Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too
news.sciencemag.org
news.sciencemag.org
Anecdotal :
Honestly, I'd go so far as to say that teaching as a whole is an afterthought, even (or especially?) at top universities. I work for a research institution affiliated with a top CS school, and attend their classes regularly. The quality of instruction and academic support in the undergrad classes makes me cringe for the students, particularly given the astronomical tuitions demanded of them. Over-crowded (and un-recorded) lectures are a staple.
Lectures are omnipresent for many reasons. One is because it is a lot easier to stand up in front of the class and just spew out knowledge than to take the time to understand what the students need in a class and adjust lectures appropriately.
The class is 700 people, in Kane Hall, literally 10x my entire graduating class from HS.
After the first lecture, and with extreme naivety, I walk up to the professor, Eugene Silberberg, and ask him when his office hours are in case I need any help with the material.
The perplexed look on his face was probably the most memorable thing I experienced my entire four years in college.
"Uh, go talk to your TA"
You can also find many schools offering these courses online, for a bit more money. Transferring in a credit is painless.
Actually transferring college credits is one of the most painful things I've done in my academic career.
Now, out of state transfers, that's another story.
[0]http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_25731300/uc-nonresid...
Is the massive lectures thing predominantly a state school phenomenon? Maybe my university being real-estate bound had something to do with it.
To be honest, I preferred large lectures and suspect I would prefer massive lectures for the same reason: smaller lectures are more prone to inane interruptions from students (typically students that had been skipping lectures).
But education systems are a product of political and, consequently, economic belief. We believe in a nominally equal distribution of power, but we also believe that most people are destined to be industrial cogs, with disproportionate power going to an elect few. That's what our school systems reflect: niceties declaring equality while applying a rigorous filter in order to determine the worthy.
I wouldn't say "niceties declaring equality while applying a rigorous filter in order to determine the worthy". This is just too dour. Filters have to be set. I mean, people without arms just can't be fluent in sign-language. Like wise, people that just can't do calculus just can't be rocket scientists. That is not to say these people are not valuable elsewhere. Hell, I can play guitar a tinge, but I would say a guitarist adds more to life than I ever will. Similarly with a dance instructor. Their talents are what we do all this engineering for.
Worth is not economic, it's internal. What some guy in a tower thinks matters is not what you should think. College, as much as it is a cliche these days, is about teaching you to learn. Whatever that is that you do learn. At then end of it all, you can't take a coin, transistor, or chord with you into the grave.
Also, many many kids are unfit for STEM fields, Law or Medical school, yet go into school as if they are[0]. The cutting has to occur for the good of society and the students themselves.
My '5A: Intro To Physics' course was notorious for the cutting. The attrition rate was 90%. This was intentional. If you could not contend with the bad grades, the stress, the material, and the work in that class then you were out. Better now than in 3 years. My graduating class year was about 7000 people, of which 20 were in physics, a rate of 0.3%.
[0]http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/07/08/math-science-popul...
But I think we'd lose a lot of the benefit of doing so if it became a standard.
Quite possibly, yeah. Learning environments are quickly destroyed if they have to accommodate people who don't want to be there.
In addition to teachers focused on teaching, community colleges also have a significant share of adult education... and it's not quarantined away as it is in universities, because the percentage is in the double digits, rather than measured in decimal points.
There are other things, but I'm having trouble capturing them.
What happens if you didn't make a connection to someone you want to develop a relationship with?
Learn how to make connections if you want connections. University is a lot more expensive and a lot less effective for that.
So far as I can see, "a $200 marketing package and a couple months" isn't going to actually get you far, but if you're interesting and know how to network then dropping a few thousand for charity dinners or similar might be able to get you further for cheaper than being one of however many students at a big-name school.
If you go to college just for the education, then there are a lot of places that are very good for the dollar [1] (still though, Ivys dominate).
If you want a mix of the two, it seems as if you'd still want to go to prestigious schools. They have the scholarships, very good teaching, grade inflation, the connections to the progeny of money, and their grads are well received in industry and elsewhere. Really, a cursory look at the data does seem to indicate an Ivy or the Claremonts (though many exceptions exist[2])
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_bonding (Actually a good article to read)
[1]http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/xqeol/the_preside...
