New Google and CMU Moonshot: the 'Teacherless Classroom' 89
theodp writes: At the behest of Google, Carnegie Mellon University will largely replace formal lectures in a popular introductory Data Structures and Algorithms course this fall with videos and a social networking tool to accommodate more students. The idea behind the multi-year research project sponsored by Google — CMU will receive $200,000 in the project's first year — is to find a way to leverage existing faculty to meet a growing demand for computer science courses, while also expanding the opportunities for underrepresented minorities, high school students and community college students, explained Jacobo Carrasquel, associate teaching professor of CS. "As we teach a wider diversity of students, with different backgrounds, we can no longer teach to 'the middle,'" Carrasquel said. "When you do that, you're not aiming at the 20 percent of the top students or the 20 percent at the bottom." The move to a "teacherless classroom" for CS students at CMU [tuition $48K] comes on the heels of another Google CS Capacity Award-inspired move at Stanford [tuition $45K], where Pair Programming was adopted in a popular introductory CS class to "reduce the increasingly demanding workload for section leaders due to high enrollment and also help students to develop important collaboration skills."
Re:Teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
For $200k just hire more teachers.
If you include benefits, overhead, and the amortized cost of the pensions, that would get you two teachers, who on average would be average.
I have taken several MIT Courseware MOOCs, most recently Patrick Winston's AI course [mit.edu]. It is better than anything I was taught at the univ I attended. With a MOOC, everyone can see the material presented by the best instructor available. Asking questions in the forum generally gives better and more thorough answers than a rushed professor would give if you interrupted him in class.
If you step back and think about it, mediocre teachers regurgitating the same material over and over is a dumb way to educate people. We can do better.
Re:Teachers (Score:4, Informative)
Eh, we're not going to get rid of teachers. They're just going to have more tools and instructional models at their disposal.
This sounds like a good instructional model. After all, one of the best ways to truly learn a topic is to attempt to teach it to someone else.
I'm pretty sure they're going to find out they still need someone in a "teacher" role to monitor progress, resolve conflicts, keep students motivated, adapt the curriculum to individual students' abilities and learning styles, and so on.
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When you can replace a teacher with a video lecture you're admitting that you've had substandard teaching all along.
Re:Teachers (Score:4, Informative)
"Teaching" as we know it is going to be replaced. We will always have teachers and people that foster learning but it will not be done as it is done now. K-12 virtual schools have taken off in Michigan. They have all online and 'hybrid' programs as well.
As a high performing student I would have watched Kahn Academy until I couldn't keep my eye lids up. The times I did have a question it could have been answered clearly and easily by someone in a video.
You're going to have super star teachers on youtube or other learning channel answering high level questions. (Like how Stack Exchange works). For those people that need hands on learning (which is a small subset of everyone) they will get hands on learning in person.
Why does a tiny small school in the middle of nowhere need both a French AND Spanish teacher when you could have someone in Spain and France teaching them through Youtube and interacting through Skype. Look at how Duolingo[0] has taken off. That's something that can be introduced to a 3 year old and they will intuitively pick up without fighting 13 years of trying to 'unlearn' some things in English.
Teaching as we know it is going to be automated away by technology. Code Academy [codecademy.com] taught me python syntax in an afternoon. It's clear and straight forward enough that I'm trying to get my wife to learn coding.
I would have spent every waking hour doing Code Academy in one window with Kahn Academy in the other if I had those tools available to me in high school. Instead I got stuck in some math classes with people that didn't care or distracted the teacher from actually teaching. In that scenario I would have benefited from where technology is taking teaching. So will a lot of other students.
Teachers are already experimenting with Fliped classrooms [wikipedia.org] where students watch the lecture as 'homework' and the homework is done in class when the teacher is available. There's no reason the 'interacting with a teacher' part can't be done online. [Some rural schools are rolling out alternatives to 'snow days' where the students still learn at home](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/02/02/382701005/for-some-schools-learning-doesnt-stop-on-snow-days)
There was a story that I can't find now about a teacher that had students write the book for the next semester. Take a classroom of 8th graders and have them make a LaTeX/Wiki page for each chapter they learn about. Make it the final class project and have different groups take a different chapter. The next semester improve on it. After a year or two you'll have a very well written and vetted wikibook on a class.
Why do teacher spend so much of their time on lesson plans? That's something that should have a good central Git repository. If you have a different style of teaching fork the project and make your own. Let teachers merge revisions back. You should have a good set of lesson plans, books, etc all. End the big book cartel and just start publishing LaTeX books for K-12.
