Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye To Lectures (npr.org) 116
The University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine has begun phasing out lectures in favor of what's known as "active learning" and plans to be done with lectures altogether by 2019. NPR spoke with William Jeffries, a dean at the school who's leading the effort, about the thinking behind this move. From the report: Why are lectures bad? Well, I wouldn't say that they're bad. The issue is that there is a lot of evidence that lectures are not the best way to accumulate the skills needed to become a scientist or a physician. We've seen much evidence in the literature, accumulated in the last decade, that shows that when you do a comparison between lectures and other methods of learning -- typically called "active learning" methods -- that lectures are not as efficient or not as successful in allowing students to accumulate knowledge in the same amount of time.
Give us an example of a topic taught in a traditional lecture versus an "active learning" setting. A good example would be the teaching of what we would call pharmacokinetics -- the science of drug delivery. So, how does a drug get to the target organ or targeted receptor? A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.
Give us an example of a topic taught in a traditional lecture versus an "active learning" setting. A good example would be the teaching of what we would call pharmacokinetics -- the science of drug delivery. So, how does a drug get to the target organ or targeted receptor? A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.
Mixed bag (Score:2)
The medium that best suits a person's ability to learn varies a lot from person to person. For me, easily the worst way to absorb and understand information is verbally (reading is the best by orders of magnitude). I've always found lectures to be a complete waste of time because of that.
But I'm not in favor of getting rid of lectures because there are a lot of people for whom it's the best way for them to absorb information.
Ideally, lectures would be available for those who can benefit from them, but optio
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True, different people learn differently. But another big variable is what the topic is. If it's a problem solving course (math, physics, CS, many parts of engineering) the "work stuff out" active learning is more likely to work well. If it's more "absorbing information" (say, anatomy, some chunks of o-chem or biology), then the gains aren't as large.
We're replacing our lower level physics lectures because of this, and doing our best to measure the effects. The upper level physics courses, it turns out
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Another aspect is cost. Sure some ways are more effective, but cost more per effective unit, making them less cost efficient. That's why we still have 150 students in a lecture hall - cost.
Re:Mixed bag (Score:5, Informative)
Considering the size of some endowments it seems like universities are being somewhat selective about which costs matter. Administrators are getting bigger and bigger raises and bonuses, while full professors get replaced by adjuncts who make less than the minimum wage. So those lectures with 150 students are given by someone with little experience and who doesn't even get basic benefits like health care or a sick day, while administrators are being given seven figure salaries.
A smaller and smaller percentage of the money in higher education is actually being spent on educating students, but the football coach is the highest-paid public employee in the state.
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While fundraising by college deans and presidents, scrambling for grants by professors, and lubricating alum donations with feel good events like sports becomes more and more and more important, of course they will figure out how to cut corners on the little stuff that does not keep the money flowing in.
It is not malice. It is not stupidity. It is not even greed.
It is all about having a business plan that actually works.
We expect these giant educational institutions to be run like smart businesses and the
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It is all about having a business plan that actually works.
I hate to tell you, but your business plan that actually works is falling apart. I'm not certain if you've noticed or not, but outside of a very few disciplines, young people are graduating with a mountain of debt, and with precious little prospects. For many schools, the football attendance is down, and then there is the actuarial tables. A lot of wealthy alumni give a lot of money to the schools. But they are dying off.
Now we are looking at those young folks I told you about before. That guy with the ph
Re:Mixed bag (Score:4, Insightful)
Administrators are getting bigger and bigger raises and bonuses, while full professors get replaced by adjuncts who make less than the minimum wage. So those lectures with 150 students are given by someone with little experience and who doesn't even get basic benefits like health care or a sick day, while administrators are being given seven figure salaries.
A smaller and smaller percentage of the money in higher education is actually being spent on educating students, but the football coach is the highest-paid public employee in the state.
As cynical as that sounds, it is absolutely correct. Having spent over 30 years in the arena, the takeover of universities by management is nothing short of shocking.
There are now more people shuffling papers around and pulling down 6 figure salaries keeping track of 5 thousand dollars worth of pencils than there are academics.
