Why Virtual Classes Can Be Better Than Real Ones
nautil.us
nautil.us
I thought that was just me. The ability to pause, rewind or replay a lecture is just so incredibly useful. I wish this had been available when I was young.
Lecture is my biggest problem with MOOCs. Lecture is the easiest and laziest way to teach a topic. I know because on my lazy days I tend to find myself falling back on it with my students. When I first started teaching I leaned on it heavily, and have learned it doesn't really work. Nobody retains anything of value.
Adults learn new things by doing and discussing. And adults zone out frequently. Really, the most the average adult can listen is about 15 minutes anyway, and after 10 you've probably lost interest. See http://www.mrmediatraining.com/2012/08/23/how-many-minutes-i... for some interesting info on that.
If you watch a cooking show, you learn some techniques. But unless you get in the kitchen and try to make that cake, and have someone give you feedback on your technique, then you won't learn how to do it.
But that doesn't scale online. Feedback and assessment simply don't work at that kind of level. And we know it doesn't. That's why in big lecture situations in traditional schools, there are lots of TAs, tutors, or supplemental instruction sessions to help people learn. But lectures scale really well for MOOCs so that's what they end up being - a series of video lectures. It's easy. Just record yourself talking and throw it online. And it's easy for students, too. They don't have to do things, they don't have to talk to anyone. They can just listen. And maybe zone out for a bit.
A huge benefit is that, as mentioned here, If you missed something in a lecture on video, you can rewind. But if you had a question or something to add, then the opportunity to do that in context is lost.
And that's where I think a lot of the dropoff happens too. We don't learn that way as adults. We learn by doing things and engaging with people. And if you can just take a course by watching someone talk to you, you've not really learned. You've just been told some stuff.
And this is why adults make comments like "I love online classes because I can slow the lecture down or rewind," Adules have been conditioned that lecture is how you're supposed to learn. Rewinding and slowing down is a bandage over the real problem; too much lecture and not enough application means you don't really learn - you don't retain things.
One last thing - lecture is highly effective for entry-level content if chunked. 15 minutes of lecture followed by direct application of the content or practice, followed by a review or reflection. Dr. Christine Harringon has some great insights on this. See http://drchristineharrington.org/publications for some.
I think the future of online learning is going to involve finding a way to scale the practice and assessment parts of learning. And I see interesting movement out there on that.
I don't know about the other MOOC's, but on Coursera the video lecture is regularly interrupted with a little multiple choice quiz, to test if you understood what was just explained. There are automatically scored tests after each week's lectures, and some courses more than others encourage or even require you to be active on the associated forum, where students discuss the lectures with each other and with the professors and TA's. It's not just a bunch of videos online.
Required discussions are great, but they are asynchronous and often after the fact. They certainly help. But in my small online courses, only 5% of the students engage in discussions that are not required, and 70% of the students only do the minimum of the required discussions. Which if you think about it is about the same as a traditional classroom. Ask a question of the whole group, get crickets until one brave student answers just to move things along. But put them in small discussion groups and watch things get noisy quickly.
Another aspect that is a lot of fun is that in one year you can take a class at Princeton, a few months later one in Calgary, then a few months later in Kopenhagen. All for no other reason than that I'd like to learn more about the subject. It's like going to college, but without the stress and pressure.
About retaining knowledge: you always lose the details after a subject ends, but regain it as you use the subject in your daily work. That's just how education works, you learn how to learn, not to retain the details. You can always look those up later.
It's entertainment, not education. It's like watching TLC or the History Channel. I get that. And that's totally cool.
Where things get messy is when people try to pass this off as a replacement for a formal degree.
And as for "learning how to learn...", may I ask how you learned how to learn? Your description sounds very similar to other people who have obtained a formal degree somewhere and already learned how to do that and have a natural drive to get better. I don't think everyone has that. Not everyone values learning.
On Coursera, colleges showcase some of their most famous professors, they cite sources, offer background material. The courses serve as advertisement for a college, so they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they served rubbish.
What course did you do on Coursera that gave you such a low opinion of it?
I had a formal education, and liked it so little that it turned me off the field. After working in a completely unrelated field for years, I got another formal education to get a degree relevant to my job. A MOOC is not a replacement for a degree, and doesn't compete with you at all. It's a way to check a university out.
Did you know Alberta is a great place to study dinosaurs? Did you know Kopenhagen is a great place to study earth sciences? Thanks to Coursera, you can now find out. Twenty years ago, there was no way for such information to reach me, or for me to act on such information. Or for me to study such a field, because there isn't a career in it outside academics, and we weren't that well off.
- For me, the most difficult part of in-person was managing my schedule and transportation. I would come in to class, all stressed out about being 10 mins late, only to listen to 15 minutes of unimportant chit chat. The energy expenditure felt hugely wasteful.