$200k and 4 years, or $200 and a couple years sending letters? Btw, it's only going to take years for the President. The CEOs of F500's can be done in months.
Even the entry level classes have pretty good TA support, and the TAs often know more than the professors. That being said, I found it useful not to go to the huge lectures (even the one taught by the nobel prize winning physicist, who wasn't that great of a lecturer), spend my time in the study center, and rely a lot on the TAs (who were mostly awesome).
It was really actually quite cool getting so much of his headspace for my project.
My TAs were probably 60% great, 20% alright, 20% pretty bad during my time there.
Probably not as much as simply reading books.
My currrent understanding that they were cost effective at some point of history, when students didn't have books, but lecturers did:
> Not only are they still lecturing, a relic of the Middle Ages when students didn’t have books and monks read them to them
http://educationoutrage.blogspot.de/2013/01/princeton-profes...
I usually also got better grade, maybe because I had clearer idea about what lecturer focused on.
Video lectures on coursera were much more effective for me then live lectures. The difference was in speed up, slow down, rewind and stop buttons of course.
Exactly. The book covers a much wider range of topics. The lecture just clues you in on what the teacher is going to include on the exam.
Compare something like Schaum's Outlines to an undergraduate text for the same material for an example of what I mean. The outlines are pretty pruned down.
edit: just to add one more thought: we read all the time about "opinionated software." Pruning down the material requires understanding and "opinion" in the same way --- textbook authors almost invariably have the understanding, but are usually economically discouraged from imposing their opinion on the material because it can discourage book sales because instructors with different opinions tend to choose a different book. Lecturers don't have the same concerns, so they can prune more aggressively. Authors of textbooks that will never sell well (e.g. the advanced texts I mentioned earlier) don't have the same concerns either since they're never going to make a substantial amount of money off the book, so they can prune pretty heavily too.
Plus, while it may make sense for textbook to contain five different explanations, theories or proofs or whatever on X, it makes even more sense for professor to require only the most important of them.
For who? Got to keep some sort of pretence up to make people think they're not just purchasing the right to sit the exams.
I also work at an institution that can be described like yours. To me, listening to a professor lecturing has always been the most effective way of learning something. Not because the lecturing quality was so outstanding but because I apparently can absorb new information better when somebody explains it while I think along. I fall asleep much quicker when I read a text book (as opposed to a lot of other students).
201 weeded out the fratboys and folks who used "sort by first job starting salary" approach to picking a major. The 300 level courses washed out the people who weren't passionate/insane, and the 400 level courses taught you stuff.
In fact, most of my learning took place while taking notes independently on lecture notes / slides (rarely the textbook, although sometimes they were okay), sometimes watching lectures from other schools, and then trying to apply the knowledge to projects and practicing for exams. Discussion sections were only occasionally useful, generally for the more difficult classes where I actually needed an empathetic person who recently took the course to explain things to I.
For the most part, though, I feel like I taught myself most of what I learned here - I would have done fine if lectures didn't exist. Mind you, this only applies to the CS program. I took only the required EE courses.
The great thing about the institution is definitely the research. My graphics professor, for example, does a ton of awesome work both academically and professionally. Working with him would have been a great opportunity to get into that industry.
Otherwise, I don't see why I couldn't have just done my education by myself. The only problem would be motivation to slug through the difficult / boring but important stuff. My databases class got quite boring at points such that, if I were teaching myself, I may have just skipped over a good chunk of the class material. I'm imagining that if I just had a person to get on my case and me on them, it would be almost as effective as the concept of a GPA.
1: you've been screwed by the California budget over the last 5-10 years.
2: I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) offers classes that are unimaginable at other universities. An undergraduate SDE class really is "unimaginable" most places, and learning the material from a textbook would be impossible -- it's too difficult and appropriate textbooks don't exist. The "textbook" is usually the instructor's notes from the last time they taught the class.
Anyway, I have enormous fondness for Berkeley and the three classes I took there got me into grad school and kicked off my career (I took these classes after graduating from college --- Tufts, which is a great liberal arts-oriented school with generally small classes and personal attention, but it ain't got undergraduate SDE --- and moving to the bay area), so I'm kind of saddened to read your experience.
edit: typos
Not a Berkeley alum, but I went to UVa; which is considered a similar tier (if I remember right, the top 3 public schools in the US, at least by News+World rankings, are usually a toss up between Berkeley, UVa, and UCLA).