And if you want to know why college is so much more expensive now, they'll tell you they would have to hire 50 new accountants, 30 middle managers, 2 staff assistants, and have a building built to house them.
Then a year later, they'll release a report saying that the University needs to hire more accountants and managers.
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A few years ago, the University of Illinois at Chicago spent $1.5 million to renovate the chancellor's residence, which had been completely renovated 3 years before. She had a round-the-clock campus security detail assigned to her in the safest neighborhood in the city and a town car and driver on call
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I'm out of the game now, but my wife is still an active math professor, so I get to see first-hand what's going on. Higher education is eating itself, and they wonder why they're being challenged by online diploma mills.
Their salad days are going to come to an end. They have priced themselves out of the market.
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There's a big movement in mathematics, even in 400 level and graduate courses, toward group work. Surprisingly, this seems to work pretty
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If I don't know the material, lectures have been a terrible way for me to learn it. For some reason, I can't learn from them while trying to listen and take notes at the same time. In a long hierarchy of unfamiliar definitions I can get overwhelmed and completely lost.
But when I learn the material beforehand from the book, lectures have been an excellent way for me to reinforce what I learned, both because it is (for me) reviewing what I more or less know, and its different modality of audio seem to
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Most academic lectures have always assumed that the listener has come prepared. At the last, they've read the book, or the chapters assigned so far. Of course, the majority of the college age students will not do that, they haven't learned the arts of learning, time management, and preparation. Lectures that don't assume the listener is prepared tend to be introductions to a topic and the audience is not expected to take notes or a have a quiz.
But this applies outside of lectures too. A med school won't
Context Matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Abandoning lectures is stupid.
Lectures aren't to "teach" you how to do something, they are to explain what it is you are about to learn, provide the context, provide a process map to that learning.
The ACTUAL learning is done by you, at your desk, alone or with a group of people. and even then the actual learning comes right down to YOU performing the task, not just hanging out with others who are performing the task.
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Most academic lectures have always assumed that the listener has come prepared.
Yes, but they don't tell you that they assume that. Most students simply don't know that or only learn it during studies.
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Depends on the class--I've been in several where you didn't need to read the textbook, a few where you were distinctly better off not reading the textbook, and one where our professor informed us on the very first day that the sole reason there was a textbook in the school bookstore for our class was because he wasn't allowed to not have one. (From experience, I would assert that 'no textbook' is distinctly preferable to a bad textbook.)
However, even in these classes, you were certainly expected to take no
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But when I learn the material beforehand from the book, lectures have been an excellent way for me to reinforce what I learned
Yes, I understand. I am not quite like that. Even if I know the material beforehand, lectures are worthless to me.
Re:Mixed bag (Score:4, Insightful)
"The medium that best suits a person's ability to learn varies a lot from person to person."
This sounds like it's true, but it is actually highly controversial among learning scientists. There is very good evidence that people have well-established ways they prefer to learn ("learning styles"). The idea that teaching should be customized to match students' learning styles was originally promoted by a company that made money selling learning styles tests to schools. It turns out it is very difficult to prove if it works or not. And it's very expensive to implement.
In educational experiments, alternative teaching methods nearly always work better than lecturing. I'm not aware of any evidence that replacing lectures with a thoughtfully-designed alternative has ever harmed a student's learning. It is common that students complain they have to work more when lectures are gone - but the extra work is the cause of the extra learning.
Re: Mixed bag (Score:2)
It is false. There are no learning styles. There are abilities, and lack of them. Education comes from person to person way easier than from video to person and from text to person. You need to pass not only facts (which do not exist on its own , strictly speaking ) but also values of the discipline that you are teaching. What is important and what is less importance and why so. That forms a basis to build on.
Now pick random people that have read some texts, make them to do group work : where they are to l
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There are abilities of teaching, and lack of them.
FTFY.
Yes, there are abilities in learning, too, or lack there of. But the main problem is teaching, not learning. Teaching people to do group work and learn in groups, works. Other teachings work, too. A slight competition, the superiors being examples for the less advanced ones, and teachers for them, too. That happens e.g. in martial arts classes.