I sit at home 400 miles away from my boss. I use my webcam for meetings. I push and pull git repos over VPN. There's no reason learning can't be facilitated in the same way. The best part about it is I can work it into my schedule. Some days I'm up at 4 am coding and feeding the kid. When the kid goes down for a nap, so do I. Then I'll work until midnight with dinner, TV and time with the wife intermixed. Apple has "At Home Advisors" [apple.com] so that people can get tech support from an American working at home. My company has moved almost all IT support to people working from home. Parents don't have to choose between raising a family and working.
With online courses my kids will learn the same way I work. If we want to go on vacation for a month in Germany all we need is internet access and both him and I can get our work/school work done and then eat dinner at a delicatessen, talk German with some locals and do some sight seeing. The learning and work still gets done but it didn't require a teacher in a classroom or even a building.
[0]. Check out DuoLingo, it's 'online learning' and work books done right for foreign languages. https://www.duolingo.com/ [duolingo.com] I can't wait until my son is old enough to start playing with the Android app.
Re: Teachers (Score:1)
I'm going to guess you are not a teacher. Everything you said makes sense and would work if we assume that all students care to learn and would do their part. The reason teachers have lesson plans is that they have to reach the students they gave in their room not some imagined ideal of a student and their students are different from other teachers and even each class period has different students. If America wants to continue educating all Americans this will never work, most Americans simply don't care
Re:Teachers, the oldest profession (Score:2)
"Teaching" as we know it is going to be replaced. We will always have teachers and people that foster learning but it will not be done as it is done now.
Yep, teachers are just going to keep incorporating new technologies... like blackboards and whiteboards and textbooks and transparencies and TVs and computers and projectors and the internet and laboratory equipment. But kids that can learn on their own will continue to learn on their own, and teachers will be there to try to keep those students engaged and motivated and get the best that they can out of the rest.
Why does a tiny small school in the middle of nowhere need both a French AND Spanish teacher when you could have someone in Spain and France teaching them through Youtube and interacting through Skype. Look at how Duolingo[0] has taken off. That's something that can be introduced to a 3 year old and they will intuitively pick up without fighting 13 years of trying to 'unlearn' some things in English.
I'll check out duolingo, but usually it's relatively difficult for a native speaker to teach t
$6K a course for a "free video lecture" (Score:3)
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This was my second thought - that I would feel ripped off to spend private university tuition on something like that. Perhaps they can figure out a way to make it work, but that was one reason I went to a top private university, to be in small classes with more professor support - my school (an academic rival of CMU, as I understand it - Rose-Hulman) advertised and delivered on not having classes taught by TAs, and a video class seems far worse than that.
My first thought was that apparently Rose-Hulman wil
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So this is to get the CMU name on your diploma and certification you passed the exam?
Yes, and there is nothing new about that. Even back in the pre-Internet days, you could learn anything that universities taught by just going to the library and reading the textbooks. Universities provide structure and certification. The learning has always been up to you.
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Also, it's quite often the case that one can pass the classes without having learned or understood anything at all. Going to a university is a great place to learn things. But it doesn't guarantee that you will learn anything (and especially anything useful) even if you get the degree. You have to take some of your own initiative to ensure that you actually need what you want/need to learn to succeed in life.
Corporations controlling university ... (Score:1)
I find it a little concerning we're letting corporations and private foundations control how universities/schools are doing their stuff.
At the very least, it's self serving. Especially from people who keep offshoring jobs and abusing the H1B system to lower wages.
This sounds like we're letting corporations define what education should look like to maximize their own pool of people they can pay even less to.
Want your kid to have a good job? Get them into welding or being an electrician or something.
Because
K-5 CS Teachers Trained at Microsoft Store (Score:3)
Taught by Code.org Affiliates who are experienced computer science educators, our free workshops will prepare you to teach the Code Studio courses for grades K-5. Workshop details [code.org]: The Microsoft Store @ The Domain will host a FREE Code.org workshop. FREE CPEs for educator re-certification will be provided!..Priority: Title I Schools. Waiting List: Non-Title I Schools. THANK YOU GOOGLE & MICROSOFT FOR SPONSORING THIS EVENT!
"find a way to leverage existing faculty" (Score:5, Insightful)
Google translation: Find a way to lay off more faculty and make existing faculty work a lot harder for the same pay.
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Most advancements increase the amount of work an individual can do, or replaced human labour completely. If you are against anything that makes someone redundant, you are a Luddite.
