While substantive data is always nice, this has always struck me as a bit of a "duh" factor. Lectures are omnipresent because they're cost effective. Pedagogical effectiveness is an afterthought.
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.
Little freshman sharkweek back in '03, having gone to a small high school (graduating class of ~70 or so) walks into his first class at the University of Washington, Economics 201 (the first of the series).
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.
I'm about to graduate from Berkeley, a so-called 'top' school. Besides the name of the degree, I can't think of anything that was particular top-notch about my education here. Class sizes were big and are only getting bigger. The intro CS class had a few hundred when I took it. Now? It can have up to 1100 students. I would say I've only had 4 good or great professors (enthusiastic, interesting, smart but also good at teaching) my whole time here - one in CS, one in EE, the other two in humanities. Everyone else ranged from useless or unbearable to okay. Many were simply too smart, so to speak. In other classes, the lecture powerpoints did most of the work for them.
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.
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).
You're completely right about teaching being an afterthought: just look at a university's hiring policy. New staff (researchers) are hired because of their research skills, i.e. the number of publications they can deliver or the number of grants they can receive, certainly not because of their teaching skills. Good teaching skills are only considered a nice benefit.
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 avoid having students stick to what they are familiar and comfortable with?
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?
Small point about the title: just because B is more effective than A doesn't mean A is ineffective.
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.
The problem is also that students have different pacing. Some will sit bored and waste time waiting while others will need more time or missed something and need to revise whole notes once again before they get it.
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.
About "it's more work on their part": when I lowered drastically the number of my slides, and started to put emphasis on facilitating the creation by my students of their own knowledge I had the guilty feeling of not spending enough time preparing the class. Preparing a lecture can be many hours of works. (Of course some lecturers will reuse ad nauseam the same slides and content for years. Not even thinkable in my field :-)
Back when I was at University, a lot of the lectures (and more generally courses) felt like advertising platforms for the lecturers. We would follow bland Powerpoint slides which would regularly point to particular chapters of books, more often than not written by the lecturers themselves.
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".
I'm actually very optimistic for education in the near future. After taking some Coursera classes, I'm confident a more personalized education is completely attainable.
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).
It sounds like you took awful courses. The majority of my professors were extremely engaging and very rarely acted like they had all of the answers or knew everything. In several cases we were actually encouraged to find fault with their work and some of my classmates actually did just that.
Then again, I didn't go to uni for CS because it's such a boring subject.
Well, scientists and computer engineers are typically working on real world problems, for which certain learning styles are better. I'm an engineer, so I actually would agree with this article... for those domains.
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.
Having studied theoretical physics, I would disagree with the statement that lectures are awesome. If anything, learning theoretical physics requires grappling with conceptually difficult material, where problem solving and debating the subject are essential. You can't learn it by passively memorizing information.
It's conceptually simple, "orientation-like" material that can be learned fairly effectively with lectures.
Here's an article from 1981 lamenting that although the science was settled and everyone agreed that lectures weren't any more effective than unstructured reading, you couldn't get the people giving lectures to stop doing so, generally for rather insipid reasons:
"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."
A good lecture has elements neither book, nor video, nor homework, nor group discussion will have. It has the element of a knowledgable person disseminating knowledge in a quasi- Q&A format guided by his knowledge and experience.
As one who has gone through about 100+ Khan videos, I appreciate them for what they are - which is usually helping someone over a conceptual hurdle. I would love it if someone were to take the next step, and create a more sophisticated question bank than Khan has, which stresses your learning experience. The one key issue with Khan is that it typically doesn't stress you, and as such, the knowledge retained is usually fairly shallow.
This was how one of my favorite professors would teach, only instead of videos, you just had to read the books and readings he assigned.
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.
I agree. It would be weird if we only listened to songs rendered by mediocre live cover bands years after the record, cassette, CD had come and gone.
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.
That's the "flipped" classroom model, but these days, we talk more about "self-paced mastery" learning or "personalized" learning, which is different.
Basically, students should be able to go at their own pace, so they can dive into whichever topics they don't grasp as easily or find particularly interesting, and not worry about having to keep exactly in step with their classmates. That may mean doing more problems, re-watching videos, etc.
These style classrooms don't involve students necessarily doing anything at home, they just give students the equipment to learn at their own pace.
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.
Agreed. But the video has to be quality. We have several flipped classrooms at my school, where you watch a video before lecture and then have an interactive session. The videos are mostly a professor talking over a PowerPoint deck, which is worse than a lecture.
