More Clicks, Fewer Bricks: The Lecture Hall is Obsolete
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- Is the college of the future online? With the popularity of MOOCs (massive open online courses) and the availability of online degree programs at a fraction of their on-campus price, we are experiencing an exciting experiment in higher education. Does the traditional classroom stand a chance? Will online education be the great equalizer, or is a campus-based college experience still necessary?
Brought to you in partnership with the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy, a joint venture of Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School. The Richman Center fosters dialogue and debate on emerging policy questions where business and markets intersect with the law.
You can safely skip the first 15 minutes-a quarter of an hour of bloviating. Actual debate starts at 15:24
I really enjoy these debates. I get extremely excited whenever you all post a new one! Please don't ever stop doing these!
I am self educated. I dropped out of high school to help my mother pay off her debt (a mistake I regret as I was in my sophomore year at the time).
I continued my education online. Got my GED and used free online university resources and tools like Khan Academy to further the fields I was interested in, as well as strengthen my weaknesses (maths).
I find now that I am older, not only am I more well rounded than the current college graduate but I am also more articulate due to my understanding of academia.
Brick and mortar education institutions have agendas, and finding one that fits your goals is nearly impossible. When you put knowledge in the hands of the scholar that seeks knowledge, it is a far more powerful and useful learning tool. Primary school is useless, and college, as it is now, isn't for everyone or anyone some would argue.
What I got from this debate is this: online classes are more suited for science/technology courses, whereas liberal arts courses are better left in lecture halls.
I'm smarter than my community college teachers, thanks MOOCs!
My issue throughout the whole debate is, as one of the opponents to the motions stated, its proponents are assuming a bright future for online education. As they sit these online schools, while entertaining (Brian Greene's new website comes to mind), are not accredited and therefore not particularly useful.
Also, if the online proponents are allowed assume that things will continue to get better and better to make up for current admitted shortcomings, surely the exact same thing could be said for the "brick" model. Universities are embracing, perhaps slowly, new technology including online elements--and they'll keep getting better and better.
I am leaning more for the motion. I think lecture halls are becoming more or less obsolete, at least in the traditional sense. The side against the motion keeps going on about interaction and a professor being able to talk about texts and reading. Haven't they ever heard of video conferencing and similar technologies not to mention some of the other technologies allowing for such interaction mentioned by those arguing for the motion? Anyway, I think the college of the future will have a combination of online and offline or on-campus learning.
I went to college for 6 years and learned almost nothing. Everything I use at work, I learned in my free time. The only thing I stayed was for the darned piece of toilet paper I needed to land my first job. That piece of paper is now completely obsolete due to 2 years of in field experience.
Yes, the lecture hall is entirely obsolete if and only if people would hire based on personal qualifications rather than the ink on the toilet paper you present during an interview.
College isn't right for everyone. Clearly it wasn't right for you.
brian177 It isn't right for anyone. For technology courses, it lags behind the facts about 20 years. The education we get is close to worthless and yet it's the standard by which young people are judged to enter the job market. It doesn't work anymore and it's time for big change.
We're getting into a situation where people without a degree can arguably earn more money than people with a Ph.D. if they were smart enough to get proper certification and training. That's probably for the best, but it does mean the lecture hall is done with.
ahouyearno My degree is in biology. without universities we don't get equipment (which require inordinate amounts of funding). My degree might not specifically broadcast my exposure to gas chromotography, but it does lend credibility to my account of what I might be capable of in the work place as a researcher or lab tech say.. if my cv didn't include a competency in lab work generated by my exposure to extremely expensive machinery I would not get the job of my choosing regardless of the quality of my toilet paper.
Adam Katz The value of your degree is in learning to operate that machinery, not the machinery itself. A degree merely means you're capable of being educated in complicated matters. If you understand gas chromotography, I'm fairly sure I could retrain you into any field I need, even if it has nothing to do with biology. You're smart, that's all your degree proves. However, 2 years of experience in the field would trump your degree.