I think this is definitely true, and in basically every field a top school is strong in. The upper level courses, even at the undergraduate level (especially the ones people are not required to take. If it's a required course, /someone/ has to teach it, and they might not be that into it, particularly if they aren't teaching faculty. If it's an elective, they're teaching it because they think the subject is awesome.) are usually being taught by people who have made it their entire life's work to study that field, and at that level of University are often some of the best people in that field. That kind of perspective, depth of knowledge, and passion don't necessarily translate well to teaching (I can think of some math professors that I had...), but it often does, and even if it doesn't those professors are usually /amazing/ resources outside of class if you want to know more about (subject of choice), what the current problems in that field are, what's considered important or valuable, etc.
I'd hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think that if you didn't manage to take as many advanced courses (particularly graduate ones. Good undergrads at institutions like that can almost always handle the graduate courses they offer after they have the sufficient background) with as many top people in a field (or fields) as possible, you wasted an opportunity if you were at a school like that.
(Full disclosure: I come from a family of liberal arts professors at UVa, whose social circle largely consisted of other liberal arts professors at UVa. I might be a little biased on the matter... but those people /know their field incredibly well/. All of the ones I've met, both outside and in school, are both very, very smart and many of them spend the majority of their time thinking about one field or area of study.)
I personally don't see why 'often does' would be the case, at least in technical fields. I'm also thinking about graduate student instructors (GSIs), the ones who taught discussions. Few were genuinely good at teaching the material either - I always had to 'shop around' to find the few who were capable of explaining the material properly. All of them were very smart, but I think that it was often a drawback because they often seemed unable to empathize with not quickly developing an understanding of the material. Others simply weren't interested in teaching or at least didn't seem interested. There were, though, a couple that were both brilliant and seemed to genuinely think and care about teaching. This paralleled my experience with professors.
I was actually talking with my girlfriend about this because she thought she had a lot of good / great professors during her time at Cal. However, she was also in the social science realm. I have two very rough hypotheses to try and explain this difference:
One, I think that it might have something to do with the fact that most of my professors were originally from countries other than the US. Accents were never a problem, but I would guess that when it came to explaining more difficult concepts, there may have been some gaps in communication.
Two, more importantly, I think that the research done in computer science attracts a different kind of person than research in the social sciences. My girlfriend noted that much of the research that her professors were doing necessarily involved a lot of human interaction that extended beyond the academic sphere. On the other hand, I'm guessing that CS research is a lot more insulated, which may result in worse communication skills.
> even if it doesn't those professors are usually /amazing/ resources outside of class if you want to know more about (subject of choice), what the current problems in that field are, what's considered important or valuable, etc.
Again, this isn't helpful when it comes to actually learning the course material. If you want to do research, this is great. But I'm talking exclusively about the undergraduate educational experience.
> I'd hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think that if you didn't manage to take as many advanced courses (particularly graduate ones. Good undergrads at institutions like that can almost always handle the graduate courses they offer after they have the sufficient background) with as many top people in a field (or fields) as possible, you wasted an opportunity if you were at a school like that.
I took 6 upper division CS undergraduate courses + 1 graduate CS course. Most graduate classes were only for graduate students or, if anything, took only A+ / 4.0GPA undergrads, at least in the few fields I was interested in.
>Again, this isn't helpful when it comes to actually learning the course material. If you want to do research, this is great. But I'm talking exclusively about the undergraduate educational experience.
Sure, but my original point was that the unique thing that Berkeley and other tippity-top schools offer are those quasi research-oriented classes. For "database security," you can learn the material well lots of places, and for some people a less prestigious university might be a much better environment. And, for sure, depending on the year or the subject, for a class like that you might get an adjunct lecturer who doesn't know the material well, an adjunct lecturer who knows the material phenomenally well and works in the field, a tenure-track/tenured professor who doesn't give a shit, or a tenure-track/tenured professor who does cutting-edge research in the area and cares a lot about teaching. It's a crapshoot.
But going to Berkeley gives you access to classes like "Qubits, Quantum Mechanics, and Computers" [1] that are offered almost nowhere else. Those classes can be extraordinarily hard, but extremely rewarding.
[1]: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs191/sp12/ (not my field, so this is my guess at a representative example. For Berkeley, I think anything in the 19* range fits the bill.)
