increase poverty/crime rates, dumbed down video classes to make up for the poor previous education of your cohort, or the removal of funding due to the low passing scores, YOU WILL FEEL THEIR FAILURE.
Real education isn't a plug-and-play option. It's work. Teachers need to work in the classroom and do their best to make sure the students learn as much as possible. It's adaptive, changing, and sometimes will digress to related, but more entertaining, topics to keep long-term interest. These things cannot be done by video.
Get it through your heads. The education of the masses must be done in person by skilled individuals. Preferably in smaller groups.
Qualifier: Distance/video learning can help to enlighten. It can even help to educate people who genuinely want to learn (typically, this works better with adults). Just please understand that kids 4-25 are crap learners on their own. They NEED others to help them learn or else they just won't bother.
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But what we can do is dramatically change the providers and costs of education.
With technology, there is almost no reason teachers should be doing their own lesson plans... I've been a teacher. Do people really think every grade 9 Math class is custom tailored? Trust me... it's not. There's a lot of bullcrap to make it seem like they're doing that work. But in the classroom, it's not like that.
The material/tests/activities... are pretty generic.
As a result, you really don't need very 'skilled' people i
Great rant with no basis in fact! (Score:5, Insightful)
Children are voracious learners. Given the chance, they will learn anything and everything they can get their hands on. If you don't disabuse them of the practice, they will carry it on into adulthood.
As homeschool parents know, give the child access to materials - the internet, a CD of dinosaur books, an electronics experimenter's kit - and they will happily figure it out at their own pace, on their own schedule, and in a sequence that makes sense to them.
Forcing kids to learn your subjects at your pace by forcing them to sit still and quiet while you drone on is hard work, and it only teaches one thing: learning is not fun.
For example: How many English classes require students to write book reports, on works which are considered "classic" but not really relevant or interesting? This only makes an association between reading and hard work. It's rare to see an adult who likes to read for enjoyment after a highschools' worth of treatment this way.
I see this all the time in adults. The vast majority think of any type of learning as "tough", "boring", and "not worth the effort". They won't try anything new unless it's forced on them by life circumstances. They have lost the joy of learning.
Learning new things is an evolutionary survival trait, yet we spend 13+ years of a kids life teaching them not to enjoy it.
The standard teaching approach by lecturing has been in use for over 2000 years. Do you suppose that maybe there are more effective ways? Perhaps by experimenting or using our new technology we can raise our adult productivity.
Some professor is experimenting with different methods. I applaud his attempts and eagerly await the results.
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Whatever works is great. No where do I say the premade stuff should just be lectures. It also includes activities and games and experiments...
But what technology allows is for any new lecture, experiment, activity to be quickly used by almost anyone on the planet.
Suffice to say I don't subscribe to the idea that children are capable of making their own decisions. The older they get, the more choice they should have of course.
I do think most things are taught... some will use the term 'indoctrinated'... I
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You seem to be thinking that the method they're talking about involves replacing live lectures with canned videos of lectures. I can see how you might get that impression from the slashdot summary, but the actual article does a significantly better job of explaining what it's about. It's about replacing traditional lectures, where students sit passively and take notes, with classes where the students interact with each other and/or with the professor.
YOU WILL FEEL THEIR FAILURE
The teaching method described in the article isn't new (i
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You are 100% right... because this was supposed to reply to a post about distance learning not be a post on its own. /shame
However, in regards to the article itself, the guy is doing nothing new. He's having a discussion session in which he makes sure students learn fewer things in class to a higher degree of success instead of more things learned very lightly. This is why most universities have lecture and discussion sessions for the majority of their courses. The only thing that's even remotely novel is t
Re:Great idea if you don't care about students! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a hidden problem is that these people are not fundamentally capable of doing the things the economy needs. All the jobs these people could do are now done by machines, and the phase-space of things a machine cannot do is shrinking rapidly.
What we are currently doing is forcing the incapable into systems they cannot compete in and compensating by lowering standards. These people end up with degrees, but no robust competence.
What we will have to do in the next 30 years or so, when machines are able to do very advanced things (like diagnose disease and perform surgery), is rethink our economic paradigms.