How old is the lab equipment you worked with in university? In Belgium at least, I wouldn't be surprised if the equipment was a decade old if not more.
You know to handle expensive machinery which makes you qualified as a junior cisco network technician. I'm not kidding, I could send you to a training and you'd pass it. That's the value a degree holds today and that's what makes it possible to get the job of your choosing, any job inside and outside of biology.
I do not believe that it is possible to adequately learn to use many (if not most) kinds of lab work without real exposure to the working machinery. There are too many tacit components to many types of lab work, which would make an applicant seem unlettered in the act of defending their candidacy for a related job. Safety precautions and minor procedural details are crucial components of research, but are unmanageably nuanced when learned without first hand experience (it would be analogous to memorizing how to build a shed cold from a text book before ever getting started).
If i wanted to use my degree with cisco I believe you'd be right, my having worked with complex and expensive equipment might land me the job. This is why "Bricks vs Clicks" should be a subject-to-subject specific debate. Computer science is best taught online. It's better for comprehension and for transfer appropriate processing. The field of computer science has already accredited online courses which hold as much hiring power as our leading universities in the states.
Biology and most of the STEM fields require too many moving parts, too much expensive equipment and too much tacit knowledge to do without university settings. We should take a bite out of higher education by stripping them down. Include only the subjects which require these parameters to flourish, and pour the university resources into them. That's my opinion.
One of many things people discuss these days about human in relation to technology is whether or not technology is dehumanizing or promoting disconnection from reality and such. This is one of many ideas emphasized by the con side, but one thing people must consider is the definition of technology because technology exists in various forms. Whether or not it's good or bad is merely a subjective matter. It's feasible online education is a more influential and powerful medium than the traditional method of teaching and like humans, it will change, adapt, and evolve.
I have recently discovered Intelligence Squared. Its phenomenal. Real topics by intelligent human beings who do not scream and talk over each other like you would get on any news outlet.
some of rebecca"s arguments were really poor, in her closing, she depicts what she did in her classroom, completely ommiting that the exact same thing can be done on online forums... which most of moocs already do... and has been doing for years.
I am definitely for more clicks thank bricks. I earned two BA's in a brick and mortar school before opting to pursue a MA from an online program. Both approaches have specific advantages. I was lucky enough to go to a University for my undergraduate work that had small class sizes; being able to have a student-teacher relationship with my professors was awesome. The brick and mortar approach can also lose its personal touch. As an example have also been to schools where I was one of 70 people in the class; in those instances I was just a number.
As many advantages as having that relationship with your professor can yield I am still a proponent of online education. My masters program gave me an opportunity to be part of class with students from over 100 countries. This included troops who were earning their MA while serving in Afghanistan. It was a tremendous experience. Online education forces the serious student to actually LEARN the course material. During my time in Grad school I had a minimum of 150 pages a week to read every week; that was just the reading portion. In my opinion I would say that I learned more in the 18 months of my Graduate Program than I did in most of my classes where I had to be at the school itself. Like many things it just takes the right amount of motivation to succeed.
Anyone else watching this for their GEO Class ?
For science degrees, it is hard to get the understanding through an online course that you get in a brick-and-mortar school. Sure, you can teach theory and discuss principles and hypothetical problems online. Doing experiments, asking laboratory technicians for help, watching yourself attempt to translate theory into reality - is a whole different matter, and a skill you cannot practice until you do it in real life. I can see an English or History major being taught online but not a Chemistry or Biology or Physics major.