The best teaching I found in my upper division experience was from GSIs. So yes, they do, especially since they're the ones that will become professors some day.
> But going to Berkeley gives you access to classes like "Qubits, Quantum Mechanics, and Computers" [1] that are offered almost nowhere else. Those classes can be extraordinarily hard, but extremely rewarding.
But there's a big problem here as well: such courses, that are only offered every once and a while, fill up extraordinarily quickly, which goes back to the issue of lack of funds and too large class sizes. Getting into any preferred upper division course is difficult now. It especially didn't help that I was always behind fellow students in my grade when it came to class registration times because I did not have very much AP credit coming in (my high school didn't teach to APs at all). This meant even some students a year or two below me got registration before me.
Another thing: if you wish to inspire students to take the difficult but rewarding classes that you're speaking about, having a mostly mediocre undergraduate experience does not help at all. If most of my upper division courses were, in my experience, taught poorly, why would I want to take even more difficult quasi-graduate courses, where poor teaching would be more impactful?
In the end, I did choose Berkeley over Carnegie Mellon and other schools. I feel a tiny bit of regret in having done so, only because I feel like a smaller prestigious private school would have offered a better undergraduate experience than Berkeley without sacrificing the awesome opportunities that you're talking about. Then again, there are many things about my experience here that I don't regret at all.
Experiential learning rocks! I never want to go back to lecturing.
I had only recently learned of the teaching style, mainly from a K-12 education conference where I was the only university professor, which KQED reported on -- http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/can-university-profe.... After the conference I redid the syllabus to replace lectures and texts with the students and I getting to understand each other to connect the material to their lives to motivate them and so I could help them create projects they'd care about because they'd be connected to their lives.
The results:
- The students loved the class.
- Over half of them are continuing the class projects after the course ended.
- Several reported me the best professor and the class the best class they took.
- The students are getting together to create a video about the class even after it ended.
As much as I'd like to brag, the credit goes to the teaching style.
Engaging students with empathy and helping direct them to personal projects connected to their lives works better than any lecture, at least in my experience. It was a lot more engaging, fun, and educational for me too.
The core, to me, is to see the students as the most important consideration and the content lower, the opposite of the lecture model. With the internet, the students can find any information they want at any time. Lecturing wastes their time. My value is in connecting with them, helping direct them, sharing my experience, and holding them accountable -- more like a manager or colleague in the world.
How do you ensure students get a broad understanding of the subject?
In my experience the major difference between hiring self directed learners and people who studied cs in college is the lack of breadth in self directed learners. Great python/js/php web dev who has never heard of pointers or a priority queue?
I can't speak on avoiding what they're familiar with generally, but my strategy was to make the deliverable for most sub-projects a five-minute presentation on their results to the rest of the class. I reasoned that presentations are critical for marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship in general, and that the students had very limited presentation experience so the format would give them experience. Then I followed many presentations with students meeting one-on-one to give advice to each other.
Public presentations with feedback are accountability tools that force them to do thorough, quality work, to pay attention to each other, to see how others tackle similar challenges, and to develop communication skills. Several of them were scared to present at first but then reported improving presentation skills as one of the most important parts of the class. They grew a lot in that area.
I also made deliverables similar to real-world problems. I assigned them to talk to people in the field, even experts in the field, which forced them to prepare (I didn't just throw them to the wolves. We worked up to that by having them practice with classmates and then friends and family to develop their business communication skills).
Regarding breadth, I told them at the beginning of class something like this: "Even the best salespeople learn sales their whole lives. Nothing anyone can do can make you the worlds' best salesperson or marketer in one semester. You'll always have more to learn. If you became the best, you'd probably keep learning faster. My goal in this class is to develop in you the skill to improve yourself by finding out what you need to know and learning it -- to improve the slope of your learning more than the y-intercept."
The most important tool was having them act, not just listen or read. I can't comment on how things will go for them in the future, but they've already hit major business challenges and learned how to overcome them, like how to find an expert in the field and get him on the phone. Each saw others do it. Their barriers are lower. If they have depth without breadth and they need it, I hope they'll figure out how to get that breadth. The class is only a semester so we couldn't cover everything no matter what.
By the way, they weren't purely self-directed learners. I created the course structure and they never worked more than a week without oversight.