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I'd go even further. What passes for science in pedagogy is complete flim-flam. Education departments are packed with mediocrity, yet they are taking a bigger and bigger share of the focus in teaching basic sciences in higher education.
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There is a small subset of superteachers who are heads and shoulders above the rest. And the main difference is that they are tireless in trying new things to further improve their teaching methods.
Guess who volunteers for the small scale research into new teaching methods?
Motivate these superteachers and give them sticks and dirt and frayed string, and they will figure out a way to make an effective lesson. Give them weird new teaching materials, and they will figure out a way to make an effective less
Re: Mixed bag (Score:2)
Too bad nobody has discovered a form that can contain both text and audiovisual information as alternatives, passive and interactive lessons, a database of questions and answers, hold quizes to ensure understanding and so on that can be copied thousands and millions of times at near zero marginal cost. That could make parameterized and randomized tests from huge sets of problems. That could make proper A/B testing to see what improves results/efficiency. Maybe it's not good for everything but I think 80% of
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80% of your education from primary school to a master's degree could have been self-taught from books, once you mastered the basics of reading. So, your point makes sense, but it is not exactly a surprise that sophisticated computer programs can be a very effective replacement for books.
Getting back to your main point, what you suggest can be done, but it does run into two significant bumps in the road: (1a) It is much more expensive to do this well than is generally realized, and (1b) the world is already
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Ther's a middle ground though. When they say "no lectures", it implies no discussions, no intro material, etc. Ie, in a laboratory class in physics for example, you start with someone up front describing what the experiment is going to be, writing details on the board, and so on. That is done because if it takes 30 minutes to explain to each student what is to be done, then that's 30 minutes for each student versus 30 minutes total plus some personal help as needed.
A lecture can be the same way. What yo
Re:Mixed bag (Score:5, Informative)
Ther's a middle ground though. When they say "no lectures", it implies no discussions, no intro material, etc.
No, it really doesn't. "Active Learning" tends to mean that you studies the material beforehand (read the book, watched an online lecture, whatever) and then in class you discuss, practice, ask questions about whatever you didn't quite understand, etc.
The goal is that the intro material is absorbed by the student without a teacher present. Then the class is the discussion. So you have the teacher for the parts where having a thinking human is useful, and for the parts where in the past a human would blather at you, have Youtube blather at you instead.
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No, it really doesn't. "Active Learning" tends to mean that you studies the material beforehand (read the book, watched an online lecture, whatever)
"Active learning" means absolutely nothing, because *everyone* uses it to mean something different.
The origin of the term is the fairly straightforward argument that there is no such thing as "passive learning" -- you cannot simply receive knowledge, your brain must be actively processing the input for it to be learnt.
However, that doesn't mean "no lectures", because a skilled lecturer will always word things in such a way as to make the listener think about what he's saying, and that is a form of active
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What this change a drop from lectures in preference to nothing but labs/tutes, means school competitiveness can be easily defined. How many students in labs/tutes and the minimum qualifications of lab instructors. I found lectures to be far less effective than labs/tutes. Time spent in them was far more educational beneficial even when the instructor was only a doctoral student. Lectures can be pretty much reduced to nothing but a video you download from the university network. That video should of course b
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Yeah, the description of their courses sounds exactly like a traditional lecture+lab course where they just drop the lecture part.
If done well, it could be a great improvement. I've had lecture sections that were not very informative. And I've had great labs.
But I also had lab sections that simply had us following a recipe by rote, and had instructors that barely spoke the language and couldn't help with comprehension.
So I guess it is all in the implementation. And doing that right is hard. Designing a
Lectures moving to video ... (Score:3)
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Personally speaking, video is even worse than in-person lectures in terms of absorbing information. But if they supplied the transcripts for the video, then I would be able to get by.
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Personal experience is that what works best is the mixed approach: You start with the professor introducing the equation and walking you through a couple examples, with each part written on the board so you can get them into your notes correctly if nothing else, and then you get to do some on your own in the classroom with the professor around so you can ask questions--this sounds like switching from just being shown some examples to being left to figure it out yourself.
