Yale U. Library Acquires Lost Play by Eugene O’Neill

The word “Wikipedia” in the title is utterly irrelevant, and if anything, it devalues the concept, since we all know Wikipedia is governed by a corrupt and inept team of non-academicians.  It’s as if Vedder has never heard of Khan Academy.  Finally, did Mr. Loynd really say, “A student could them work…”?

I never cease to me amazed by Vedder and others who assume that everything in college involves a profession lecturing in front of a large class, with students reading a book or two, and then taking a mid-term and final exam.  What does Vedder propose for teaching sculpture involving welding or woodworking?  How about biology?  Does each student go catch a frog?  Classes that involve anything other than text-based interchanges will be exceedingly difficult.  Yet we are all draw to the panacea of online education as if it will save massive amounts of money and draw millions more students to college.  In some majors?  Sure.  In many others?  Not so much, not so good.

This could be just as successful as education obtained by just reading the textbooks, or that notion that revolutionized the world of education 50 years ago, educational TV!  Sorry for the sarcasm, but very few people learn well by just listening passively.  Real education consists in confronting ideas and receiving feedback on your efforts and questions.  As educators have learned that lecturing to largely passive audiences hasn’t been working and instead move toward techniques to engage in more “active learning”, it is surprising to see an article like this promoting what clearly does not work for most learners!

All of this “innovation”? To what end? What is the good of an education, if it can’t be applied in some meaningful way in our society. I hate to use long quotes, but in the case of this discussion, we could look to Bob Dylan, not Bill Gates for the answer to this “crisis”.

Excerpted from “Tombstone Blues”

Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll
Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole
And the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul
To the old folks home and the college

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the streets
With the tombstone blues

We had better look at ways to reconnect with people face to face rather than view the virtual campus as the only way to go in the future.

There is a quaint notion that a University is a place to go to to interact with students similarly inclined and to meet educated men.  Suggestions to replace face-to-face teaching with the latest high-tec are very old but do not work for most subjects or individuals. It seems some subjects cannot be learnt from a textbook: you have to be taught.  Chinese is the classic example but in the biological sciences biochemistry seems to be practically impossible to learn from a textbook or on-line.  Kimbruce & bbaicad are right.

As others have mentioned, lectures are a poor method of teaching. Some excellent work on this very point have been done by physicists. Two papers that come to mind are

Hake, “Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses” http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf . As the title suggests, it looks at learning by some 6,000 students in some 60 courses. Figure 2 summarizes the results — lectures lead to far less learning. This paper has been quite influential in physics education research (PER) as Google Scholar reports 1,400 cites to it.

Deslauriers, Schelew, and Wieman, “Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class,” Science, Vol. 332, no. 6031 pp. 862-864 (May 2011)  http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html and click on the link to this paper (or, if you have direct access to Science, click on
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6031/862.abstract . This paper very much addresses Vedder’s point that a lecture by a leading scholar leads to good learning. Rather, it shows the opposite — well into the semester, they swap out an experienced lecturer with a post-doc with little teaching experience who teaches by asking questions and with group work. The students taught this way earn far more. See  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110512/ap_on_sc/us_sci_teacher_or_tools for a summary. It’s worth noting that the last author, Carl Wieman, is both a Nobel Laureate and U.S. College Professor of the Year (for research universities). He’s currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President (for science education). One would hope that other disciplines would have leading scholars publishing works on pedagogy.

In short, the interactive teaching that physicists have shown leads to better leaning doesn’t lend itself to being filmed. It takes, well, interaction in the classroom. For example, when Eric Mazur goes into the classroom (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg for him in action) he isn’t sure what questions he’ll ask until he sees what his students understand.

Active learning is indeed a better way to go.  But why not let students access the best-of-the-best professors in an active-learning, university setting?  Let’s replace learned professors with engaging and effective educators and mentors that: 1) explore and discuss great content rather producing their own; 2) measure, assess, and evolve learning techniques on a real time basis;  and 3) customize interaction and content based on students profiles to insure superior outcomes.   

We no longer need an army of PHD specialists teaching our undergraduate students the same content over and over again when we can point them to the best explanations for solving any problem or understanding any subject.   The successful educators of tomorrow will be those who can effectively curate the massive content already available in a format that produces the smartest students with least amount of effort and resources. 

Some percentage of a typical college education consists of listening to lectures.  When I attended a land grant university as an undergraduate physics major, it was about 90%.  When I taught mathematics at a smaller institution, I interacted intensely with a few of my students.  Unfortunately, for most of them, I was just a guy lecturing and occasionally grading tests and quizzes. 

I’m sure things are better now at many colleges and universities, but at hundreds and hundreds of mediocre schools students are probably getting something less valuable than what the “Vedder University” promises.  It may be that a scheme involving online lectures plus outsourced recitation and grading is only a jazzed up version of the venerable correspondence course.  My guess is that with the right kind of online discussion and coaching, it would be an acceptable and affordable alternative for hundreds of thousands of students.  It is not the answer, but it is an answer.

The idea rests on the perfect student, one that needs the credential of a degree but needs no support other than hearing a wonderful lecture in order to learn what is being presented to her.  All of the faculty I know would love to be teaching students of this kind, but almost none of us are.  Our students need to have things broken down to them in their terms, they need reinforcement, and they need a series of assignments that test that they are doing the reading (or problems).  Most importantly, they need a significant amount of work by an instructor to help them 1) articulate a problem, 2) frame their answer, 3) provide evidence, and 4) communicate this effectively.  Richard Dawkins, someone who could easily rank as a “stellar” professor, is not going to interact with 5,000 students over their writing, their problem solving skills, and their weak research.  The “cost” of courses (if not of the entire university, which is a very complex organism) is providing quality faculty to do this work.