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Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

Enrolled! Anyone have any opinions on what subjects you CAN'T teach effectively through MITx's proposed methods?

I'm having trouble coming up with any "intro"-level work that cannot be effectively handled in this way. Solve the likely engagement issues (perhaps with well-designed gamification), and suddenly you've replaced all 100-level university courses -- freeing professors to teach the interesting stuff.

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Introductory-level courses are interesting stuff if the right person teaches it (to the right students). In fact, they can (and should) be more than that. Intro courses should inspire, fascinate, and fill students with excitement about their journeys ahead in their field. I was lucky to have some of those.

In terms of the lecture content, if you go to any large university this is essentially how those 100 level courses are taught anyways. You're sitting in a huge auditorium with hundreds of other students just watching the lecture on a TV screen. The grading of assignment is then done by TA's. The professor has been abstracted away so far in those classes that I see little difference just replacing it with a format like this.

Agreed. However I wouldn't complain if this drives costs down for students.

English seem like the largest issue, because the system would need to be able to understand an essay to grade it and provide feedback. The other issue is intro classes are setup to go over material with the expectation that people will form study groups if they don't understand it. Which in many ways is punting the issues of education back on the students.

P2PU has an implementation (clumsy, at this point) of the "study group" concept -- but there's nothing about learning online that makes it impossible to collaborate with fellow students, right? I agree it's a problem, but I think it'll be solved sooner rather than later.

As for the English example, you'd probably run into that problem for all types of writing-intensive courses. That seems like potentially a major gap in this entire model of learning. Multiple-choice and defined-output problem solving sometimes just can't cut it...

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