MIT Moves Away From Massive Lecture Halls 317
eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."
remote learning (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this going towards a future where students do not need to be physical present on the campus? they would attend classes from home (or basement for some) and graduate with professional degrees. while that may be well and good for knowledge and proficiency what does it do to learning about social coexistence?
oh well, i guess they could take a class for that too.
great (Score:5, Insightful)
The best educations often don't come fro the bigge (Score:5, Insightful)
The giant schools are not the place where the best educations come from. Sure they often have the biggest research budgets and thus are in the news the most. Smaller schools with smaller class sizes are where it's at from a value for dollar spent standpoint.
My biggest class was intro psych and it was 75 folks. My Hydrodynamic instability was four students and the professor. Just try to hide when you haven't prepared with only three other peeps to hide behind.
Sheldon
Re:The best educations often don't come fro the bi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:5, Insightful)
MIT doesn't work that way. If you can get into MIT, you should be able to get through MIT.
Re:remote learning (Score:5, Insightful)
Social Co-existance? Why in God's name would you need to learn that at college? Those are life skills, and can be learned in *drumroll* life. Sure, college is a great place to do that, but I would not say the social attributes gained in college translate 100% to working life, more like 50% or less. There is a lot of stuff kids do in college that would get you fired in a heartbeat at a real honest to goodness job.
Social co-existance is not a good reason to go to college, IMHO. Apparently they teach that at some schools anyway (which is completely retarded).
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is a 50% reduction in failures a useful stat?
It's useful because it shows that many of the students in the class were not learning anything...which is the point of education.
Having a larger number of people with a bachelor's degree does not make it worth less. Having a large number of people who don't know anything have a bachelor's degree makes it worth less.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Massive lecture halls were completely pointless in my experience. The only correlation between attendance and my grade was actually a negative correlation: the less I went, the better my grades got.
I had one class, a planetary geology course, where I was told in the first class that there was no way I could pass without attending class (to watch his boring-ass slideshows, which were going to be on the exam). That was the last class I went to, and I aced the class and the final.
Likewise physics, and all the gut CS classes (everything up to the 300 level). If you have a question, you're fucked anyway, because with 200+ students, you'll never be able to ask it...Half the time they put you off to the end of the lecture anyway, and then they tell you to ask the TA during the practicum or the lab.
After I graduated I heard that they'd put in this system where you had to "rent" this fricking remote control, register it (unique serial number, so they could track you attendance) and use it to input multiple choice answers to questions the prof put on the board. I can only imagine the benefits felt by the students [/sarcasm]
Save your time for the practicum, keep on top of the syllabus, and let the prof drone on at 8:00am while you get an extra hour of shuteye.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. If I'm paying $40,000 a year to get an education, I expect that the university do all in it's power to facilitate the education.
Note that they're reducing failures by 50%, not because of aptitude or student ability, but purely by changing the delivery format. Hands-on small classrooms with a low student to professor ratio has been proved time and time again to be a good thing. This is true at all levels of education, from grade school through PhD programs.
In a big class, if you don't understand something, and aren't given the opportunity to discuss it with the professor for clarification, you're far more likely to lose interest and motivation. There's a reason why every university when recruting high school students tries to brag about low student to teacher ratios.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:4, Insightful)
In my living group we had 18 freshman my year. 1 graduated early, 6 of us graduated "on time," a few more graduated in 5 years and the rest never graduated.
So sorry, at least in my small sample, MIT does work that way.
Re:remote learning (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I agree with you. I get the feeling sometimes that, in many ways, people have come to think of college as an advanced summer camp where their darling little snowflakes can learn how to behave themselves out on their own, "in real life". Of course, their concept of the best way to do that is to seclude them in a community where practically no one has real-life experience outside of academia.
That's not to say that you can't learn about social interaction in college, and I think there is value in having some kind of transitional space between childhood and adulthood. It just seems to me that sometimes real education gets lost in the shuffle.
IMHO (Score:4, Insightful)
great story /. (Score:2, Insightful)
Large impersonal classrooms reduce accountability for attendance and decrease overall learning rates. Film at 11.
sink or swim (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a couple monster lecture hall classes as an undergrad. They were usually either introductory courses or weed-out courses. TFA is right that by the end of the semester addentance is cut in half. Students either don't need to attend anymore (introductory course) or they have already dropped it (in the case of a weed-out course).
Big U's are THE place to be for grad students and researchers. If you can manage to keep your head above water as an undergrad you will be better acclimated.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:3, Insightful)
In the long-term, students may realize that classes a high student count and attrition rate may not provide the most utility for them in terms of learning. Maybe those who can survive the lecture hall are perfectly capable of learning on their own and those who can't need a little more one-on-one help. After all, isn't one of the reasons people go to school: to be taught by someone learned in the material? If all I'd get out of a class is the equivilant of books-on-tape and working alone, I'd go RTFM, take some certification tests and save a couple thousand on tuition.