My general thoughts here --
The "more clicks than bricks" idea works great for a complete education in any of the soft sciences, almost any fine arts program, and most liberal arts programs. I think you have one major impediment with hard sciences and that is the physical "work" portion of the picture. Even with arts programs, there is "equipment" involved, but it is all well within reach and available for anyone to acquire. The need for live person-to-person interaction between students and professors/TAs is quite doable with live chat sessions. The presence of technology exists now to make instantaneous personal interaction with people across thousands of miles which gives it a big advantage over college-by-radio/TV/RUclips as mentioned early on in the video. A system like this doesn't get you down to zero bricks, but you can certainly bring it down considerably. Also, online instruction does not have to equal after-the-fact watching of lecture videos -- this is the most common mode simply because the people who favor online instruction are working professionals who have irregular and uneven schedules; so self-paced learning is super-valuable for these people. Alternatively, I can even imagine, for instance, a traditional lecture held not in a huge lecture hall but a little meeting room where the professor and a white board feed are visible to all the students who connect at some scheduled point in time -- he has a screen where he sees connected students in the lecture... gets a little blip when someone has a question and everybody can hear an audio feed of the question and so on. A pseudo-Google Hangouts/WebEx type of approach, albeit a little more formalized for a specific purpose.
Of course, in a lot of the soft sciences, we tend to have problems with education that are not really stemming from technology or lack thereof, but from attitudes about how to teach, what constitutes learning of a subject, and how we value certain knowledge above others. This comes partly from the history of universities being a place where faculty are valued not in terms of their ability to pass down knowledge, but in terms of their fecundity in producing novel research. This in turn creates a system where your safest bet is to assume that your professor doesn't have a friggin' clue how to teach; and most of the time, that assumption is very depressingly correct. The other thing is that, at the end of the day, the majority of students are not looking to produce novel research, but to gain knowledge and a foundational background that can support their efforts in a vocational pursuit. That is something that I feel a lot of university programs still do not get because they design their curricula to drive people up through grad school, and not through reality. It's a self-perpetuation effort that is running the risk of putting them behind the curve. The other shortcoming is a little harder to deal with, and that is the fact that the same idea can be presented in different ways and some work better for some students than others. This doesn't really work in a lecture setting by any means but only by personal interaction between students and professors/TAs.
That said, where bricks do count is especially evident in the hard sciences and engineering. This is the place where you need to experiment; you need to directly study physical _things_; you need to collect the data and get your hands dirty. Can you imagine, for instance, studying medicine without ever physically touching a human body? And it's not as if you can do the lab sessions by getting yourself some mail-order cadavers... Can you study chemistry in depth without a laboratory and well-maintained equipment? That's not the sort of thing someone can build in their bedroom, especially not if there are any risks involved. This is where the bricks of a campus are unavoidable. And while I can argue that this necessitates traditional universities, it certainly does not apply to every student in every program, and even programs in the hard sciences can in some part make use of online instruction in order to bring costs down. The basic thesis here is not moving education universally into the cloud, but simply _fewer_ bricks, and/or that the _lecture hall_ is obsolete. The lecture hall is not the place where the "hard" portion of these areas of study takes place... and that means that you still have room to hybridize the two even in the realm of otherwise conventional education.
It's interesting to see that the side that won got less votes in the end than the side that won.
Mooc? I'll give you mooc!
- George Memmoli, MeanStreets
Just to put it out there...
There are no evidence that US American universities are best "in the world", major innovative companies such as Intel although founded in US America, is in the end, international. Intel spends 10% of total research budget in Beijing alone, out of 50+ cities. The extensively commercially successful Pentium Intel CPU series, is engineered in India.
There are also no evidence that US America founded technology companies have innovations dominantly by US American university educated people.
The various rankings of universities possess variables in which skews the final value, examples includes the total number of citations of thesis, hence the older the university is, the larger the value, this variable does not serve as a variable to decrease the final value but increase. Some variables even include "international standings" which contribute to the final value whereby the "best" possess the highest value, doesn't make sense right? Also, to note, the rankings of which rank US / UK universities at the top not only have extensively ambiguous variables, but are themselves predominantly US / UK centric, I do believe they are funded well in order to create false measurements. Hence they *rate themselves* as the "best".
This is similar to ranking economics of countries with the value of nominal GDP, in-fact, it's worse.
To conclude, there is no evidence that US American universities are among or the "best" in the world.
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