Re:"find a way to leverage existing faculty" (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly is the advancement here?
You answer that yourself in the very next sentence:
Why would anyone pay for a college education where there were no professors?
Bingo. This is the advancement. You can get a world class education for NOTHING. How is that not an advancement? You only need to attend a physical university if you want 1) a diploma, or 2) to meet girls.
I am currently working through the CS program at MIT Courseware [mit.edu]. Every morning, I start up the video, jump on the treadmill, and burn up about 300 calories while I learn something new. I have applied many of the things I learned to my job, and I have also lost about 5 kg. I think it is fantastic that MIT puts this material up for free, and I am glad that CMU is doing the same. I can't see how anyone can think this is not an advancement.
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Bingo. This is the advancement. You can get a world class education for NOTHING. How is that not an advancement? You only need to attend a physical university if you want 1) a diploma, or 2) to meet girls.
Except that this still requires students to enroll in a university to take the class. And $6000 is hardly "nothing" to most people.
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Except that this still requires students to enroll in a university to take the class. And $6000 is hardly "nothing" to most people.
The MIT Courseware is available on Youtube. It costs $0, which is "nothing" to most people.
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The only "advancement" I see is that CMU is now going to have a huge profit margin on this $6000 course since they no longer have to pay a professor.
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The only "advancement" I see is that CMU is now going to have a huge profit margin on this $6000 course since they no longer have to pay a professor.
CMU is a research university. So every dollar they save is another than can be spent on research. Every hour that a professor saves by not regurgitating the exact same material that he taught last year, is another hour dedicated to research. So, yes, this is an advancement.
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CMU saving money for itself doesn't help the students.
If you feel that attending a university that does more and better research has no value, then you should not enroll in CMU. Go to a community college instead.
Especially when CMU isn't even discounting their tuition for this.
Why should they? In many fields, CMU is considered one of the best universities in the world, and they have far more applicants than spaces. Prices are driven by demand, not cost.
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CMU is a research university. So every dollar they save is another than can be spent on research.
Research universities don't generally spend their own money on research. They recruit faculty who then find other agencies to pay for research.
Every hour that a professor saves by not regurgitating the exact same material that he taught last year, is another hour dedicated to research.
Likewise, every hour that Elton John spends rehashing the same songs he's been playing for thirty years is an hour he could dedicate to producing new music. I don't see anyone begging him to stop performing, though.
If you consider students to be faceless vessels waiting to be filled with information, then yes, teaching can be automated. Filling willing vessels with
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Methinks you won't feel that way if you're ever on the receiving end of a redundancy.
There are always losers from any improvement in productivity. Millions of farmers were put out of work by the steel plow. Windmills and solar panels destroy coal mining jobs. Even if some jobs are eliminated, we are still collectively better off as we become more productive.
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I agree. This is inspired by a deep desire for more profit. It can only fail, as good teachers are critical for 85% of the students or so.
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That's a little disengenuous. There's just fewer faculty worrying about that pesky 'teaching thing' and they can worry about what's really important, like Academic research, or not.
Frankly, I paid maybe $1000 / semester (+1k for books) at my state sponsered school and got a great job. 15 years later, I look back on the pathetic state of 'educational inflation' with outright distain.
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There's just fewer faculty worrying about that pesky 'teaching thing' and they can worry about what's really important, like Academic research, or not.
Yes, because I'm sure the universities will keep paying them even though they're no longer needed.
"We don't need you for teaching anymore. But, you know what, we're going to keep giving you this big paycheck! Go research or something!"
Penn State did this back in 1983 (Score:2)
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Yep, this is a way for the college to get an even more obscene profit margin out of what they charge students. Why bother going to college at all when you remove the professors from the equation?
Re:Penn State did this back in 1983 (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah ... wow ... why the hell would someone pay tuition for something like that?
That's not an education. That's a web site or PBS.
This doesn't sound like it will improve education, just let Google co-opt university education with their crap.
I'm pretty sure there is no other area of education in which private corporations and interests are so heavily involved.
The new corporate vision of "every learns teh CS the way we think it should be taught" sounds like a bunch of crap to me.
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Not sure about keeping the same cost using this experience. I'm hoping (maybe naively) that these courses would be provided externally free for auditing and then, fees charged for credit. And those fees wouldn't be the same as in-class.
I rather enjoyed the "Google University" python intro classes I did a few weeks back. They're rather old (4 years IIRC). But, the instructor did a great job and the examples were well thought out and executed.