Re:remote learning (Score:5, Insightful)
Lecture halls have nothing to do with being on-campus.
They fell out of the middle-ages mentality where the large lecture was the best way of disseminating knowledge to a group of individuals, specifically because multiple copies of a book were not often available. The "Lecture" format was originally much like the sermon you get from a preacher at sunday services.
Of course, for most of my "lecture" classes, if there were more than 30 students, all the "lecturer" did was read his own damn book (which we had to buy at way-too-high prices) to us for 3 hours every class anyways. I wholeheartedly support the end of the "lecture" format class on this basis.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:2, Insightful)
PROTIP: Education is not a consumer-oriented service industry. You have as much a responsibility as faculty to facilitate your own learning. Part of college is learning how to learn. Most schools offer free tutoring services, and their centers have well trained staff.
Large research universities are not there to educate, but rather to produce knowledge. Even at state schools, tenured faculty have a greater responsibility to research than to teaching. Want proof? Look at budgets. Less than 10% of salaries in Engineering, Math, and Natural Sciences colleges come from tuition or state funding. The rest comes from grants - private corporations who expect research and care nothing for your pass/fail ratio.
To take your first clause: If I'm receiving $2.5 million for my current project from Bayer, and $50 from you, I expect you to shut up and try your best to learn in the three hours a week we're in class, or failing that, to show up at office hours, because I'm spending the rest of my time earning my paycheck.
Failing or burning out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:great (Score:5, Insightful)
I always loved the question part(sarcasm/irony). A lot of my lecture profs would ask this question like, "Everyone who doesn't get it, raise their hand" and if enough people raised their hand, he'd go over the topic again, and if that didn't do it, you had to ask the TA anyway.
My brains a bit odd: when I don't get it, I don't get it differently from most people, so I always had to ask the TA, or figure it out for myself. At that point, there ceases to be a reason to go to the class. Add to that the psychological torment of being the only moron who has to raise his hand twice...Ugh.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:3, Insightful)
If I'm paying $40,000 a year to get an education, I expect that the university do all in it's power to facilitate the education.
Exactly, I could teach myself the material for a lot less money. I pay the money to get, as the grandparent says, a cozy environment.
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that you learned this preposterous story from your son, who learned his concept of reality with you. Your acceptance of this obviously falsified or wildly embellished story as reality shows that your understanding of reality is deeply flawed. This, in turn, implies that your son's understanding of reality is similarly flawed. By the time the story gets to us through you two highly imperfect filters, it's pretty much meaningless.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:1, Insightful)
>"if you cant handle it your waisting the seat"
But you *were* wasting your seat in grammar school, weren't you?
HINT: you're your, waist waste
Re:It saves money (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, there is a balance of cost and effectiveness. You can't have infinite students to one professor because very few students would get anything meaningful out of it.
What Firethorn is arguing is that one of the major benefits of having smaller classes is the individual student-professor interactions that occur such as the ones he listed. I tend to agree with him. When a professor can hear a student's (incorrect) thought process on a problem, he may have heard similar issues before and be quick to correct them. There are plenty of incorrect ways to look at problems, but it wouldn't make sense for a professor to approach a class of 300+ and say "Don't do these problems this way - this is wrong. Also, don't do them this way. This way is wrong too."
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been teaching at public and private universities for many years, and I have yet to see or hear of a undergraduate class where a professor could arbitrarily drop a student from that class without that student's permission, just because the student said something politically incorrect.
So tell me, what university was this? And what reason did your son claim was given for this supposed drop? And why didn't he raise holy hell with the administration for such a flagrant and prejudicial abuse of faculty power, assuming such power even exists?
I call shennanigans. I suggest you contact the dean's office and find out the real reason your son dropped the class.
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. No way the OP's son got removed from a class for that. I've seen plenty of *actual* misbehavior from dumbass freshmen that never led to their removal from class.
This sounds like the kind of "look what the libruls are doing *now*" sort of email that circulates among my Christian/conservative acquaintances.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who think they can teach themselves a subject, even to the level of a four-year degree, are overestimating their own initiative and discipline. You may be the rare exception, but if so, the system isn't designed for you anyway.
You don't pay for a cozy environment. You pay the university to certify that you really *did* learn the material to their standards. You pay for access to experts in the field. You pay for use of facilities. All things you can't get on your own, even if you can learn everything independently.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:5, Insightful)
I have taught at a MAJOR university of the MIT class and at a couple of state universities. When you have an MIT with its extremely high admission standards, weeding out extremely capable students is not necessary, although you may have a "project" in getting some of them adjusted to the pace of the real world. A lot of them played with science, doing what they wanted, prior to admission but in the real world you have to do things in a more focused and directed way (unless you are a professor, ahem). Many don't take to disciplined thinking and working, and are weeded out.
