I never fail to be surprised at the venom reserved for lecture as a core part of education. Sure there are poor lectures, but the good, engaged lectures an be remarkable learning opportunities. I learned the most in my college classes that had great lectures.
I think it comes from a place of frustration. Some people don't learn well from lectures at all, but because they're considered the default so strongly, other conduits of learning aren't usually provided.
I learn by conversing and hands on experience much more efficiently than I do by listening to a (usually boring) lecture. School was not much fun for me.
One of the things that I learned from good lectures was... how to lecture. It was the "apprenticeship of observation," and I got to observe a variety of styles, along with things that worked, and things that catastrophically didn't work. I think it's helped me in my career, since a lot of my job involves giving presentations and talking to people about complicated stuff.
The available evidence shows that lectures are extremely poor at delivering conceptual understanding to students, even when delivered by relatively accomplished professors.
In a wide range of lecture-based introductory physics courses, for example, if you measure conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics before and after the course, you find that students only learn about 25% of what they didn't understand at the beginning.[1] (And students usually do pretty poorly on the pre-test.) With interactive teaching methods, you can boost that to 50%.
The problem is that students don't have to engage with the material during lectures -- so if they hold misconceptions, they misinterpret the lecture in light of them, rather than realizing their errors. This can be seen in lecture demonstrations, for example, where students don't learn anything from just watching a demo, but do learn if you force them to think about the problem and make predictions first.[2]
There's a methodology based on these concepts, Peer Instruction, which has students actively engage during class time by making predictions, explaining their reasoning to other students, and answering conceptual questions posed by the instructor. This has excellent results when tested.[3]
This is a hobby horse of mine[4], and I think we need to judge our claims about education using the evidence, not our personal experience. Particularly because we are the least capable judges of our learning: as students new to a field, we are completely unqualified to judge how well we understand the field.
[1] Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66(1), 64–74. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.18809
[2] Crouch, C. H., Fagen, A. P., Callan, J. P., & Mazur, E. (2004). Classroom demonstrations: Learning tools or entertainment? American Journal of Physics, 72(6), 835–838. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1707018
[3] Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics, 69(9), 970–977. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249
But a good lecture is exactly one that enables you to do the prediction/explanation/result checking feedback on your own.
For example, a good maths lecture is one where you can always have an idea of what you would do for the next step in a proof, so every step actually taken is something you can compare against what you would have taken.
Looking at [4] they use it to say that a teacher / professor is necessary over coursera or similar.
Given that almost all courses I took in college were the lecture / hw / exam model, I don't think that conclusion fits their claim.
Video games are excellent at teaching in a similar manner (the witness is very much like a math course that just happens to be made up). I see no reason why the digital medium can't have an equal or better experience. Good coursera courses often seem fairly interactive and the lecture itself isn't necessarily the focal point of the class.
If I'm going to get anything out of a lecture, I need to be able to effectively take notes on it. To do that, I need to be able to parse an hierarchy of concepts, aka an outline. You know:
I. Blah
A. Sub-blah 1
B. Sub-blah 2
II. Foobar
A. Sub-foobar 1
etc. If I can't determine how to organize my notes, then it's not really a lecture. It's just someone talking haphazardly about something they know way more about than I do. If they're introducing any concepts that I'm not already familiar with, I'll be lost pretty quickly.
This isn't a huge ask is it? I don't need an explicit outline written on the board for me. All I need is a little recognizable organization, and I can figure it out from there. Otherwise, I'm usually better served by reading a good textbook.
The hardest class I ever had in school wasn't hard because of the material, it was hard because there was no textbook and the lectures were extremely disorganized, just random ideas that weren't linked together in any obvious way. There's no need for that.
> As soon as education gets difficult (and useful education always gets difficult) it’s social pressure, peer pressure and our own need to fit in and achieve that often keeps us going.
What, no mention of the sunk costs to date? By the time a course gets difficult (second year, third year, wherever your course got hard), quitting will cost you a year of your time and a lot of money.
I would expect major factors contributing to online course dropout rates to be:
1) Often there are no prerequisites enforced, so people get ambitious and find themselves out of their depth very quickly.
2) Once they get stuck, all they're losing by dropping out is a few afternoons' worth of reading a web page.
Why does the percentage of dropouts from an online class matter? Do the issues raised in this article really need to be addressed? There are still so many people benefiting from successfully completing these courses, and learning new information. Do the people who don't, or who try and then give up, really affect the value of the opportunity online education brings?
Look at how the military does technical training. It's quite different than traditional education. They're in a hurry, they're paying the troops, and they have a job ready for them.