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This is not exactly a school of the masses, now is it? They have 60 students in their entire school, charge $17,000 per year in tuition, and tuition only makes up 75% of their revenue.
By contrast, the State of California, in 2009/2010, spent $8,452 per student for its entire educational bureaucracy. That's less than 40% of what that school charges.
Now consider any application process to get into the school... and the parents submitting those applications... and all the additional resources to which the stud
Academics doesn't deserve live performances? (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful where you go with that line of thinking. And if anyone says, "there's a difference between a physics lecture, and something creative like music," I would respond that you've never had a good physics teacher. Physics is very creative, once you start getting into the upper levels.
Eric Mazur gave a talk here at the University of Waterloo, and his talk was not about getting rid of lectures, per se. That's something the NPR reporter seems to assume, to the point where (s)he inserted soundbytes from an entirely different physics prof. Mazur's focus is about making the classtime much more interactive, to give students feedback about whether or not they really grasp the concepts. Again, it's about guided creativity. And no, you can't get rid of the professor in that situation.
(Yes, I was a physics major.)
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Perhaps the lecture format in question is where there are 100+ students sitting in a lecture hall listening to the information the professor is madly trying to get through. In many of these classes, there is little if any time for questions, and certainly little time to review or repeat.
But then, there are good lecturers and bad lecturers. Most people fall into the latter category. The good lecturers engage and even entertain the audience. They move at a pace where both the slower students would be able to
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You have good profs and bad profs. You also have good students and bad students. A good student can not just sit by passively and a good prof can not allow a student to just sit by passively. Even if the lecture is the most boring thing in the world the student has the responsibility to do something with the time before the next lecture; do the homework, go to the prof's or TA's office to ask questions, read the text book, etc. Even with a bad professor much of the responsibility for the failure to lear
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Anecdote, not sure about the veracity: supposedly David Hilbert had a mathematics PhD student who quit, and changed his major to poetry.
Hilbert's response?
"Good, he didn't have enough imagination for mathematics."
(Translated from the German, of course)
Princeton has been doing this for a long time (Score:2)
See: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/whatsdistinctive/experience/the_preceptorial_system/ [princeton.edu]
Or just google it: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=princeton+preceptorial+system&pbx=1&oq=princeton+precep&aq=2&aqi=g3&aql=&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=1334l4298l0l7175l16l12l0l2l2l0l186l1404l5.7l14l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=da70dd10971034b4&biw=1376&bih=790 [google.com]
Well, I liked it.
agree and disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
That being said, I had a lot of equally frustrating classes where the professor did the exact opposite and taught in the classical face-to-blackboard lecture style. I would sit there frantically copying notes for an hour and realize I had no idea what I just listened to, again wondering why I was paying $20k a year to read condensed notes taken directly from a textbook.
The best classes, however, were a mix of these techniques. One class would dedicate about 1/2 to 3/4 of each lecture to slow, explanatory and engaging lecture with the rest of the time being dedicated to class-wide example problem solving. Another class would dedicate an entire lecture or two each week to solving a number of representative problems from the homework as a class, introducing or reinforcing the thought processes needed to go about learning HOW to solve the problems. These professors took the time to engage the students and walk them through the problem solving, not just quickly write down decades old lecture notes with their backs to the students.
Why even record your own faculty? (Score:2, Interesting)
Try small, private universities for undergrad... (Score:4, Interesting)
I attended a small, private university and most of my 3rd and 4th year courses had 7-9 students + the professor. Many of those classes were structured into 3 hour blocks. It was great. There was plenty of time to explore topics together, and in a way that resulted in everyone gaining a fairly thorough understanding of the material.
That school couldn't provide the kind of resources necessary for grad work, but it was great for undergrad.
I always wanted them to get rid of discussion (Score:5, Interesting)
Discussion sections were the biggest waste of time in college. Get 20 undergrads and one grad student in a room to "discuss". I was a history major and every class had the same two or three hours a week devoted to these tedious discussions.