If you put these into a Kahn Academy model and then charged for uni
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I was there in EE too. Today, the fuckerbergs of the world would call the guy on the vhs a 'super-teacher' worthy of vast sums of money and the guy who changes the vhs - well, he's still a TA.
He's a ikaa sahyaka
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Why do you need a $80-100k professor to repeat the same words over and over for 10 or 20 years? A video recording can do the job an order of magnitude better (assuming high-quality graphic models shown to augment the audio portion of the professor).
With a flesh-and-blood professor, h
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You don't. If that's all the lecture is, it may as well be done well once.
Any professor who would throw out a paying student for asking questions should be fired, unless that student is being deliberately disruptive. Instead, there's a point where you just tell the student to come to office ho
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Re: Penn State did this back in 1983 (Score:2)
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I took an EE circuits class back in 1983 where the professor, as far as we knew, existed only on some VHS tapes in the corner of the room.
Hartshe University?
Will universities still teach ugrads in 30 years? (Score:4, Interesting)
>> tuition $48K (a year)
My first kid will be entering college in about 4 years and I plan on giving each of my kids about $20K (total) to help with their undergraduate education. (Each also went through 9 years of private school before high school at about $3K per kid per year, so I'll be about $45K into each kid's education total.) I'm already harping on the importance of getting through college without picking up debt. That means they will (hopefully) be shopping for ugrad creds from cheap alternatives (e.g., community colleges), and then transferring into a university only when they absolutely have to to get their 300/400-level credits. They'll also need to work through college and/or pick up some scholarships and/or live a home a bit to escape with little or no debt (and hopefully be completely out of college and the house in four years). I'm also looking at some trade options for one of my sons (good grades and great personality but dislikes reading and scores only the 70-80th percentile on standardized tests).
With a lot of other gen-X "middle class" parents like me (single IT earner, wife works part time) doing the same thing, I see the market for on-premise college and university undergraduate degrees starting to dry up. After watching the collective fail of an overeducated millennial generation so far, we just want our kids to get out there and succeed. Whether or not they have the same diploma on the wall that dad, grandma or the neighbors do...not so much.
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This is so true. I used to be very pro college, but now that my own kids are reaching the point of going or not, I've changed my tune. When they were little, I expected them to go to college. It was such a clear win. Now, I teach them how to evaluate whether they should go to college. It's not a clear win anymore.
Re:Will universities still teach ugrads in 30 year (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. I graduated in 1997, and I think back then it was still possible to find work that made any degree from any reasonable school worth it. Liberal arts students have always had problems, but at least there were some teaching jobs available and companies were willing to take a chance on someone who wasn't a perfect fit. For example, I got a chemistry degree and used my part time tech support job to land my first "real" IT job. These days, you really have to think about it. Graduating in a field where you can find work is almost always a guaranteed win over not going, or worse not finishing. But, going to a private school and running up massive debts you can't pay back to get a degree that isn't marketable is an even worse decision than it once was, given the vast sums of money involved.
Just like the tech boom we're seeing now, I think the "everyone needs to be in college" boom will calm down somewhat. Tuition can't go up forever, and if people aren't getting an ROI they won't pay for it anymore. Being a state school grad, I've always wondered whether the Ivy League connections network you buy for your $50K+ per year is actually worth it. I know that's where all the investment bankers, big law firm partners and management consultants come from, but are you guaranteed success with a Harvard, Yale or whatever diploma? I don't think that's the case.
An even more extreme example is law school. The Bar Association basically gutted entry level law jobs, allowed offshoring, etc. all while opening new law schools and encouraging people to practice. Now, the only way to make any serious money as a lawyer is to work for a big law firm, and those firms only hire the top 10% of the class from the top 14 law schools in the country. So not only do you need to go to the best schools -- you need to be better than all your peers. Otherwise, you waste $250K+ and three years of your life...literally flushing it down the toilet, no recovery possible, etc. That's the worst ROI in education ever.
Believe it or not, trades are a good idea. They're not outsourceable, and if you live in a state with reasonably strong unions, commercial construction will provide a very stable living. Plus, apprentices get paid while learning. There's going to be a ton of steamfitters, carpenters, welders, etc. retiring, so anyone who isn't cut out for higher education should get in on it. You'll get a stable living...no six figure salaries without massive overtime, but no feast or famine either.
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Are you sure that they need to go to college? College isn't for everyone. The trades need intelligent people too. You can get paid for your apprenticeship/internship and work all day with your hands. The 21st century trades are the 20th century college degrees. Stuff gets easier & simpler to use/understand until it just requires someone smart/clever with training and not someone with a full degree. IT and Plumbing have a lot in common. You don't need to know fluid dynamics to know how to do plumbing.