Incidentally, I don't claim to have mastered inquiry-driven project-based learning, only that it's gone great so far. I expect to keep learning my skills in it forever. Part of why I'm posting at such length here is to try to find or create community of people who work similarly. I saw how much the K-12 IDPBL community helps each other. I hope university IDPBL teachers do too.
The first talks about how games also teach things, but in a way that failure is an incentive to learn more and try another way around a problem (which is an essential skill for creative work) without the crippling fear of failure that makes students stick to easy topics to avoid bad grades.
The second discusses how one would design games for education with that perspective in mind and how analytics would help teacher make the best use of their time.
And by then you'll be hooked to Extra Credits and watch all 8 seasons :)
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Also, I didn't read the original source, but I wonder how difficult it is to get a class to be active participants in a lecture. I know plenty of people, if given a clicker to answer questions in class, would either not do it, or just click randomly (if it was required).
I think it is pretty obvious that getting students to actively participate is the ideal, but I feel like a lot of teachers and/or professors have given up on this strategy because it is more work on their part. If students don't want to learn (a good amount of) teachers probably don't want to put forth the effort to force them to.
Technologically clickers are impressively easy to use as well, you just need to put in slides with questions into the main presentation. The biggest disadvantage is students who forget to bring their clicker or have endless excuses about why they couldn't be in class on a certain day.
My grades were good, so I do not think it is the issue of me being incapable of college level of learning.
I also usually managed to get enough participation points or answers or whatever was necessary for the grade, but rarely felt that the whole thing added something to my learning. It felt more like waste of time, especially those parts when people asked or had comments only to show they are participating.
That is I guess why problem solving and active exercises were usually done in smaller groups (at least in our school). It is easier to manage in that setup.
The slides would often be years old and would fail to adapt to common trends. As for the books, the few updates they received each year seemed to be a way for lecturers to force students to buy the new editions (e.g. page 10 becomes page 20), rather than actual research updates.
This, to me, just feels like lecturers trying to get their money's worth. The students have become secondary to the whole "education thing". I'm aware that higher education systems are largely at fault, not just the lecturers, but one would think integrity would have gotten the better of this odd machinery.
Unfortunately the problem seems even larger to me, we assume Education is this linear, step-by-step thing, when in fact people learn different things at different speeds, in very different ways. Lectures are only a symptom of trying (and failing miserably) to normalize Education. It's the quote by Einstein in all its glory: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid".
There are a lot of weaknesses to point at with the online education platforms popping up, but I think those weaknesses minuscule compared to our standardized brick and mortar structure we have today. Really the only thing I find particularly lacking is a mentor. I don't need a person to lecture me in person everyday for an hour, I just need someone to check in to make sure I'm staying on track, or to point out a different area I might find interesting if I'm bored with what I'm working on.
We really only need a few expert lecturers to build high quality online classes. The 40 students to one teacher can be slightly modified by 40 students to one mentor, whose job is simply to make sure everyone is staying relatively engaged. I don't think a teacher can effectively instruct a class of 40 students, and it's wildly ineffective and inefficient. A trained mentor, however, can make sure a group of 40 students are progressing on their own. (The 1:40 certainly needs to be up for experimentation, but the point is I feel online education can be a close fit to the general infrastructure of our system today).
Then again, I didn't go to uni for CS because it's such a boring subject.
For other areas, like theoretical physics and philosophy, however, the lecture and the seminar are awesome.
So we need to be careful not to paint the world with an engineering brush.
I think that in Computer Science in particular you can completely move to video recorded lectures. Some say that we need live lectures so that people could ask questions, but from my experience, the questions asked during lectures are usually inane (mostly stemming from the fact that the person didn't pay attention) and could be answered by simply rewinding the video, or looking something up online. At the worst case, you could always email the professor/TA.
I guess the only thing being lost here is the social aspect of college where you get to meet new people.
It's conceptually simple, "orientation-like" material that can be learned fairly effectively with lectures.
https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/20reasons...
"Disclaimer: The ideas, explanations and evidence which form the arguments of this paper are not the outcome of years of esoteric study and hence accessible only to professional educationalists. On the contrary, they are readily available in popular paperbacks, notably in Donald Bligh's "What's the Use of Lectures?" The evidence is not new. The arguments have been made before. Only the continued prevalence of lecturing justifies the writing of this paper."