I did not care what my fellow undergrads thought. I cared what the guy with the PhD thought. My fellow undergrads were spouting off their own ill-informed ideas (as was I, to get credit). Complete waste of time. We'd have been better served to spend those 8-10 hours a week reading.
fire the faculty? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why Math Lectures Are Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Inquiry-based learning: nothing new (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-based_learning
I teach physics in a workshop, not lecture ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and it's okay.
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago. The students meet in a room with small tables and maximum class size of 42, three times a week for two hours each. The room has equipment at all the tables, so that students can quickly set up small experiments which may not take the entire 2-hour meeting.
I taught in the traditional manner for about seven years, and in this manner for an equal duration. Does the workshop have advantages? Sure: students are less likely to fall asleep because they are often working examples, and because they are in a small, well-lit room. I can walk around and talk to individual students for a minute or two at a time, so I can find those who are having problems and try to help them. It's easy to introduce a concept, give one simple example, then ask the students to do another example, within a span of 20 or 40 minutes. In some cases, this cycle of introduction - observation - action may help students to understand or remember the material.
But there are disadvantages, too: in a workshop, it's difficult to move away from the median student. I can't go too much faster or deeper, because it's clear that many students are not getting it; so some students are held back. I can't slow down for the slowest learners, either, because it becomes obvious that the majority of the class is bored. This approach is MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE than the traditional one, because we need to offer 10 or 15 sections of the class each quarter; that means a lot more faculty time. The rooms can't be used for any other classes, and the AV requirements are pretty steep -- we need to spend around $10K just on projectors each year. We need more equipment than we would have in traditional labs, and that stuff isn't cheap.
It's not clear that this approach causes students to learn any better; some are helped, some are hurt. It's difficult to compare student achievement in workshops vs. lectures, because at the same time that workshops were introduced, we changed the content of our classes as well.
My summary, after years of experience: not a silver bullet, a lot more fun to teach, more expensive overall.
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There's a happy medium that uses a lot less staff time. I'm trying to push this out in the Intelligent Book [theintelligentbook.com] (sorry, gratuitous plug). And that's to make the lecture interactive, without having to redesign the whole course. The first few slides are my same slides from last year to give you a quick intro to what we're talking about today. But my next slide is a quiz that happens on the main screen and you interact using your phone/iPad/laptop and there's a live Twitter-like on the lecture screen as well a
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Thanks for your post! I teach at a community college in California where the maximum class size is 25 anyway. (Lecture and lab are in the same room, with the same students and teacher.) I use mostly interactive engagement techniques, mixed with snippets of straight lectures, demos, etc. We don't use any techniques that require expensive AV stuff; what techniques that you use require that?
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago.
Does this mean that you've completely eliminated traditional labs? (IMO that would be a shame.)
Do you have any data on ho
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The "expensive AV stuff" is 2 projectors per room (we need to project onto opposite walls because students sitting at tables aren't all facing in the same direction), times 7 workshop rooms. 14 projectors cost a lot to maintain.
Yes, we've completely eliminated traditional labs from the introductory physics sequence.
There is a small amount of data on how students did on the FCI before and after the switch, but not enough to be significant. I don't think that the FCI is a very good way to measure the knowle
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Hmmm...sounds like you're simply finding that you have to do your teaching within a system that's poorly designed. Why not fix the bad design?
I don't think that the FCI is a very good way to measure the knowledge of a student in physics, by the way.
Are you talking about false positives, or false negatives?
In other words, suppose that class A has a very low average on the FCI, while B has a very high one.
I would maintain that the teacher of class A is incompetent, and is in denial if he won't admit that fact and try to change; the FCI is ridiculously basic, and any student who's at all competent should score very
We don't need ... (Score:2)
I use teaching methods similar to Mazur's. (Score:5, Informative)
The slashot summary isn't terribly accurate, and even if you violate the social norms of /. and click through to read the article, the article is pretty sketchy as well. We're already getting comments from people who think this is about substituting video lectures for live lectures, and that's totally inaccurate.