It really sounds like they're trying
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I learned the most from the personal presentation of the lecturer of the stuff he was teaching. He wrote it down on the blackboard, *explained* things and we were able to ask questions.
That interactivity, with someone who actually *knows* what he's talking about and can explain and give valuable insights, is what will be lacking in this interactive learning thing they are proposing.
I think they want to totally and centrally control the stuff the students r
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That's exactly what I was thinking. I agree with more emphasis on lab, and less emphasis on lecture... but dumping lectures, jumping straight to the lab and expecting students learn about X before they show up is just idiotic.
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I'm always wary of anything involving group work. A typical group consists of me doing all the work, maybe one other person helping me, and two or three slackers doing fuck-all. So why should I have to share my good grade with the slackers who didn't do (or learn) jack shit?
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I'm always wary of anything involving group work. A typical group consists of me doing all the work, maybe one other person helping me, and two or three slackers doing fuck-all. So why should I have to share my good grade with the slackers who didn't do (or learn) jack shit?
Because the students actively working through the examples are the ones doing most of the learning. The others are destined to become chiropractors or hospital administrators.
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If you do all the work, you do all of the learning. The slacker typically learn nothing and a good grade is not going to change that fact.
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They still end up with the same credentials. And if they're a good enough bullshit artist, they can even do better in a job interview than me. Very few universities actually require someone to take a final competency test before awarding a degree. And very few companies test a potential employee's actual knowledge before hiring. So a slacker waltzes through to a degree on other people's work, and into a job based on credentials he or she didn't earn.
It's bullshit any way you cut it. Good students shouldn't
Learning is ALWAYS the Student's Responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)
So in other words, they have no solution to accelerate the initial process of learning the material, so they just shovel that responsibility entirely onto the student.
Learning is, and always has been, entirely the student's responsibility: a professor cannot learn the material for you! The responsibility of a university is to provide the best possible environment and resources to enable and encourage students to learn as well as to assess what they have learnt.
The idea with these techniques is that students learn the simple concepts by themselves because they can and this allows instructors to spend their time teaching the harder concepts which students need help understanding. The other benefit is that these techniques force students into thinking about concepts they may find very challenging whereas in a lecture format students can "write-off" challenging topics as too hard by tuning out and just accept they will take a hit on exams for these topics.
That's the theory. Where we have to be careful is that a lot (but not all) of these new techniques are also far less "dense" i.e. you end up spending a lot more time on each topic so you cover less. Even a traditional lecture format should show an improvement in understanding if you go through things more slowly and demand less of students. So while I think that these techniques are better when adapting courses you have to be careful not to also dumb-down the course by removing material.
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The responsibility of a university is to provide the best possible environment and resources to enable and encourage students to learn
It's the resources thing that is lacking here. Sounds to me like: go buy a textbook, read it and/or research the topics on the web, then go to group discussion.
Not that that won't work for many people.
But it's higher education's damn job to figure out how to teach, not just how to hold group discussions after the fact. I don't get the impression anyone is doing that job at this school. Or in general, I certainly haven't seen any sample learning formats that weren't just either A) youtube videos of lectu
Teaching != learning (Score:2)
If learning is the students responsibility, then why have we always taught - - - from Neolith stone hand-tool makers to constructing Greens functions ?
Teaching hugely speeds up learning by directing students to what they need to learn and helping them learn it when they cannot understand or misunderstand a concept. You do realise that teaching is not the same thing as learning, right? Teaching is designed to aid learning, not replace it especially since you cannot teach something before you have learnt it.
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But it's higher education's damn job to figure out how to teach, not just how to hold group discussions after the fact.
True but the fact is that there are numerous studies showing that reading and watching material and then group problem solving/discussion is far more effective than just lecturing alone. Of course, this is averaged over all students and, like any teaching technique, it will work better for some students and less well for others.