In a state university which has to admit anyone with a high enough class rank from high school, if you want a respectable degree for your graduates, you are bloody ruthless in weeding out your unworthy freshmen. That's life. I have not noticed in the two state universities I have worked in anything like "eliminating the worthy" taking place. I teach in the hard sciences, and if you are going to be worth a damn to an employer (for instance), you have to be able to take the pace of meeting large demands on your time and brainpower. At commuter schools, you have the problem of people working -- in one I am familiar with, over 70% of the students work over 30 hours a week, and it is hard for the faculty there to work students hard enough (i.e., homework) without putting the students on an 8 year plan to graduate.
What you are seeing here with the MIT changes is an adaptation to a lot of research going on in the teaching of physics (one area I know a bit about). There are ways to re-organizing your teaching methods, and the clickers play a very large role in this if used correctly, and with properly set up support by TA's students show a 30+% improvement in standard (conceptual) test scores versus standard teaching methods. The debate is over teaching problem solving skills which can only be trivially tested on 1 hour standardized tests. Better understanding of the class overall of concepts does not mean you have helped the small percentage of real problem solvers which will be in any class in any school, the MIT's included.
So, there is clear evidence that the modern teaching methods, used correctly, provide much more competent C students, it does not necessarily mean the two or three percent of students who are the real future of your field are getting anything more out of it. The improvement in conceptual understanding of the better students is much less dramatic, and may not even be measurable in the few you want to really get to. And, you have made a choice to not emphasize problem solving in order to increase the average conceptual understanding. Those of you out in the real world will understand that solving real problems is ultimately where it is at, not scoring well on standardized tests.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:4, Insightful)
Colleges don't (and cannot) sell you an education. They sell you access to an environment where you can become educated. If you are insufficiently intelligent, motivated, or clued-in to take advantage of it, it isn't the school's fault, nor is there anything in the world they can do about it.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
The useful lesson here is not about free speech, but that the way in which you say something is just as important as the content of what you say.
The professor was trying explain that Summers was wrong for the way in which he said things (an evaluation Summers agrees with), regardless of the content. Having just explained the need for tact and the awful consequences that come from ignoring that need, does your son's comment seem so harmless?
Even as a physical scientist, I have to be careful of this. Tact is not some PC fluffy mumbo-jumbo. It's a way to keep discussion substantive and prevent emotions from tainting your judgment.
Also, I would bet your son dropped the class (good move on his part), which would make his statements to you true, but misleading. I've seen some faculty who have enjoyed dealing with "troublemakers," I've never seen someone kick a student out of a class.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you pay the money to get a piece of paper that says you learned something you could have learned yourself.
Otherwise no one would go except the people who already send their kids to private secondary schools.
As for facilitating education, many, if not most research schools expect their faculty to be researchers, and then they take these people and expect them to also be great teachers of the material.
Its sort of like having a respected author teach literacy or grammar classes. They don't want to be there unless they happen to be into teaching, and frequently they are so advanced in their fields that the tend to forget some of the more basic things that they should be teaching.
You know, kind of like having ee cummings teach you about the capitalization of proper nouns.
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, what got Larry Sommers in trouble was that he said that *after* an entire conference on exactly why what he suggest wasn't true. In other words, he had been ignoring the very meeting he was there to attend. Whether it was sexism (ignoring what he didn't want to hear) or just being rude (which I consider more likely) is an open question.
Second, there are *some* students who learn more from a textbook than from face-to-face, interactive learning. However, research (Kolb, for example) shows that most students need other ways of learning in order to really get material. Sadly, the ones that do learn best in lectures/from textbooks go on to become the next generation of faculty (more or less by default), perpetuating the notion.
Re:remote learning (Score:3, Insightful)
RTFA!
Why would you extrapolate to a future "where students do not need to be physical (sic) present on the campus"?
The point is that they're moving away from large impersonal lectures to more interactive group sessions. The result has been a higher percentage of attendance. That's kind of the opposite of what you said, isn't it?
Why are you modded Insightful?
-t.
Scalability (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a gigantic unanswered question here: How does this scale?
Under the large-lecture system in place when I was at MIT ('92), 300+ students filled the lecture hall two times a day, 3 days a week. That is 600+ students taking class 8.01 (Intro Physics). This required one professor to deliver the lecture, and a handful of TA's to handle recitations and study groups.
Under the system described in the article, only 80 students are taught at a time. But *each* class requires a professor and a team of TA's. To handle 600+ students taking the class, it would require 8 classroom sessions, 3 times a week, each involving a prof and TA's. That's 24 hours a week the prof is spending in class teaching. (not even counting prep-time, grading papers, or office-hours).