This method is not new. I teach physics at a community college (not at Hahvahd like Mazur, alas), and I've been using methods similar to his for about 15 years. I learned about them from Mazur's book [amazon.com], which was published in 1996.
It's also not just some guy's opinion about how to teach. It's solidly backed up by research.
Let's start from the evidence. There is very strong evidence [mit.edu] that lecturing is a terrible way to teach physics. The classic studies work like this. You give students a multiple-choice test at the beginning of the semester on very simple, basic concepts of physics. What hits the ground first, a larger rock or a smaller rock? What forces act on a book that's lying on a table? They do badly, but you expect that, because most of them haven't had high school physics. Then you teach a semester's worth of physics to them and give them the test again to measure how much they've improved. The usual statistic used to measure their improvement is the gain, G, defined as G=(final score-initial score)/(100%-initial score). In other words, if they haven't improved at all, G=0, and if they've improved as much as it was possible for them to improve, G=1. With classes that use traditional lecturing -- even by experienced, award-winning teachers who get glowing reviews from their students, are enthusiastic, and put a great deal of effort into their lectures -- you get about G=0.25. In other words, the students have developed very little conceptual understanding beyond what they came in with. On the other hand, if you use interactive teaching techniques that force students to participate actively and talk about concepts, you can usually get much higher G's.
The evidence is that it doesn't really matter very much what specific interactive technique you use, as long as it's interactive and deals with concepts. Mazur pioneered a technique called peer instruction [harvard.edu]. Just to be concrete, I'll describe his specific technique. You require the students to read the book *before* they come to class. You enforce this with reading quizzes given when they walk into lecture. The class consists basically of a bunch of multiple-choice conceptual questions. You pop up one of the questions on the screen and ask students to show you their initial opinion about which answer is right. This can be done with expensive electornic "clickers" or with cheap pieces of cardboard marked A, B, C, and D. If you see that almost everyone got it right, you briefly confirm that, and then move on. If they didn't, you have them break up into small groups and discuss the question. You walk around and listen a lot without saying much. Then you have them vote again again. The theory is that the right answer is supposed to win out over the wrong answers in the discussion. When it's time to give a test, you make sure that the test includes some purely conceptual questions, because otherwise students will tend to resist dropping the "plug and chug" approach they're used to and switching to focusing on concepts.
Mazur's book shows data where he got G~0.5 with this method. Nobody has ever gotten a G that high with traditional lecturing. Over the years since 1996, many of us who use interactive techniques have refined what we do, and it's not uncommon to significantly higher G's. The average for three of us who teach freshman calc-based physics at my school last semester was 0.7.
A common concern is that if the teacher d
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The class consists basically of a bunch of multiple-choice conceptual questions. You pop up one of the questions on the screen and ask students to show you their initial opinion about which answer is right. This can be done with expensive electornic "clickers" or with cheap pieces of cardboard marked A, B, C, and D.
Or live on the lecture screen from students' phones, iPads, tablets, etc [blogspot.com], with live discussion alongside it if you want (for the things students aren't game to say in person). As it's live, and there is an option to let students move their votes, I've found it's sometimes entertaining revealing the votes and then watching them change as the discussion happens -- for instance all flocking to a common misconception that has the most votes on first reveal, and then shifting to the right answer as the discussi
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Interesting. What about students who don't own a cell phone, or who only have voice on their cell phone, not data? (Actually, I don't own a cell phone myself.)
At the University of Queensland, where I was teaching the class, about a third of students tended to vote, which I found to be enough to get a sense of the class understanding and get a discussion going. I'd expect that to rise year-on-year as most students have a phone of some sort, they replace them every two years -- standard length of a phone contract here -- and most new phones can do WiFi these days (we've got good WiFi coverage across campus). The remainder, however, still stayed attentive (more so
This Reminds Me Why I Preferred Seminars (Score:2)
Your comment reminds me why I preferred seminar to lecture: we came to class to discuss the state of each student's paper, got an opportunity for feedback from instructor and peers, and got an extra dollop of subject expertise from the instructor.
Lecture gave me 'waaaaay too much leeway to how much material I elected to mentally engage with, or not, and too few opportunities to (literally and figuratively) test my comprehension, and address knowledge gaps.