Not only that but it is actually more-or-less how I learn myself now. I'll read up papers on a new topic and then discuss it with colleagues. Those discussions show me where I ha
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But it's higher education's damn job to figure out how to teach, not just how to hold group discussions after the fact. I don't get the impression anyone is doing that job at this school.
It is only very recently that there were any expectations that university lecturers be good at teaching. A century ago, they were expected to be fairly current and interesting. Lectures were necessary because good quality textbooks often did not exist, and even more rarely were current ones available. And if they existed anywhere, you might have to learn German or French to read them -- that would be your problem.
If you did not study hard as possible before lectures, you might be lost. Regardless you an
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In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there.
So in other words, they have no solution to accelerate the initial process of learning the material, so they just shovel that responsibility entirely onto the student.
Not that active learning is bad, but you'd think if you are "replacing lectures" you'd actually replace them with something, not just skip to the lab/homework.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely give you some. Most classes of this sort, in my experience, have both a lecture and a lab. You learn the concepts in the lecture, and you apply them in the lab. If you switch to nothing but labs and require students to study the topics in advance, you've now isolated the students and taken them out of the environment where they can ask questions on things they don't understand, and hear other students' questions on things they didn't consider.
Labs are great, but lec
I'm ambivalent. (Score:2)
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I don't want a doctor who learned how to learn. I want a doctor who actually learned.
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I don't want a doctor who learned how to learn. I want a doctor who actually learned.
I'm the opposite. Some of the facts a doctor learned when they were in school 30 years ago have since been found to be completely wrong. We've made some impressive leaps since then. But a doctor who learned how to learn will not depend on the old facts and will instead continue to learn new techniques and diagnostic methods.
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There is the problem that doctors taught by working through case studies and classroom exercises tend to get good diagnoses by subjecting the patient to lots of tests and sending lots of samples to labs. Doctors taught in a more traditional way tend to provide quicker and cheaper treatment.
The traditionally-taught doctor's diagnosis process is something like: 1) does it look like a textbook common case? If yes, treat it as such, and ask the patient to come back if the treatment isn't effective, if no, 2) d
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I guess we are all lucky that you are not a medical doctor.
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Incidentally, have you ever read this paper [usc.edu]...?
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Unfortunately not, as I'm not a professional teacher. But I will read it, thanks for the link.
The BEST teaching technique (Score:5, Interesting)
The best teaching technique I've ever seen was that practiced by the Bible Study Fellowship back in the 1980s. All the material was broken down into 1-week chunks. You started with reading assignments and an outline that you did on your own. This was followed by a weekly small-group discussion where the group collectively answered a series of questions on the same material. This was followed by a lecture of the whole fellowship. The lecture was now very interesting, because you had personally worked through the material, worked with others to process it and cover the bits you didn't get on your own, and now you had some appreciation of what you were dealing with.
I adopted that pattern for every course I've ever had to teach, and the retention is phenomenal, 90% and higher.
My opinion is it worked so well because:
- Same material, multiple processing methods (reading, writing, talking, listening)
- Same material, multiple repetitions
- Your FIRST introduction to the material is personal. That increases "ownership".
- Questions answered BY a small group invite collaboration and sharing
There you have it.
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Just imagine if they put that much effort into learning Evolution instead of fairy tales......
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Just imagine if they put that much effort into learning Evolution instead of fairy tales......
Not all religious people are against evolution. If you want to avoid the fringes of Christianity rejecting science, stop presenting this false dichotomy -- it's this that drives religious people away from science.
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I worked for a nonprofit that tried promote this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Specifically, we tried to get colleges and universities to adopt new methods of andragogy in addition to lecture.
The reason is that for most students lecture isn't very effective. Their retention drops of rapidly as the lecture gets longer, to the point where when you are approaching the 1 hour mark almost nobody is retaining anything being said. Basically long lectures are a huge waste of a lot of people's time.
It's also important to understand that students are different from each other in their learning strengths and weaknesses. I, for example, can sit in a lecture hall for hours on end and remember almost everything. I'm an oddball. People like me have traditionally been seen as "bright", but life experience has taught me that I'm not *that* much smarter than most of the people around me. What I and people like me am are, is unusually good at retaining lecture material. That's a massive advantage in a lecture-based educational system.
