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.
It's pretty easy to avoid the enormous introductory level lecture classes. Nearly every large university will grant credit for AP or CLEP exams towards undergraduate level classes like Econ 201. These exams cost under $100 for an entire course.
You can also find many schools offering these courses online, for a bit more money. Transferring in a credit is painless.
How long ago did you attend? Almost all states have made public colleges and universities arrange transfer agreements to guarantee credits will transfer. Most private, not-for-profits have taken up this cause as well. For-profits are still a bit wonky with transferring, because their academic rigor tends to be terrible.
Now, out of state transfers, that's another story.
At UCLA and Cal, 30% of freshmen are out of state[0]. As you said, this is not an easy thing to do to begin with. I don't think that these numbers hold as high for other universities, but it's not 10 or 20 people at a school. It's like 1/8 to 1/4 of the freshmen that may need to transfer credits.
I never really got the "massive lecture size" thing. My university had ~20,000 students (about 15,000 undergrad), which I thought was mid-range as far as American universities go, but I never had a lecture with more than about 100 people in it. As far as I know, there weren't lectures that large anywhere in the university; I can only think of one hall large enough to accommodate lectures that large. It was used for administering tests for classes that had several hundred students (but all of those classes were split into several different lectures, often with separate instructors who worked together on the class.)
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).
This exactly. There are millions of kids that want to be engineers or in STEM fields. It may seem rough, but if they can't do calculus, it's better for everyone that they find this out sooner than later and can then adjust their plans. The big lectures are intentionally designed to cut people that can't make it.
I agree completely. However, when designing a new surgical technique or a better mouse-trap you have to be able to do it in nearly ANY environment. Your job, profession, or avocation is not going to coddle you at all, most likely. If you can't learn calculus in a lecture, then you should recognize this and learn how you are going to learn it, then learn it and pass the test. If you cannot, then (under this more brutal theory) you are unlikely to do so when it really counts.
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%.
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.
Well, it is one (flawed) was of sorting people out. There are better ones, I'll admit, but none will ever be perfect. We are dealing with people after all.
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.
I did most of my lower division at the local community college. At the time it was $11/unit for residents, and when I transferred to a 4 year school they told me I was probably better prepared (having had teachers that were there to teach that material).
You do loose out on a lot of connections though. If you go to Harvard for the know-how, that's a dumb move. You can get a better education for much cheaper with a little research. But, if you go to Harvard for the connections in business, finance, defense, etc., that is a great investment. Going out drinking with the son or daughter of Lockheed's CEO or the head recruiter of Goldman is worth the tuition at Harvard.
Well, I did make a lot of connections in the two years I spent finishing my undergrad. Your point is certainly valid, though - connections are a big part of what you're paying for at a big name school.
I doubt $200 will get you an invite to the wedding of a Senator's son. Those are the types of connections I'm talking about. Not a phone number or address.
I think you have a solid point, and Noxchi's point was overstated and poorly expressed, but I think there is still something of substance there.
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.
I agree. You have to choose for yourself what it is you want out of college. If it's just contacts, then going to charity balls and concerts is a better way to spend the money. You are going for bonding experiences with the wealthy [0] in order to cement relations and trust and Harvard is a lot more expensive to gain trust than a night in Vegas with head-honchos.
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])
Certainly. Prestigious schools offer a package of things, you (as always) need to assess for yourself how well that package fits your needs and how that compares to your other options compared to the costs (in money, time, effort).
$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.
There is a part of me that would honestly prefer that everyone went through community college rather than bothering with freshman/sophomore "finding yourself" shenanigans. But I'm biased, since that's what I did... and I'm also biased a second time, because I never had the "must pick a major" uncertainty.
But I think we'd lose a lot of the benefit of doing so if it became a standard.
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.
When I was in college, I found the evening classes were older people who really wanted to be there and learn. I ended up always selecting evening. At community college especially. There was nearly always 15% of the class that was professionals continuing their education.
Oh, for sure. There was a guy in my Recent American History class who'd been a member of SNCC. Wonderful experience. Still, I think "everyone is there to learn" makes the biggest difference.
This is true only of lower division classes at UW. Once you get to mid or upper-level classes, your class sizes are much smaller, the professors are more accessible.
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).
Yeah, my senior year during a research project on public policy (polsci major) it was a class of 20 students and a professor who normally taught classes of 200-300.
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.
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).
I too learn effectively when I've got outstanding lecturers lecturing at me. However that's rarely the case - some lecturers don't really care for the students; some care but aren't that great at lecturing... So in practice, lectures don't even always work for students who learn effectively from lectures.
I prefer book to lectures, but whenever I skipped lecture the learning for exam was much more difficult. I do not really know why. I rarely understood things directly during the lecture, I usually just wrote notes. However, just being there and listening made learning afterwards easier.
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.
That's almost always what the teacher considers the most important material. So, yeah, attending lectures lets you know what concepts are especially important in the subject.
I tend to agree with this one. Half of the point of having a teacher (as opposed to just hit library as some suggest) is to have somebody knowledgeable to tell you what is important/worth your time and what is not.