That there is a weeding out process of freshmen is v
Importance of reading and testing w/ theory (Score:4, Interesting)
They note the importance of reading before the class in the article but don't follow up much on that. This is crucial.
This problem presents itself when teaching interactively: If students don't prepare ahead of time, the lesson totally stalls. Then they are trying to figure out problems with no basis for it. What happens? The professor often ends up lecturing. Then no time is left.
My intuition (based upon TAing Statistics as a PhD student and being a high school teacher of history, philosophy, and information technology) is that very few students read before lecture. I often didn't as an undergrad. Why? Because as long as the lectures re-tread text material, student can get away with using the text only as a reference, not as a primarily source of information. If students are required to be active participants, they HAVE to read ahead of time. Otherwise they have no way of actually figuring out how to use the knowledge from the reading.
I agree with the poster who mentioned the importance of assessing theoretically. A lot of students think that theoretical assessment is easy -- they don't have to remember a lot and can just use their brain to figure out the test. At least in the Stats class I helped teach, this simply wasn't true. Whenever we had problems sets or exam problems which were more or less plug and chug, the students did GREAT. However, when we started asking theoretical questions (which statistical test is appropriate here? Why? How do you test assumptions...? Critique this statistically informed research piece.), students really struggled -- which means they don't get it. That tells me they weren't really ready to use statistics.
I bet this could have been alleviated significantly if we had spent more time in class really working through problems which asked tough theoretical questions in groups as a class. But alas, we lectured, then I had 50 minutes weekly to try to answer their questions -- never enough -- and the quality of work struggled. Many students never really seemed ready to work independently with the concepts: I think a big reason for this is they were taught by being talked at... so when it was time to show they knew stats, the brightest did fine but the majority freaked out.
Labs for the win (Score:2)
I cautiously agree to reducing lectures. I found that in getting my BSEE I learned much more doing hands on labs in small groups than I did in the lectures for the class. Further, what I learned in labs and doing student jobs on various programs stuck much better than the lecture material, and cemented the lecture material better.
Sadly, lab are less and less hands on these days, and most new engineering grads have never held a soldering iron and had pathetically little hands on lab work. I would argue th
It was good enough for Hawking, Watson, Einstein.. (Score:3)
While these were all smart people, and not average, my point is that while lectures maybe aren't the best for all disciplines, they are a proven method.
I think an unappreciated point is that with the increased societal goals of getting everyone into college, the average IQ of college graduates is steadily declining. Used to be, only very intelligent people went to college, now everyone is expected to go. Therefore teaching methods have to adapt to teach to lower and lower students. What I am unsure of in this article is if after these methods the students still have deep understanding, or are just better at answering questions they've already been asked before and been given the answers to in these discussions. Essentially it seems these discussion based methods are just out-sourcing the teaching to the students who do read the material.
I've heard someone say that intelligence means that someone is able to absorb and grok information in the form it is given. College education has been based loosely around this. There is some required reading, there is a lecture where you can ask questions, there are office hours/labs/recitations where you can ask more questions, then there is an exam. In this situation the burden is open the student to assess their own learning. Competent students can do this, and do. This new idea seems based around forcing students to think about the material and assess their own understanding through required discussion groups rather than learning to do this on their own. Consequently, I studied like a freak and spent a lot of introspective time asking myself if I understood this material.
In general I think the goal of the university should not be vocational. The goal is not to teach in such a strong way, but to merely make information available and have students learn how to learn. They've always done this with required readings, problem sets, etc. I'd be interested to see how many of these physics students who do so poorly actually do all their homework to the point in which they understand it. I had a labmate once (who was not cut out for physics) complain at how he did all the homework, but wasn't able to get the right answers. To me it seemed that he didn't really do it at all. (note: I am not a genius, but I am appropriately intelligent for college.)
What was once studying is now part of class time. When I was in school we worked in groups to independently form study/discussion groups, we didn't get our hands held by having teachers FORCE us to think about the material. This new method is interesting, but makes you think about what standards we expect of a college graduate. Does a degree mean that you know the material? Or should it mean that you have demonstrated the capability to learn the material? It would seem that in a job-environment they won't hold discussion groups to teach you how to do something, and a better skill would be to be able to learn on your own.