Don't get me wrong. Being an information sponge is a tremendous asset in real life. But I think academia over-selects for people like me, and makes people who don't happen to have this peculiar talent work harder for the same results.
But a more diverse way of teaching would also benefit oddballs like me. When people talk about "learning styles" they usually mean "I shouldn't be forced to learn in ways that are hard for me." Actually, you should be challenged to learn in ways that don't come naturally to you, just not 100% of the time. It's important to become a versatile learner, able to adapt to the situation. Playing to your strength all the time is limiting.
Re: I worked for a nonprofit that tried promote th (Score:1)
Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs. There are people that can learn, and to learn from a person is way easier tha from a textbook alone.
Then there are the diversity people that cannot learn at all. Dispensing with lecturer means that the diversity people lose nothing but people able to learn do. And group work is just a waste of time because each has to grasp the material on its own, by applying effort, not by yanking in a group of ran
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Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs.
Learning styles are BS, in the sense of "visual learner", "auditory learner", "kinaesthetic learner". But if you look at the faculty in any given university, you'll find a lot of personality traits that appear to be high-functioning autistic spectrum. The whole system of universities is a self-selecting system, where only the people who are comfortable with the teaching style go on to make a career in it. And so it continues.
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with ASD -- quite the opposite. We've co
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It depends on the lecturer (Score:2)
We did similar ... (Score:2)
... in this man's Navy, ca. 1968.
We studied the shit out of troubleshooting techniques and then walked into a lab that had a slew of defective radios, caused by tampering by the instructors.
We applied the methods we learned out of class to these "real," situations and discussed successes/failures in pinpointing the defects.
Lecturea were boring .
You tube (Score:1)
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Listen to any lecture by Leonard Susskind and tell me that lectures can't be extremely helpful. I imagine there are professors in every field who are as amazing at elucidating topics.
True, and a great example of someone who's good at it.
I suspect this is a pernicious way for the school to deprecate professors and their wages. Regardless of their stated reasons, I'm certain that this was done to save money, and not to make better students.
False. In fact, quite the opposite: the style in TFA is substantially more expensive both in salary and floorspace. Lectures and big lecture halls exist primarily because mass production of anything (even education) is way cheaper.
Active learning is learning by doing (Score:1)
Active learning is a provably superior form of learning. Active learning is actually a harder form of learning in that in requires more work from both student and teacher. The student has to solve problems, and the teacher has to provide constructive feedback and help the student self-correct. It is one of the reasons why the averaged tutored student performs in the 98 percentile (See 2 Sigma Problem [wikipedia.org]). That is why these doctors and scientists are implementing it in their school.
Passive learning is
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Actually you are completely wrong there.
A SJW will happily call someone who is not part of their selected 'victims' group all of those things, and more.
Remember, sjwism is not about helping anyone, it is about sticking it to 'da man' so to say.
Not that I am saying you are an sjw, just pointing out your characterisation of them is dead wrong.
Of course you also happen to be dead wrong in your argument above, and your reasoning does seem to show signs of a lack of critical thought associated with lots of handf
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Of course you also happen to be dead wrong in your argument above, and your reasoning does seem to show signs of a lack of critical thought associated with lots of handfeeding and claims of authority without any evidence.
My argument is that active learning is superior. There is research to support my position. The medical school in vermont has read some of the same research. Here is one source from the national academy of science that I got from a my bibtex file. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics [pnas.org]
How about I mention that the largest problem in universities is the lack of entry filtering, by which I mean 80% of the people there should not be, and that that detracts hugely from the education of the 20% who should be? And that those 20% are the dedicated intellectuals who are willing to forgo other things in their lives and dedicate themselves to academic research?
Your answer to that should clear up the question.
Those are technically not questions. I am not convinced everyone who is in college is ready for it. I think we push college on students when other careers can be bett
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Active learning is actually a harder form of learning in that in requires more work from both student and teacher.