I only found lectures especially useless after the shift to PowerPoint slide dumps. I still think back fondly on the days where English/History/Calculus/etc professors would write on the chalkboard while lecturing. Something about the act of writing made each point seem more important and easier to recall
My favorites were the fusion between the two, (powerpoints for key formulas, scribbling for explaining) especially with the professors that would mark-up the powerpoint with a stylus and post them online.
I disagree. In my experience, the lectures are one of the primary reasons for attending a university. For a lecture to be effective, the students will need to have read the material that the lecture is taking on. Then, during the lecture, they should see why they have read what they have and understand why it is important, what the general implications are and so on.
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.
Yes, you are very right that it is what's supposed to be. The problem is that most students don't want to read ahead and expect the teacher to provide all material in class (and more recently, I am told, to provide class notes for those unable to pay attention for more than 150 seconds in a row).
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.
As someone who learns almost exclusively by reading, I've always been bemused by the concept of lectures. I've never thought that a professor explained the material better than the textbook or other reading materials that prepared us for class.
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.
As someone who learns far better by lecture, I've always been bemused by the concept of textbooks. I've never thought that the several hundred dollars I paid for a book got me nearly as far into a subject as listening to the professor.
From the original paper:
"The effect sizes indicate that on average, student performance on examinations and concept inventories increased by 0.47 SDs under active learning (n = 158 studies), and that the odds ratio for failing was 1.95 under traditional lecturing (n = 67 studies)."
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.
I think one important point to make is not only about the amount of knowledge absorbed from lectures, but also the discipline and rigor in education.
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.
I always find it educational to meet someone who lacks all of the characteristics I think are crucial for success, but is still successful.
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. :)
Agree. I didn't go to a single lecture after 2 months at university (electrical engineering). My TA was shit as well - was too tied up in computer vision research and found us inconvenient. However we formed a club (5 of us who actually gave a shit) to work through stuff as students. Rather awesomely our digital electronics lecturer turned up after a couple of weeks and helped us with stuff and had a weekly rant about how useless the other staff were. I think we helped him vent too.
I can't find the journal article, but I saw an academic machine learning paper that claimed our whole lecture system was inefficient and not optimal. Our lectures are currently based off an old system, before all the technology now. The game changed when we introduced computers/phones/tablets, but our method didn't change.
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?
I worked at one of the bigger MOOCs for a while and we knew that over 50% of our paying customers never watched any of the video lectures they subscribed to.
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.
Is that really a flaw? If I can learn better by reading books and then working through problem sets, why bother with the lectures, especially if I am strapped for time as many MOOC participants probably are. I am a huge fan of MOOC's, I've probably attempted about a dozen and have completed about half. So far the biggest reason for failing to complete a class has been time constraints. If I am already familiar with the material (i.e taking the class as a refresher) or don't find the lectures particularly engaging, I will still 'watch' the lectures, but play them in the background while I work on problem sets or do other stuff. In my experience, most MOOCs have a healthy portion of participants who are very familiar with the material, so it's quite possible a good percentage of them are just using the problem sets as a way to refresh their understanding.
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.
That's the problem, transplanting physical world directly into somewhere that analogies don't work.
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".
Hey, in some of the classes in my university more than 50% of the students didn't watch the lectures. It is impressive that 50% watched the videos. He glass is half full!
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.
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.
It's not like Sal Khan was the first to say lectures are an ineffective way of learning. For example the "How people learn" report by the National Academies from 2000 (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853) is a very good overview for those new to the subject.
“Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,”
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.
[+] [-] doktrin|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sharkweek|12 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] gcd|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kleiba|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] eatitraw|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] praseodym|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sheepmullet|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] skizm|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] watwut|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] juliendorra|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grownseed|12 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] Jormundir|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] zacinbusiness|12 years ago|reply
Then again, I didn't go to uni for CS because it's such a boring subject.
[+] [-] joeevans1000|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikevm|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lutorm|12 years ago|reply
It's conceptually simple, "orientation-like" material that can be learned fairly effectively with lectures.
[+] [-] tekalon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] pnathan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] findjashua|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevesearer|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AJ007|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pamelafox|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davycro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphilip|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Valseuss|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crpatino|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] regoldste|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Fomite|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_va|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Morgawr|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grayclhn|12 years ago|reply
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. :)
[+] [-] bananas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayro|12 years ago|reply
* 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...
[+] [-] skierscott|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] stonogo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dramirez|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pyoung|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] neves|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temuze|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lutorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimantas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonsen|12 years ago|reply
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.