When I was in undergrad at the beginning of the past decade, the average grade in my physics class was a D, and this was normal. The average grade in organic chemistry was a C, and this was normal. The fact was that these were just very complex subjects and most people would not grasp all of it. The grades were adjusted upwards of course, but it was understood by the faculty that a course which covers the expected amount of material would be very difficult and the average student's raw score would be low, but that was ok.
no shit, teacher... (Score:2)
This is the same issue across all age ranges. Larger classes results in less time for teacher student feedback. But thanks to never ending MBA/economist efficiency demands the classes grows larger and larger...
Nothing wrong with failing students (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it such a surprise that the average grade in a university physics class is a D?
If you took a random sampling of the population and tried to teach them a complex subject, do you expect that most of them would pass?
The fact that a lot of students fail, does not mean the teacher is bad. It could be so, but it could also be that the subject matter is difficult and most people are not smart enough to grasp it.
People fail classes. In fact, 50% of the students SHOULD fail (with modern grading paradigms).
Is the goal to have a university where everyone passes, or one where only the capable pass?
Re:Nothing wrong with failing students (Score:4, Interesting)
The goal should be that a high percentage learn the material. Folks that don't learn the material should get a failing grade, those that do should get a passing grade.
If a technique increases the number of people in a class that can learn the material, and increases the proficiency of those that would have learned it anyway this is a win/win.
So given that a pass should indicate that a student learned the material, yes it should be the goal of a university to have a high pass rate. We have advanced degrees and harder curricula for those that need softer classes to be able to pass (i.e. if an artsy type ends up in a hard physics class, the failure has already occurred elsewhere).
Learning styles (Score:2)
Different people learn in different ways. Some are verbal (lectures), some are visual (textbooks), others learn best from tactile experiences. Reinforcing each of these are different applications of performing some task (homework) or discussion groups to rehash the learned knowledge. These are both learning techniques as well as a demonstration of the comprehension of the material.
It would probably be inadvisable to eliminate one avenue of learning that suits a significant group of students. On the other h
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait tell they figure out that they can get a guy in India to do the lecture on video for 1/2 the price. Then we will outsource the professors as well.
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He's trying to teach you how to think rather than what to think. Fail.
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the biggest problems I have found with students from India and China is not that they don't know their material. They have memorized what they were required to know and passed their tests, but the real problem I have found is that is all it is. Trying to understand something new is difficult, if it just involves memorization it seems to go fine, but coming up with their own concepts seems to be difficult. In computer science since most of what we do is not memorization, students have had a great deal of difficulty if they were in other engineering fields. Talking it over with my advisor, head of graduate studies in computer science, he agrees with me on the way things are done at least in india where he is from. Now, we still have issues in the US education system as well, not meaning to say that it's too much better here than there.
The issue is of course education systems that focus more on remembering facts rather than understanding facts and coming up with new concepts. Since I have a poor memory, I never could do well at memorization, but on the other hand, due to my problem, I became better at understanding the data rather than just remembering it so that on tests I could figure out what the answer should be.
Blah, I prefer teaching people to think rather than what to think.
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More like hes forcing the students to do the things in class they used to be expected to do on their own. When I was in school I used to think about the material and assess my understanding on my own time, now its done in class.
It is a clever outsourcing job though. The students who read the material and are prepared will end up teaching the material to the rest of the discussion group. Slackers will be rewarded, and the students who spend a lot of time preparing for their lecture will not benefit with a
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only lectures on Artificial Intelligence on Youtube are by Indian professors, but I couldn't understand them through the accent. With lectures on video, you could listen to the best lecturer in the country instead of some third rate professor. They can do a frequently asked questions list and update the lecture according to the questions. Electronic books can be both much shorter and longer. That is, if you can follow the quick example you can move on, if you can't, then you click a link for an expanded explanation. I don't think we should be wasting $50000/yr and the mind of an intelligent person to blab out a lecture like a video projector. One on one or small group help would be a much better use of those resources.