This system, for whatever successes it might have, just doesn't seem to scale. It seems to put a huge load on the prof and TAs.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever considered that you might be happier at a pure research institution where you wouldn't be burdened with teaching?
It certainly sounds like your students might prefer you there...
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please. The truth is we don't know a lot of how the brain works and a lot on behavioral genetics. There ARE differences between men and women whether you want to admit it or not. Speculating that there very well could be an innate reason why men and women have different ratios in different fields is fine, which is what he did.
The conference was titled, "Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce". From what I can see, it wasn't necessarily about *why*, it was about "what we should do", and even then he DOESN'T HAVE TO AGREE WITH OTHERS' CONCLUSIONS. I'm sorry that some of his speculations may not appeal directly to your ideology, CheshireCatCO, but AT A UNIVERSITY HE SHOULD BE MORE THAN FREE TO SHARE LEGITIMATE IDEAS WITHOUT BEING CENSURED. But alas, he did not play homage to the proper gods, and was a sinner to be excommunicated for his heresy, right?
Pinker explains it well:
First, letâ(TM)s be clear what the hypothesis isâ"every one of Summersâ(TM) critics has misunderstood it. The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical distributions of menâ(TM)s and womenâ(TM)s quantitative and spatial abilities are not identicalâ"that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women (both implying that there would be a slightly higher proportion of men at the high end of the scale). It does not mean that all men are better at quantitative abilities than all women! Thatâ(TM)s why it would be immoral and illogical to discriminate against individual women even if it were shown that some of the statistidcal differences were innate.
Re:Slightly off topic, perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
Doubt it. When it comes to the Summers debacle 1) most undergrads probably wouldn't even know it went on, 2) if you have the facts it's really easy to argue against the "Summers is a sexist patriarchal monster!" nonsense.
Average teachers. (Score:3, Insightful)
I, however, wasn't lucky enough to get a professor with eidetic memory. What I got was a professor who, if I was lucky, realized he had a class.
There are good teachers, there are bad teachers. I generally posit average. You need a very excellent teacher to effectively teach a class size over a hundred. There are reasons states pass restrictions on class sizes in primary education.
What I discovered was that attending lecture in such a huge class was effectively useless for me. The sheer number of noises(coughs, chair creaks, whispering, pen clicks, etc...) often drowned out the teacher. It was often difficult to get a seat at the right range to effectively see the slides. The books ended up explaining it better, but people don't learn just by reading. Lecture helps, in my case discussion helps a lot more. Experimentation, hands on is even better.
Re:I don't get the "50% reduction in failures" (Score:1, Insightful)
It's worth noting the average person still seems to think of himself as the rare exception.
Next stop, Trantor. (Score:4, Insightful)
"However, while you can get basic scientific knowledge taught as - more or less - a byproduct of a research development focused program, you cannot get research development as a byproduct of a "good teacher" focused program. "
And, truth be told, I'm not arguing your point either. You're right.
It's just getting awfully dark out here.
When I first set foot on a college campus way back in the early 80s, professors listed their academic affiliations on their door -- Dr. Someguy, PhD, Caltech, Dr. OtherDude, PhD, Stanford, etc.
The last time I spent any significant time on a college campus in the year 2000, I saw entire departments listed by their corporate sponsor. Professors began listing the companies they consulted with, rather than the institution that granted them their degrees.
Yes, it was at the height of the boom, but several professors I heard of -- at a big famous state school of awesome reputation -- had ditched teaching their classes entirely. They literally did not show up to lecture a single class and dumped all teaching duties on their grad students of dubious communication skills, who in turn slashed schedules to a minimum, too busy consulting on the side themselves.
And then we had eight years of Bush. Public schools in this country aren't even a shell of their former selves any more. They're not even a joke. They're just sad and pathetic, cargo cults going through the motions of running a school who have forgotten the substance and barely remember the form.
Most of the "official" communication my kids bring home looks like the first drafts of a high school freshman comp class. I talk to history teachers who can't tell the difference between the battles of Manassas and Midway, science teachers who can't make an electromagnet, English teachers who dimly remember seeing a couple of Shakespeare's plays on video, math teachers who can't take a derivative...
The two people doing the most to educate the American public about science right now are Jamie and Adam of "Mythbusters," and as much as I adore those guys, it's a little like saying our national defense is secured by the good ol' boys of the Buford Volunteer Fire Department.
It's not just our physical infrastructure that's crumbling, our intanglible assets such as level of education among the populace are falling apart as well.
So when I hear someone who calls themselves a "professor" -- and that title literally means teacher, mind you -- talk about how teaching is too trivial a task for them to attend to, how it's not their main mission, it's a little like hearing a firefighter talk about how he doesn't wanna get his hair messed up. It makes me want to grab them by the collar and pimpslap them across the room until they get back into the fight they're supposed to be leading, the fight that we are losing so badly.