[...]
"Conclusion: I would not like to leave the impression that I feel that there is no justification for ever lecturing. I lecture myself (though seldom for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch and then seldom when written substitutes are available). I believe there are circumstances when a well structured, well paced, varied, lively lecture can be the most efficient teaching method. But I do believe there is far more lecturing going on than can reasonably be justified by the evidence concerning the efficiency of lectures, especially bearing in mind the nature of the educational goals we claim to be striving for. I believe this state of affairs to be largely due to ignorance, attitudes, and institutional constraints, rather than to any inherent virtues of lecturing which I have overlooked, and which everyone else is privy to. I believe both institutions and validating bodies ought to be asking serious questions about courses which appear to be based primarily on lecturing as the dominant teaching method."
I used the service to get through Calc 2 as an undergrad. I liked it so much (went from a C+ to A student in math) that I went to work there the next summer!
On another note, one of the biggest, and most baffling, complaints I heard from friends who went to a large local state university was foreign lecturers whose English was so poor they couldn't understand what was being said.
The majority of class was spent with him in the front of the room responding to questions or comments about the assignment. He was really gracious and took the time to respond to what might have seemed like bad questions and somehow use them as a springboard to further the discussion.
He would also usually throw out book, movie, or music recommendations that popped into his mind during the course of the class that was related to the topic.
His passion for history and ability to engage the students was what made him an excellent professor.
There are some schools trying it out, using Khan Academy and other resources. I've visited a few and it's neat to see. I've also been doing that model in the weekend workshops I teach, and see definite benefits. No more having to rush the students that need more time or bore the students that got it quickly.
Where are you based, if you don't mind me asking. I'd be interested in volunteering at programming workshops in/around San Francisco.
For me, at least, a good lecture always brings together the assigned reading material in a way that I cannot achieve alone. A good lecture makes things click. Solving a thousand problems may also make concepts click, but a good lecturer will reduce the time needed.
TL;DR: The point of a lecture is not to tell you everything, but to bring together the material that you have already consumed and provide a different perspective than the book you read.
Then, teachers will plan to pander to that majority, so any student who does what s?he is actually supposed to do will end up bored to tears with the so called "lecture".
As a single data point, I was well known in undergrad school to sleep through lectures, and be left alone because whenever woke up I ended up disrupting the class plan by asking questions (which I had read about the night before) that other students could hardly understand and care about even less. Then, I suffered a lot through graduate school to get rid of my bad habits once I was expected to attend to real lectures.
To the extent that a professor is expounding on the reading materials--which is what you are really paying for in college--by applying them or synthesizing them, I think those lessons are often better taught through interactive dialogues with students. I'm probably a bit biased from my experience in law school, but I think the socratic method is a particularly strong pedagogical technique, and could be effectively implemented in many undergraduate courses.
But do you really think that a lecture can cover material as thoroughly as a textbook? In my experience, lectures were supposed to cover part of the material (perhaps some of the trickier parts), but could never be treated as a substitute for reading.
But generally speaking, especially when you account for the probability that "read the textbook" will result in me either grinding to a halt or just having content slide off, I covered more in lecture.
Textbooks were useful for specific needs for depth, used much more like reference works than a way to learn an entire topic.
Averages are not a very comprehensive measure for efficacy in a teaching environment. I am glad they included the failure rates too, but people here should not be so quick to jump to changing out the entire methodology based on two numbers. Different students learn differently, and ideally you would look at the distribution in student performance for different balances of teaching methods.
Having said that, they are onto something.
A lot of comments seem to hail e-learning, remote videos, recorded lectures, etc etc as the future of education, and it scares me if I have to be honest. There is a very important difference between a self-taught student and one that has undergone through formal education, and that is scientific rigor. Not to say that a self-learned person is less knowledgeable or "worse", it's obviously not true and there are always extremes, however actually attending lectures, going through the daily (and sometimes boring) routine of grinding through contents as explained in a boring way by your lecturer.. it's all part of building your determination and character as a researcher.
More often than not I find self-taught people staying at a very shallow level of knowledge, broad and generic, never digging through the details, going that extra mile to properly master a subject in a structured and well-disciplined matter.