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:4, Insightful)
PLEASE, don't give them any ideas....it was fucking hard enough to understand they back when *I* was in college!!!
I swear there was an Oriental guy teaching one of my calculus classes...maybe Chinese. But it was the hardest thing to not laugh when when he was trying to describe getting the area of a tube from a flat sheet of metal/paper.
He kept over and over doing "Ok..first you roll the shit....then, you take the shit and..."
If Indian instructors are nearly as hard to understand at the tech phone supports I've had from "Bob" lately....well, it will surely degrade the already failing US education system. Hard to learn if you can't understand a damned thing the instructor is trying to say...
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:4, Informative)
If Indian instructors are nearly as hard to understand at the tech phone supports I've had from "Bob" lately....well, it will surely degrade the already failing US education system. Hard to learn if you can't understand a damned thing the instructor is trying to say...
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the stereotyping going on all over this topic, having recently experienced the reverse of this phenomenon. In my computer science degree we covered advanced AI + Intelligent systems in the second and final years and I found the local based lecturer difficult to understand. Not his accent I hasten to add, he spoke very clearly but he taught in an overly complicated manner. In the end I was saved from panic/ruin and ultimately failing the course when I found a massive set of free lectures on YouTube by some Indian professor who explained it really clearly in spite of his strong Indian accent.
I guess the Einstein quote rings true in my experience, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Interestingly the lecturer is part of some government funded Indian University that do free e-courses on a wide range of science + Engineering topics (all in English it seems) with all the lectures online and handouts / coursework up for free digital download. Not looked through the site in depth but seems to be genuinely free beer learning on degree level e-courses. Again I stress that I've not looked through the site in detail yet, but it seems like they take some of the strongest lecturers from Indian universities and basically record their lectures and upload all their hand outs etc.
Here's the address if anyone is interested: http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/ [iitm.ac.in]
Please don't perpetuate stereotypes, yes sometimes they do hold some truth but that's no reason to write off so many other really cool things out there.
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Nope...I've never owned car car with more than 2x functional seats, and I'd not take a SUV if someone gave one to me.
I had a Porsche once...'86 911 Turbo, fun car, but Katrina killed it.
The name is for the cayenne chile pepper.
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, really....what IS the value of a college education today?
With the recession, so many people have gone back to school for graduate degrees that the Masters is rapidly becomming (if not already) the new Bachelor's degree.
But the reality of it all...it is complete bullshit. Going to college doesn't guarantee success, or even a career. Hell, it doesn't guarantee you sweet fuck all...you have taken 4 years and god only knows how much money that got you a piece of paper that suggests you should be able to do some task with some level of competency.
Now, if you're my doctor...yeah, I want you to have that piece of paper that says "M.D." on it. I want my lawyer to be able to read and interpet legalese (although, quite frankly, I do a better job of it than most of the lawyers I know). I want the engineer designing the bridge to have a P. Eng. and actually understand that shit, since lives are on the fucking line. But for a netadmin? You come in with a 4-year Bachelor of Science in CS looking to get an entry-level netadmin post I'm going to see you as vastly over-qualified and probably reject you flat out. Fuck, in my home province, it is mandatory for a librarian to have a minimum of a masters degree for a job that paid in 2004 less than 40K a year...make sense out of that fucker. The poor person we hired at the city the one year had something like $100K in student debt & pratically cried when she saw the offer.
The education bubble is the next great crash to come, where people finally stand up and realize that getting fleeced for $40K a year by an institution so that little Timmy can have a degree in Mediterranian Art which will serve him well while he cooks fucking fries at McD's for the rest of his life just isn't fucking worthwhile, and you will see a re-surgence of cheaper "technical schools" that teach you what you need to know in your chosen profession & fuck all the pretentious bullshit.
Of course, they (the schools) have "educated" us all on how special and unique and wonderful the fucking college experience is, and how shallow and empty your life will be if you don't go to university. Well seriously, fuck that shit. I drank beer, fucked girls, and even made the occasional class when I was in college. I could drink beer & hire a metric fuckton of whores for the prices universities charge today.