That is why the mediocre are so certain that active learning does not work -- they have never seen it really tried because their only experience as a student suffers the limitation of being who they are.
Furthermore, poorly implemented active learning can easily be worse than the traditional lecture. The smart ones do the real work, while half their teammates snooze or hold text message conversations on their phone, and then copy the work of their betters.
Part of the problem is active learning is touted as
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Sorry, but "active learning" has had all the meaning buzzworded out of it. "Active learning" was supposed to be that all learning is active, and no learning is passive. Learning is an active process in the student's brain -- you don't just hear stuff and have it stick, and people who appear to do so are just very very efficient at processing input.
A lecture is active learning if the listener is really thinking about what's coming in, but that takes a particularly skilful lecturer. But a class with "activit
Vermont Medical School says goodbue to lectures.. (Score:2)
Not this, again... (Score:2)
At the university where I teach, certain high level administrators keep pushing this crap, telling us to stop lecturing. Two observations:
From TFS: "In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there."
Maybe that works at a medical school At the undergraduate level, most of the class will show up unprepared. At best, maybe they skimmed the material, certainly they have not invested enough time to understand it.
From TFS: In place of the lecture, "cases ar
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From TFS: In place of the lecture, "cases are presented"
Which sounds a lot like a lecture. Where's the "active learning"? Students are supposed to be doing stuff themselves. Having pre-prepared cases presented to them is not "active".
There are medical schools in the UK that have been doing this sort of thing for years now, although rather than "cases" they present "case-studies", and ask their classes to work through them. In other words the students are doing exactly what they would once they become doctors, in a safe environment, where no-one is reliant upon their calculations or diagnoses, and where the outcomes are known, and can be discussed in detail at the end. Initial indications are that this involved form of learning is far su
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There are medical schools in the UK that have been doing this sort of thing for years now, although rather than "cases" they present "case-studies", and ask their classes to work through them. In other words the students are doing exactly what they would once they become doctors, in a safe environment, where no-one is reliant upon their calculations or diagnoses, and where the outcomes are known, and can be discussed in detail at the end. Initial indications are that this involved form of learning is far superior to a chalk and talk lecture covering the same subject matter.
Kirschner, Sweller and Clark [usc.edu] disagree with you on that.
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Thank you, I had not seen that review before.
It does appear that I have been guilty of "defend(ing) on the bias of intuition alone, teaching methods that are not the most effective". Not that I'd ever have suggested doing away with directed learning, or that I'd use unguided learning in blatantly inappropriate situations (for example with students with no fore-knowledge or existing schema), but reading that has provided plenty of food for thought.
My thanks again!
Explanation seems a little strange (Score:2)
So in short (Score:2)
Everything Old Is New Again (Score:2)
How is this different than the Problem Based Learning (PBL) [wikipedia.org] approach pioneered at McMaster medical school in the 60s (and since adopted worldwide)?
As students at Mac, we often got a kick out of seeing even our fiercest crtics at schools like the University of Toronto slowly come around to our pedagogy, but with subtly different names of course (ie, case-based learning).
It works great for medical school, and I think would also apply well to graduate school, where you have pressure to obtain results or not em
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One thing that distinguishes Open University, is their active research into new teaching methods. While they _used_ to do lectures, they don't appear to do that any more, and with more modern methods, they're considered world leaders in research into how to teach effectively.
Yep. And everyone continues to ignore the OU. Flipped classrooms = lectures. Coursera/Udacity replace lectures with.... short lectures. No-one attempts to follow the OU's model.
Bye, bye, sleep (Score:1)
Without lectures, how will I get any sleep? All the rest of the time is taken up with important activities.
Yes, absolutely, yes... (Score:2)
...yes, a hundred times yes. "Active learning" where "you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there" is always better than a lecture -- where the student comes in knowing nothing and leaves knowing more than nothing.
Good on you. If the student has already learned it, they'll learn more. Congrats.
I believe "active learning" used to be called "home work". I guess George Carlin's right again -- shell shock, battle fatigue, and operational exhaustion, ain't got nothing on post-t