In my opinion, that kind of education can only be achieved in a mentor-student relationship and, especially, through formal lectures. Even by just being around other people and interacting with the academic environment, it helps abstracting to a higher state of reasoning.
PS: I only have experience in the scientific academia, not talking about other branches like arts or philosophy or whatever.
In that vein.... I probably attended fewer than 15% of all of my lectures, for every class in undergrad (I was a math major; attendance didn't magically pick up in my advanced classes either). I've also finished an MS in stats and a PhD in economics (working on econometric theory, so... basically more stats) and work as an assistant professor.
Now, I'm posting on HN at 1am instead of sleeping or working, so I certainly lack discipline, but I don't think that "attending boring lectures as an undergraduate" is the magic precondition that you seem to. :)
This may be true, but I definitely like reading the range of opinions on this subject and I think it's helpful as an educator.
>I think it's important to note that most people are self driven enough to learn on their own.
This is sadly not true, but I'm happy that you think it is!
* Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l...
* At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?pagewant...
* First-year physics course being transformed through experiment http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/physics-1219.html
* The Tomorrow's College Lecture Series - Don't Lecture Me http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows...
* Inventing a New Kind of College http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows...
Students don't have much to rely on to determine how well they're doing in a class. Currently, we rely on practice problems. Often times, this feedback loop isn't closed. If it is, it's possible to learn where you went wrong, but often times the solution manuals say "as an exercise for the reader..." or have similar lines.
This paper was proposing to devise some test to determine how well a student understood the material and suggest strategies to more easily solve the problems (afaik at least).
Something I've noticed: we still rely on someone else relaying the information to us. Who says there's who explains the concept better somewhere else? Can we devise a method to have the student give their full and undivided attention while incorporating the technology?
That's the huge flaw in MOOCs as they are now. You can put all the content in the world online for free or not and most people won't watch or learn from it. That's the critical flaw in the e-learning investments right now.
Here's a title, and maybe a paragraph about a class. Oh you signed up, nice. Then student found out the details of a 100+ hour investment and said "nope".
Unless of course, you are insinuating that a majority of these people are cheating (i.e. copying and pasting answers on HW's) I don't really see what the big deal is.
Two years ago, Sal Khan and John Hennessy (president of Stanford), went to a conference and talked about the future of education: http://allthingsd.com/20120531/how-do-credentials-change-as-...
They both concluded that lectures may not exist in the future!
Sure, there are such things as lectures that have oratorical brilliance, that inspire students about their subject. However, for the most part, lectures are just inefficient ways to get information across. With the Internet, we have methods to get this information asynchronously, without requiring packing everyone into a room.
Rather, the role of the teacher in the future will be supporting students. That's where humans outshine computers - answering questions, tutoring, understanding where students might be confused, etc.
Me, I learned more from a textbook than I did in big 200 person lectures. You can go at your own pace, you don't have to wait for the professor to answer questions, etc. The best supplement, when I was confused with the material in class, was to have one-on-one time with a teacher.
What would I listen to in my car streamed by bluetooth from my phone? Radio? No way.
What might happen is someday, someone is going to record "The Ultimate verbal explanation of a PDA automata" or whatever, and then for the next 500 years that'll be The One that everyone listens to. It hasn't turned out this way in books because of legacy analog media combined with desire of publishers to maximize profits. Imagine if you could just download the Feynman lectures on physics. Aspects are out of date, but still going to be better than the local talent.
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/the_character_of_physical...
OK, so that's not quite everything but it is a pretty good start, and there's lots of other stuff out there on the web.
But the way professors are compensated has changed dramatically. In the early times the students payed the professor directly. Per lecture. I.e. those students who chose to attend and apparently got something of value.
One midterm one final, lectures everyday taken straight from the powerpoints the publisher provided with the teaching edition, same with the tests. I'm sorry but talking isnt teaching I can read the book word for word at home, explain the concepts do some activities anything please! Most classes I got A's in and learned something had hands on activities in addition to the lecture.
They can be boring, entertaining, exciting, repetitive, straight-from-the-textbook or enlightening but surely no one thought lectures were primarily educational.
Good lecturers made me want to read the book, study the subject, experiment on my own or do my best on assignments and labs. That's the purpose of the lecture in my opinion.
Maybe someone can highlight the teaching methods in other parts of the Eastern world?