Education is an over-hyped over-valued industry, and it is just a matter of time till the public tells universities to go fuck themselves.
(As I funnel absurd amounts of my pay into college funds for the kids...yeah, I'm a fucking hypocrite)
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The trick there is to specialize and only get the certificate that applies to what you're wanting to do. I got my TESL last summer and spent much of the time since working part time, but starting next month I'll have a good job for at least the next year. After that I should have few problems getting more work as I'm willing to relocate pretty much anywhere in the world. And some of those jobs pay really well. $50k for a job in Afghanistan and virtually no taxes is quite a huge chunk of change.
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Certification is not for you.
It's to cover the ass of the HR person that hires you.
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Haha, ironic, certifications are nothing but memorization. I've met so many retards who are certified up the ass, who have their head up there as well. Ex. guy w 12 MS certs asking how our vmware network works, less than useless, I figured that stuff out as part of the job and got a lot better at it w time where I can set up from scratch. Based on the prof. teaching theory, certifications can't exist in such theory. People who are tools (95% of corporate employees) would struggle too, so this learning s
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Not really, if you're willing to pay enough for qualified people to apply, the certificate is basically just a screening criteria. When you're doing the interview and checking references you should be determining if the person knows what they're talking about.
Ultimately, degrees, certificates and diplomas as requirements rarely have anything to do with the job these days and are all about restricting the number of applications that the HR drones have to look through. As if they have anything else that they
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Education is not an industry, it is a lifestyle. Most Universities still don't get this, nor do a large proportion of those that attend it. ALL Universities do is certify that you've gone through a prescribed obstacle course towards a particular career. My Degree is in a field I've never actually practice in, it is worthless other than for a check box on Applications. To Employers it means "will jump through hoops". My CSV is filled with all sorts of "educati
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Education is not an industry, it is a lifestyle.
And that, really, is precisely my point. And the universities DO get it, although most of the sheep going to university do not.
Colleges/Universities (which exception to the best of the best of the Ivory League) are even marketing ON the experience now. Meet friends that will last a lifetime! All that warm and fuzzy babble they spew to try to get you to spend your dollars at their institution. And in that, it has become an industry, rank with bullshit advertising, no different than the constant bull figh
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm sorry but you are a dickhead (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. Since it is talk like an ignorant dick head today, I will honour the occasion and participate. You seem to be a double dumb ass for saying university education is a double dumb jackass waste of money. If you think it is a waste of money, then by all means, don't enrol and waste your money and go back to the jerk ocean where you came from. People on Slashdot are mostly in computer-related fields, a field whose pioneers notoriously start in garages. You could learn programming by yourself so fuck univer
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Anyone who thinks a university degree is about getting a job needs to give their head a shake. For some careers it's a check mark on the start of a career, but that's because of the industry those students plan to work in, not an inherent benefit of the degree itself.
Getting a degree is about getting an education, no more, no less. It's about becoming a more well-rounded person.
If your goal is just to get a job, save your money and go to a tech school or a local college instead.
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THey already have that... its call a TA
Re:What is the real motivation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait tell they figure out that they can get a guy in India to do the lecture on video for 1/2 the price. Then we will outsource the professors as well.
No, no -- when the professors figure out they can get good lecture videos for their classes for free, they won't bother each writing their own lecture slides on the same dang material. They'll be MCs and curators -- presenting others' material and spending more of the lecture time actually interacting with the class. [blogspot.com] And the world will be a much better place all round for it. (Lecturers are generally promoted for research not teaching, so the best way get them to improve their teaching is if it also saves them time.) Seriously, if you were an AI lecturer this year, would you spend another hour writing your own ten PowerPoint slides to give a basic introduction to particle filters, or would you just show your class Sebastian Thrun's videos about it from ai-class and then talk with them about it? The second option gets you a clear understandable explanation in much less preparation time, and moves your class onto more interesting more advanced discussion faster...
--
The Intelligent Book [theintelligentbook.com]
Twitter: @wbillingsley