That's not usually the way textbooks work --- they often try to support many instructors who each want to cover more or less the same core plus some nonoverlapping material that the instructor wants to teach. When you add up all of the nonoverlapping material, it becomes less clear what's "most worth your time." Some textbooks present the material as "here's the core" and "here's some other stuff" but I've mostly seen that for advanced texts -- books for high-level undergrad & grad classes.
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.
Most of them do not. My impression is that they try to cover much more then usual semester long course.
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.
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.
That's too bad. Two of the best classes I've taken in my life were at Berkeley -- econ 141 (econometrics, about 80 students) and math 195 (undergraduate stochastic differential equations, about 5-10 students, 3 I think taking for a grade. If I'm off on the course number, sorry.) This was over a decade ago, though. Two thoughts,
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.
> I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) teach 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.
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.)
> The upper level courses, even at the undergraduate level ... 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
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.
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.
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.
My wife, a university professor, was hired only after three extensive teaching demonstrations. I think some universities and departments focus in research while others focus on academics.
Alot of that is a filter placed there deliberately. CSI 201 was a class with 2 500+ lecture sections and something like 30 lab sections. The graduating group for Computer Science had about 75 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.
I still remember the shock I had upon taking my first few graduate-level classes. The lectures and assignments were actually focused on the material rather than weeding people out through large, poorly specified projects / problem sets.
There are very scalable ways to lecture (enable learning) such as student centered learning (called active learning in the post). These are both cost effective and result in better learning outcomes.
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.
At the grad level, you get closer to what the professor is actually researching, and they have a better handle on it. Getting a professor to empathize with a 1st year undergraduate is much harder than getting them to empathize with a 1st year grad student.
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?
On that topic, you might like those two short Extra Credits videos about games theory applied to education:
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 :)
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.
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 :-)
I'm a lecturer and I think clickers are great, for large classes especially. Clicker questions and small group discussion about the answers gets students thinking rather than just sitting there with eyes glazing over. It works well. By giving a small amount of real credit to the answers you even get all the slackers discussing the topic and arguing about which answer is right.
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.
They seem unfair to me :). I learned most afterwards when I was sitting in room alone and really learning. I was present at lectures wrote notes and all that, but found it hard/uncomfortable to absorb it immediately or form an opinion. I prefer to have time to think about material before being questioned on it.
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.
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.
StudyEdge (YC S13) is doing a great job with a similar service. They provide Khan Academy-style videos with a live support system (on the FB app platform). The videos + support system are meant to supplement university courses-- essentially acting as a web tutor. Their own supplementary question banks tend to be deep and well designed.
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!
Similar experience - I had a terrible professor for my LInear Algebra course back in college and Gilbert Strand's lecture videos on MIT open courseware were the only reason I passed that course (actually got a better grade than other math courses).
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.
I actually meant to make the same point - watching lectures at homes means you can rewind and go over the parts you didn't get the first time. In fact, I do that all the time. But, the real confidence (and happiness) comes from being able to apply what you've learnt. Working with other students and having a teacher help you out when you're stuck is the perfect complement for that.
Where are you based, if you don't mind me asking. I'd be interested in volunteering at programming workshops in/around San Francisco.
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.
Agreed. When I was younger I read vociferously and taught myself a lot through books. I can read and pass an undergraduate level course in a subject (it's worked for me before) but to understand really well I need lectures and further interaction (that's worked too!).
I envy you for being so well-adapted to the traditional style of teaching :) On the whole, most people learn better by listening or interacting or doing. I'm certainly the exception in this respect. My brain processes information much differently. It takes me 3x longer to process a sentence read aloud as it would to just read it. Lectures felt like a huge waste of time.
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.
Well, at this point in my career, the lecture covers things not yet written in textbooks ;)
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.
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. :)
I feel like the problem is that educational effectiveness is too much of a personal thing that it is impossible to argue about. everyone learns differently. I think it's important to note that most people are self driven enough to learn on their own. I learn a lot in lectures. other people go to lecture and goof off and then learn the material on their own later. truth is, the smart kids will usually find a way to succeed no matter how they learn. What we are trying to figure out is the best way to teach the masses. I also think it's important to consider the sheer number of people trying to get an education in modern times as opposed to the past where most students were smart, privileged kids whose parents were probably decently successful.
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.
Passive aggressiveness aside, what would you define teaching as?
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.
“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.
I can specifically remember dropping a Pysch elective I was required to take simply because the teachers format was horrible.
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.
Very interesting because, for me personally, the further ahead I've gotten in my career, the more I've realized that I really don't like lectures at all. It's exceptionally rare for me to learn anything or even remember anything from a lecture. Everything I've ever really learned has been from hands-on work, with a book or online reference available. Perhaps some other people learn from lectures, but I don't.
Am I missing where they indicate what they mean by "active learning"? All I see are references to clickers and asking individual students questions during a lecture. Sounds like it's actually just a question of dull lecturing vs engaging lecturing to me. Can anyone provide a summary of what "active learning" means in this context?
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.
In contrast, the method of pair discussions has been used for a long time in the Islamic Seminars in Najaf and Qom. Which has produced highly effective teachers, each one able to lead a lecture in every subject they take.
Maybe someone can highlight the teaching methods in other parts of the Eastern world?
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.