FTA: “Do I think [this new course] is better than 30 students and the Socratic method, Dead Poets Society-style? Probably not,” Meer admits.
Exactly. At least he's honest. No, it's not better than a proper in-classroom experience. What it is better than is the horrible, awful, 250-student, auditorium-style, impersonal mass lecture. But that, IMO, is a woefully low bar and one that shouldn't ever have been invented in the first place. But, you know, when scalability is desired and useful technology simply doesn't exist, just making the room bigger is an awfully appealing "fix."
Me? I'll continue teaching small classes the right way as long as I'm able. And I'll put my methods up against the best pure-online instructors in terms of learning outcomes. Will the educate more students? Yes. Will they educate them better? I doubt it.
https://qz.com/1050869/the-college-lecture-is-dying-and-good-riddance/
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LEGO Americana Roadshow: Building Across America I just checked out this traveling exhibition from LEGO and was quite impressed. The scale ... -
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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When we let politics trump science, people are needlessly put in harm's way. http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/self-censoring-fears...
This got some attention and comments elsewhere on G+ and (yes) on Facebook. I have zero energy for curation today but wanted to note their existence, at least!
ReplyDeleteAutomation will eventually scale past small class size and will customize the teach experience almost perfectly to the student's learning style, effectively creating class sizes of 1.
ReplyDeleteJohn Lewis As you know, I'm an edtech advocate, but I'm getting weary of overselling it, and of being oversold. We've been saying that for decades! It's like a mashup of a chimera and the Holy Grail.
ReplyDeleteNot-so-tangent: I question both the societal need and beyond certain education reformer-privatizers, societal desire to even want to "scale past small class size." A good tutor-student match achieves the same end, and doesn't need automation.
There are very few subjects that I think can work at all with the large auditorium style. These would be the subjects where the material is pretty much already known by the students, and they are really just learning a few definitions, perhaps a few formulae, and some context for the information. Examples would be personal health courses and college level classes of subjects already taught in high school, like basic algebra.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have seen (and I am limited only to my own experience and those I know first hand), the only justification for even having these classes in the first place is that the college requires them. If they offered more options to test out for the credit, it would save the students a lot of time and money. Then the students that actually do need to be taught could be identified more easily, and reduced in number so that you could teach a smaller scale class and get them the attention they need. But then of course, the college wouldn't be making the money from teaching the students that don't actually need the class, so that's not a viable option.
I learned a lot from auditorium style lectures. It's a good way to cover introductory courses.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Station As with most service level jobs, it's going to come down to customization. Right now teachers are trained to teach to a student's learning style. If even that can be automated (so the teacher can be given shortcuts to teaching in the proper style by having a computer aid them in teaching style) we could see a better classroom.
ReplyDeleteBut that's the short sell. That's what gets these systems into the classrooms to start and then, slowly, the computer takes over more and more or the duties until there's only a handful of teachers left because the majority of the teaching work is done automatically.
See also: Bank Tellers -> ATMs.
We're a strange place where we think education is an action we do to someone rather than a pathway we help someone attain. Education departments at universities are certainly somewhat to blame.
ReplyDeleteJohn Lewis That's one pathway down which education could evolve, but why would it? Education is unlike banking. Do you think such an evolution is preferable, inevitable, or both?
ReplyDeleteAlso (I meant to ask earlier) what do you mean by eventually? Years, decades, or centuries?
Wait, this literally popped up in my Facebook feed a few minutes ago, but the 10 years could be pure hype. The person claiming it has a new book out and I think has a vested interest.
ReplyDeletetes.com - Machines 'will replace teachers within 10 years'
George Station I've seen several attempts to automate teaching.
ReplyDeleteProgrammed learning (disclaimer: that's how I learned FORTRAN) went nowhere.
Computer Aided Instruction: ditto... Anyone remember PLATO? The hardware was impressive in its day...
Teaching machines: a complete bust.
I have learned a lot from You Tube's many excellent instructional videos, but they are simply the one off equivalent of the auditorium lecture. Also, I followed up with self-inflicted hands-on sessions.
George Station eventually, decades. Two or three decades.
ReplyDeleteThere will be a paridign shift that I can't specify because it's not knowable. There will be something that aids teachers or students that is AI based in the next 10 years. It will become the leverage that eliminates teaching jobs, for profit, by allowing even greater student to teacher ratios. Eventually teachers will be niche careers.
Why do you believe this?
ReplyDeleteBecause it's happened to many fields of work already and there are no fields of work which would elude the same fate, it's a matter of time and tipping points.
ReplyDeleteAutomation reduces jobs, period.