You
Re: Will universities still teach ugrads in 30 yea (Score:2)
After watching the collective fail of an overeducated millennial generation so far, we just want our kids to get out there and succeed. Whether or not they have the same diploma on the wall that dad, grandma or the neighbors do...not so much.
Unfortunately that same diploma is becoming increasingly essential for any employment all the way down to gas station attendant. If I had kids I would highly encourage them to find a trade and go to a trade school. Find a job that pays just well enough to do the things you actually want to do while giving you enough free time to do them.
Computing conceit - not an 'education thing' (Score:4, Insightful)
Its is a peculiar computer science conceit - that people, with their biases and foibles, can be replaced by sufficiently sophisticated computing resources.
The conceit shows up everywhere - from users with 'system says no' responses, to Google's algorithmic approach to everything, to OLPC talking of heli-dropping laptops into remote villages, to apps for everything: no matter how unimportant.
Unfortunately, instead of augmenting humans tech tries to supplant them
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Its is a peculiar computer science conceit - that people, with their biases and foibles, can be replaced by sufficiently sophisticated computing resources.
Well, if the computing resources were "sufficiently sophisticated", this would even be true. At this time, there are no such resources available though, and they never may be. Because most students (85% or so) need the presence of a reasonably good teacher with a personality in order to be able to learn, nothing less will do. I do not see technology being able to supply that anytime soon, if ever. And if AI can ever do that, it may just demand the same or better salary as humans do today...
In short, the stu
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Its is a peculiar computer science conceit - that people, with their biases and foibles, can be replaced by sufficiently sophisticated computing resources.
"sufficiently sophisticated computing resources" would have "biases and foibles" of their own and may even be considered people.
if they're now teaching to the top, bottom, and... (Score:1)
Pair programming? Great. Another step toward the institutionalization of parasitism.
Unacceptable, given tuition. (Score:2)
Something has to change here. Tuition continues to rise much faster than inflation, yet students are supposed to be satisfied with videos and a "social networking tool". I'm sorry, but that's fine if I'm paying not very much, but for the price of a CMU education, I want a real live professor (not a TA) with actual experience and enough depth to answer most any question the undergrads can dream up.
Another "top-of-the-boom" moment (Score:2)
News reports like this are reminiscent of 1999-2001. There was a CS boom back then too, as well as a host of pop-up "IT bootcamps" and intensive developer/web design classes. This was to support the initial build-out of the Web and some of the advances in systems work that this drove. Now, it looks like Google is trying to juice CS enrollment further and keep the boom running longer.
One problem with this is that we in the IT and dev fields through the first boom have experienced what happens when people mot
Anything but... (Score:2)
... hire enough faculty to teach the students.
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What a ripoff! (Score:2)
Social media? Is that like, asking for answers or help on Facebook, with a CMU logo?
And for the folks who think hiring teachers costs too much... try looking at all the articles about the war on tenure, and how most course (that is, > 65%) are taught by "adjuncts", with no chance of tenure, and lucky if they don't need food stamps, they earn so little.
I need to make sure my stepson does *not* consider CMU for starting college next year.
mark
Call Me A Snob (Score:2)
Google of all people is behind this? (Score:1)
Google has a notorious hiring bias for graduates of brand name schools. Do they think this will work because there will be more CMU graduates, regardless of quality?
"Applied CS" is a built-in talent that most don't have: many of these students won't succeed and never could, no matter who tries to "educate" them. One role of CS teachers is to spot the ones who can't do the work and redirect them. From CMU or Stanford's point of view, letting an untalented student struggle on for a few extra years at no cost
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So basically a text book? (Score:2)
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no you won't. the H1 visa holders are taught the old fashioned way.
Like an online course (Score:1)
I remember seeing an online MIT Masters in CS a few years ago that cost $60,000 (flat rate.) While I'm sure people learned something, it struck me as a flat out sale of a piece of paper with the MIT logo. Most online degrees nowadays advertise that they don't distinguish whether the degree was on online or not.
The sad thing is that, for the career minded, that $60,000 was probably a good investment, just like a $250,000 (or whatever it is now) Harvard MBA could pay for itself easily by opening jobs in Manha
My contribution to the future (Score:2)
I'm thinking a miniaturized tennis-ball launcher, adapted variously:
I think I can get funding for this soon.