Education and “Internet Time” June 30, 2015
Posted by gordonwatts in Teaching, university.add a comment
I saw this link on techcrunch go by discussing the state of venture capital in the education sector. There is a general feeling, at least in the article, that when dealing with universities that things are not moving at internet speed:
“The challenge is, in general, education is a pretty slow to move category, particularly if you’re trying to sell into schools and universities … In many cases they don’t seem to show the sense of urgency that the corporate world does.” says Steve Murray, a partner with Softbank Capital, and investor in the education technology company, EdCast.
I had to laugh a bit. Duh. MOOC’s are a classic example. Massively Open Online Courses – a way to educate large numbers of people with a very small staff. The article refers to the problems with this, actually:
The first generation of massively open online courses have had (well-documented) problems with user retention.
So why have universities been so slow to just jump into the latest and greatest education technology? Can you imagine sending your kid to get a degree from the University of Washington, where they are trying out some new way of education that, frankly, fails on university scale? We are a publically funded university. We’d be shut! The press, rightly, would eat us alive. No institution is going to jump before they look and move their core business over to something that hasn’t been proven.
Another way to look at this, perhaps, is that each University has a brand to maintain. Ok, I’m not a business person here, so I probably am not using the word in quite the right way. None the less. My department at the University of Washington, the Physics Department, is constantly looking at the undergraduate curricula. We are, in some sense, driven by the question “What does it mean to have a degree from the University of Washington Physics Department?” or “What physics should they know?” or another flavor: “They should be able to explain and calculate X by the time they are awarded the degree.” There is a committee in the department that is responsible for adjusting the courses and material covered, and they are constantly proposing changes.
So far only certain technological solutions have an obvious “value proposition.” For example, the online homework websites. This enables students to practice problems without having to spend a huge amount of money on people who will do the grading of the exams. Learning Management Systems, like Canvas, allows us to quickly setup a website for the course that includes just about everything we need as teachers, saving us bunch of time.
Those examples make teaching cheaper and more efficient. But that isn’t always the case. Research (yes, research!!!) has shown that students learn better when they are actively working on a problem (in groups of peers is even more powerful) – so we can flip the class room: have them watch lectures on video and during traditional lecture time work in groups. To do it right, you need to redesign the room… which costs $$… And the professor now has to spend extra time recording the lectures. So there is innovation – and it is helping students learn better.
I think most of us in education will happily admit to the fact that there are inefficiencies in the education system – but really big ones? The problem with the idea that there are really big inefficiencies is that no one has really shown how to educate people on the scale of a University in a dramatically cheaper way. As soon as that happens the inefficiencies will become obvious along with the approach to “fix” them. There are things we need to focus on doing better, and there are places that seem like they are big inefficiencies… and MOOC’s will have a second generation to address their problems. And all of us will watch the evolution, and some professors will work with the companies to improve their products… but it isn’t going to happen overnight, and it isn’t obvious to me that it will happen at all, at least not for the bulk of students.
Education is labor intensive. In order to learn the student has to put in serious time. And as long this remains the case, we will be grappling with costs.
Tests are Good for You January 21, 2011
Posted by gordonwatts in Teaching, university, University of Washington.3 comments
The New York Times had an article the other day talking about a discovery that is making rounds:
Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.
I’m here to tell you: duh!
In fact, we’ve institutionalized this in our physics graduate schools. Most university physics departments have the mother-of-all tests. Here at UW we call it the Qualifying Exam. Others call it a prelim (short for preliminary). And there is a joke associated with this exam, usually said with some bitterness if you’ve not passed it yet, or some wistfulness if you long since have passed it:
You know more physics the day you take the qual than you ever do at any other time in your life.