Craig Froehle your method of teaching small groups well sounds great. My own experience of university is so ancient now that I can relate more to your point in terms of what I see my teenage kids choosing for schools and university courses than my own misspent youth.
ReplyDeleteBut I'd certainly pay a lot more to have my kids physically participate in a limited course because I know from personal experience that forms cadre and personal network with their peers. My own closest friends and professional contacts remain the people I met at University (Cambridge, both for Masters and PhD) and in entry-level jobs (Accenture, McKinsey). We're social animals, we make sense through our network.
My worst experience with large auditorium lecture classes was Calculus for Business. There was no way ask questions or get clarification before you totally mislearned a concept.
ReplyDeleteLaura Gibbs Because of this morning's (Tuesday's) #paleofuture trail on Twitter.
ReplyDeleteSize of the class is crucial: as someone who teaches WRITING, I think my small-ish (30) classes online are better than they would be in the classroom. Why? Because in the online class writing IS the medium of instruction. I could not teach as well in a classroom as I can (and do) online.
ReplyDeleteWe need to separate out questions of mode of delivery (which seem to me not deterministic of quality one way or the other) with questions of size. Small classes with more personal attention are going to be better learning experiences than big classes every time I suspect.
This use of "scale" really bugs me because it is a euphemistic attempt to get around just admitting that classes have sizes: small, medium, large, insanely stupidly impossibly large. Call it like it is. My school, like I suspect most others, charges students the same tuition and fees for a 1200-person lecture class and for a 30-person class.
Which means the 1200-person lecture class brings in over a million dollars in tuition and fees each semester, while my class brings in $30,000. It's that simple, but nobody seems to want to just come right out and put those numbers on the table. I have sought but not found analytics for my school based on the average class size: my guess is that it would be very useful to know for a given student what their average class size is in any given semester and also over time, just as it would also be useful to know those numbers for majors, etc. If I were a student, it would help me to know which major to choose based on what those average class sizes were, for example.
I was the only Polish major at Berkeley. My classes were small.
Very small. :-)
Laura Gibbs my mother taught English, which means I received 1:1 writing instruction, like it or no. All too often, I didn't like it, though I have come to appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteIn my university days, I watched the pool of potential physics majors start at 250, shrink to 50 in a single semester, and dwindle to about 20 by graduation. Physics was a demanding major, with a far greater attrition rate than mathematics.
... rant alert ...
... which brings me to a pet peeve, the undergraduate computer (not) science major, which I think should be outlawed worldwide. It's training masquerading as education. I'm always showing my younger colleagues, some of whom graduated from top CS programmes, how to do stuff they should have studied at university. How many CS courses did I take? 0, none, zip, nada. And one of my colleagues admitted that he switched to CS because math and physics were "too hard." Go figure. I cannot.
One Cal State campus, CSU Chico (Kim Jaxon & colleague(s)) developed a "large-class" model for in-person General Education writing that, last I heard, is holding up. IIRC, you get 80-100 students in a section but you also get TA/peer support for every 10 students. Kim can describe in better detail or just point to wherever they describe what they designed.
ReplyDeleteImportant for this convo: Each of the other 22 campuses thinks Chico's success is great, but each has its own model, so you can forget about "scaling up" across a whole system just because another sector succumbs. We have structural mandates (e.g. 120 units for a bachelor's degree), but within that we do our own thing. At least I think that is how higher ed works.
Eric Mintz I watched the math requirement for CS diminish to what was deemed "good enough" on my campus a few years ago. That was just a symptom of bigger problems. They do CS really well but I'm not sure about their support for other topics that are foundational. I had to change departments for other reasons, but that was one of the things that didn't sit right with me.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Station when an experienced developer calls DeMorgan's Law "Bullshit" (as one did to my face), something has gone horribly wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt's 11th grade math, for heaven's sake. At least, it was 11th grade math in the late '60s.
The state of Ohio has consistently reduced the math requirements for approved programs over the last 20 years. That alone shouldn't affect the amount of math we want to include in our programs -- we'd like all our students to have more -- but the state ALSO reduces the maximum number of credit hours we're allowed to require for a major. Those two actions COMBINED make it almost impossible to keep as much math in the curriculum (because we'd end up having to remove other core content central to the major). And these are laws and policies put in place mostly be people who are lawyers or from other disciplines where math isn't emphasized. It's a net loss for society.
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle Yes, it's the combination of systemic decisions, any one of which may make sense when viewed in total isolation. Watch the steam and smoke rising from the Cal State system over the next few months. Brand-new Executive Orders from our Chancellor's Office aren't being received well across all (any?) of the campuses. Orders is orders, but people are reserving the right to push back.
ReplyDeleteWe need another sputnik.
ReplyDelete