The military approach involves far more physical aids than usually seen in education. Big boards where all the components of a system are laid out are common. There's lots of practice on mock-ups of real equipment. Simulators are common, and not just simulation programs. Many simulators have real system components and controls.
Here's a classic simulator for warship damage control.[1] This is a Royal Navy (UK) installation; the US Navy version is called the USS Buttercup.
Why not give them accreditation? Clearly completing them is an accomplishment.
There are other reasons to 'drop out'. I like to save courses on coursera because I can't do them during the imposed timeframe. Sometimes I don't really need the full course and only bits and pieces. Maybe I just want to check it out and the opportunity cost was very low.
Don't solve problems when there aren't any. The biggest one is accreditation. I was trapped in college far longer than I would have been if MOOCs were accredited courses.
15 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 52.1 ms ] threadIn a wide range of lecture-based introductory physics courses, for example, if you measure conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics before and after the course, you find that students only learn about 25% of what they didn't understand at the beginning.[1] (And students usually do pretty poorly on the pre-test.) With interactive teaching methods, you can boost that to 50%.
The problem is that students don't have to engage with the material during lectures -- so if they hold misconceptions, they misinterpret the lecture in light of them, rather than realizing their errors. This can be seen in lecture demonstrations, for example, where students don't learn anything from just watching a demo, but do learn if you force them to think about the problem and make predictions first.[2]
There's a methodology based on these concepts, Peer Instruction, which has students actively engage during class time by making predictions, explaining their reasoning to other students, and answering conceptual questions posed by the instructor. This has excellent results when tested.[3]
This is a hobby horse of mine[4], and I think we need to judge our claims about education using the evidence, not our personal experience. Particularly because we are the least capable judges of our learning: as students new to a field, we are completely unqualified to judge how well we understand the field.
[1] Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66(1), 64–74. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.18809
[2] Crouch, C. H., Fagen, A. P., Callan, J. P., & Mazur, E. (2004). Classroom demonstrations: Learning tools or entertainment? American Journal of Physics, 72(6), 835–838. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1707018
[3] Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics, 69(9), 970–977. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249
[4] https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2012-10-19-shutup.html
For example, a good maths lecture is one where you can always have an idea of what you would do for the next step in a proof, so every step actually taken is something you can compare against what you would have taken.
Given that almost all courses I took in college were the lecture / hw / exam model, I don't think that conclusion fits their claim.
Video games are excellent at teaching in a similar manner (the witness is very much like a math course that just happens to be made up). I see no reason why the digital medium can't have an equal or better experience. Good coursera courses often seem fairly interactive and the lecture itself isn't necessarily the focal point of the class.
I. Blah A. Sub-blah 1 B. Sub-blah 2 II. Foobar A. Sub-foobar 1
etc. If I can't determine how to organize my notes, then it's not really a lecture. It's just someone talking haphazardly about something they know way more about than I do. If they're introducing any concepts that I'm not already familiar with, I'll be lost pretty quickly.
This isn't a huge ask is it? I don't need an explicit outline written on the board for me. All I need is a little recognizable organization, and I can figure it out from there. Otherwise, I'm usually better served by reading a good textbook.
The hardest class I ever had in school wasn't hard because of the material, it was hard because there was no textbook and the lectures were extremely disorganized, just random ideas that weren't linked together in any obvious way. There's no need for that.
What, no mention of the sunk costs to date? By the time a course gets difficult (second year, third year, wherever your course got hard), quitting will cost you a year of your time and a lot of money.
I would expect major factors contributing to online course dropout rates to be:
1) Often there are no prerequisites enforced, so people get ambitious and find themselves out of their depth very quickly.
2) Once they get stuck, all they're losing by dropping out is a few afternoons' worth of reading a web page.
The military approach involves far more physical aids than usually seen in education. Big boards where all the components of a system are laid out are common. There's lots of practice on mock-ups of real equipment. Simulators are common, and not just simulation programs. Many simulators have real system components and controls.
Here's a classic simulator for warship damage control.[1] This is a Royal Navy (UK) installation; the US Navy version is called the USS Buttercup.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGEl5DE_q1Q
There are other reasons to 'drop out'. I like to save courses on coursera because I can't do them during the imposed timeframe. Sometimes I don't really need the full course and only bits and pieces. Maybe I just want to check it out and the opportunity cost was very low.
Don't solve problems when there aren't any. The biggest one is accreditation. I was trapped in college far longer than I would have been if MOOCs were accredited courses.