- In-class questions from others were generally not the questions I had in mind. I find forums more tailored. When someone asks a question, another student with access to books and google can take a thoughtful crack at it any time of the day, with the teacher/assistant adding in precisions regularly. Just like with any teacher/group, this is hit or miss.
- Pausing is key. For math classes for example, the ability to stop a lecture after a concept is introduced and spend the next 2 hours on books/internet/exercises/etc to really assimilate it before continuing is the best way I've ever learnt maths.
- Pace is good, but focus is also important. The ability to sleep 1 hour after work before starting a lecture makes a world of difference in my sustained alertness and interest.
I understand the arguments for traditional school, but for me they are outweighted by the immediate, tangible benefits I get from distance learning. YMMV.
Edit: shorten
1. You were motivated to learn.
2. The in-class time wasted your time with 15 minutes of chit-chat rather than purposeful doing.
3. Pausing is key. But you are motivated to spend 2 hours working on the concept. It has been my experience that many do not. They simply move to the assessment to get it done. Then retention is lost.
I'm not at all arguing for traditional school. Traditional school seems to be "let's talk at a room of people for an hour 4-5 times a week, then give them tests to see how much they remember."
I want to see "you watch the 15 minute videos and then we engage together to create something meaningful where you apply what you learned."
Which sounds exactly like what you want.
Make no mistake - I can't drive because I don't see well. I have to take a bus to go teach my face-to-face classes. The bus ride can be 30 minutes to an hour depending on when I pick it up. To teach an hour class, I need 3 hours of my day. And this puts in me in the same boat as my students.
When students come to my classes, I don't waste their time because it's precious.
I'd love an online version of this. But with online classes, it's hard to find common times because people take classes around work and other duties.
But presently for me this is not a requirement. I suppose that, being okay with the lecture format as the core, I wanted to pursue learning but with less of the contextual hassle and inefficiencies (I have enough of my own!). On that, online courses certainly delivered -- which is what I wanted to convey.
However, I won't deny that this may be approaching the upper limit of what online education can manage to do well.
I think the truth that people are getting at when they discuss this is that the sort of self-education that you and I like using these courses for is not at all a replacement for traditional education. I think this "problem" will vanish once it is widely recognized that these are more useful to augment ongoing self-education. It is easier than ever to be a lifelong learner, and that is a great thing and plenty of justification for the existence of these courses.
Wobbleblob wrote about the joy of learning, I feel the same, although I get my fix listening to audiobook lectures for the last quarter century or so. A lot of people like wobbleblob and I write about the joy of consuming quality educational resources. Nobody writes about the joy of assignments and exams. If you think its unusually rare that I'm listening to a university lecture series about Russian Literature on my commutes right now, imagine how even rarer it is to find someone who enjoys writing exams about Russian Literature. You might get a hundred thousand people like me to sign up for the good parts, the lectures. Good luck getting a thousand of us who are really bored to jump thru the hoops.
That's the fundamental problem with the MOOC market now, the metrics for success are things the consumers don't care about. I enjoyed the Scala class videos from a couple years ago, learned a little too. Unfortunately the metrics for success on the corporate side are meaningless such as how many signed up, how many jumped thru all the hoops in the limited amount of time, and the ratio of the above. Until the consumer goals and the corporate metric goals align, if ever, there will be endless hand wringing articles about how awful the metric results are and why won't the consumers cooperate?
There is an even worse problem in that a good class sabotages its own metrics. If my lecture series is any good at all, if its motivational, inspirational, exciting, when I'm done listening I'm going to read some Dostoevsky, not fill out some boring quiz or write an exam essay so someone can get a good metric result and I can get ... nothing?
To be blunt, I won't waste my time preparing videos, material, assessments, etc anymore because it feels like nobody cares.
I mean, 90% of the interesting stuff I am learning during my classes comes from the discussions that start at the end of the course with the professor and a few others.
I do enjoy the ability to rewind, and choose my pace when taking an online course. Too bad the quality of the interactions I have mentioned has not yet been captured by MOOCs or OCs.
Lecturers in a classroom, specially professors who's main goal is to research and are forced to teach, just come and blurt out whatever they think today session is about. I once had a class where the slides had scrambled egg over because the professor had been preparing the class over breakfast, with his baby boy on his lap!!! And I am not talking about an overworked postdoc, this was a guy with tenure. I imagine he though he was being brilliant by cramming together his parenting, contractual responsibilities to students and fulfillment of bodily needs into a single time slot so he would have more time for his oh-so-precious research.
When this kind of lecturer do some MOOC course, they become conscious there's going to be an audience and a record of their performance. So they devote at least as much effort to it as if they were writing a paper for some mid-tier congress. This has the double advantage of having them put an honest effort, and the delivery medium playing to their strengths. This shows in the end results.