The exam usually happens at the end of your first year in graduate school. The first year classes are hell. Up to that point in my life it was the hardest I’d ever worked at school. Then the summer hits, and you get a small rest. But it is impossible to rest staring down the barrel of that exam, often given at the end of the summer just before the second year of classes start. You have to pass this exam in order to go on to get your Ph.D. And for most of us, it is the last (formal) exam in our career that actually matters. So physiologically, it is a big hurdle as well.
How hard is it? My standard advice to students is that they should spend about one month studying, 8 hours a day. For most people, if they study effectively, that is enough to get by. Some need less and some need more. This is about what it took me. What is the test like? At UW ours is 2 hours per topic, closed book, and all it is is working out problems. No multiple choice here! It lasts two days.
So, how do you study? There is, I think, really only one way to get past this. For 30 days, 8 hours a day, work out problems. There are lots of old qualifier problems on websites. Our department provides students with copies of all the old exams. Even if you don’t know the solution, you force your self to try to work it out with out looking it up in a book – break your brain on it. Once you can solve those problems with out having to look at a text book, you know you are ready. Imagine trying to study by reading a text book, or by reviewing your first year homework problems. There is no way your brain will be able to work out a new problem after that unless you are a very unique individual.
Note how similar this is to the results shown in the article:
In the first experiment, the students were divided into four groups. One did nothing more than read the text for five minutes. Another studied the passage in four consecutive five-minute sessions.
A third group engaged in “concept mapping,” in which, with the passage in front of them, they arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.
The final group took a “retrieval practice” test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
The last group did the best, as you might imagine from the theme of this post!
This is also how you know more physics than at any other time in your life. At no other time do you spend 30 days working out problems across such a broad spectrum of physics topics. If you study and try to work out a sufficiently broad spectrum of problems you can breeze through the exam (literally, I remember watching one guy taking it with me just nail the exam in about half the time of the rest of us).
Working out problems – without any aids – is active learning. I suppose you could follow the article and say that forcing the brain to come up with the solution means it organizes the information in a better way… Actually, I have no idea what the brain does. But, so far this seems to be the best way to teach yourself. You are actively playing with the new concepts and topics. This is why homework is absolutely key to a good education. And this is why tests are good – if you study correctly. If you actively study for the test (vs. just reading the material) then you will learn the material better.
And we need to work better at designing tests that force students to study actively. For example, I feel we are slipping backwards sometimes. With the large budget cuts that universities are suffering one byproduct is the amount of money we have to hire TA’s to help grade our large undergraduate classes is dropping. That means we can’t ask as many open-ended exam questions – and have to increase the fraction of multiple choice. It is much harder to design a test that goes after problem solving in physics using multiple choice. This is too bad.
So, is this qualifier test hazing process? Or is there a reason to do it? Actually, that is a point of controversy. Maybe there is a way to force the studying component without the high-anxiety of the make-or-break exam. Certainly some (very good) institutions have eliminated the qual. Now, if we could figure out how to do that and still get the learning results we want…
I wish my lectures looked like this April 28, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Teaching, university.1 comment so far
A typical lecture prepared and given by John Wheeler:
Apparently he would fill the lecture board with these amazing figures and very neat writing before lecture, and then work his way through the the board, moving from one end of the room to the next. Wow, eh? Think of that – every seminar he would give he would have to write it from scratch. No reusing power point slides!!
When the age of transparencies hit I remember seeing several people who would give talks that were art and science combined – just as above. Half the joy of watching the talk was their slides and how they told a story with their amazing pictures. The other half was the science, of course.
Then there is me. For lectures I use something called OneNote. I basically use it like a very long transparency roll, only it is better since it is on a very large projected computer screen (hey – no more transparency pen rubbing off on my left hand!). I like it because it has axes pre-drawn – and straight lines! But that doesn’t change a basic fact: my lectures are a jumble of bad writing, bad pictures, and squiggly lines.
I wonder how much time and effort I’ve have to put into things to make them look like above!? Perhaps there is some program that will automatically draw what I mean and not the tortured path my pen actually draws out?
Life as a Physicist 