Online courses and the future of teaching

[toorsdenote]

I had a conversation over lunch with a professor friend the other day about whether online classes are the future of academia -- at least for basic, quantitative classes like Calculus, which is one of the two classes I'm currently taking online.

I'm really loving taking calc online. At first I thought it was an OK substitute for taking it in person, but a lot of things about an online lecture class are better. For one thing, I can pause the lecture to do a problem myself and then unpause to watch him do the problem on the board, which is great practice. Second, I can rewind the lecture if I didn't understand or got lost in my own thoughts. Third, I can watch the parts of the lecture I already understand at 3x speed, which is so much nicer than being bored while he goes over things I already understand. It's also great to be able to watch the lectures whenever I want, which means I can work ahead in one of my classes if I have two assignments due the same day. We always tell students to do that, but often homework relies on a lecture they haven't had yet, in which case they're stuck.

At first I thought the online forums would be no substitute for asking questions in class, but in many ways they're better. I wouldn't get to ask many questions in a 97*-person class, which is what my calc class is. If the class were in real life, I'd get my questions answered by my friends in the class. In the online version, though, I get access to all the conversations classmates have had about the problem sets. Whenever I get stuck, chances are that someone else has gotten stuck in the same place and already asked my question. I can just read the replies they got, instead of making some poor TA go over the same problem over and over. (As an added bonus, the professor and TAs can read all the conversations the students have had, which must help when an academic integrity infraction is suspected.)

A downside occurred to me today, though, and I'm curious what you all think about it. Here's what I wrote to my friend:

It's a big time-saver for the professor that he can reuse a lecture year after year with different students. However, that means that he doesn't get the opportunity to experiment with teaching the material different ways and to figure out which ways are most effective. That seems bad in the long-term for professors' teaching skills.

If we imagine a future in which all college freshmen in the world (or at least the English-speaking world) take the same online calc class with lectures recorded by the best calc professor of all time (MIT's open courseware has calc lectures recorded in 1970!), then that's also a future in which nobody is learning how to teach calculus to other people. That just seems weird. I don't like the thought of having nobody, or a very small number of people, experienced at teaching calculus.

Then again, did bards make the same argument against the evils of recorded music? Did it bother people that we'd lose most of our campfire storytellers when books were invented? I think overall it's probably better to give everyone access to the same amazing recordings of Mozart than to leave us all stuck listening to our mediocre church pianists' renditions. (Church pianists might disagree...) Would it be OK for the same thing to happen to teaching?

* Just rechecked and it's up to around 145. Nice to know I wasn't the last slacker to add the class.

Comments

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

Maybe, maybe not people won't be *lecturing* in 20-50 years, but they will almost certainly be *teaching*. Having someone able to do more detailed explanations, possibly 1-on-1, is valuable.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

Yeah, it seems that in the online calc class discussed above, the lectures are basically taking the place of textbooks (video-textbooks), but a lot of the actual teaching is still happening interactively, in the forums. Maybe that's replaceable with a really good search feature on the forums, but probably not any time soon.

[toorsdenote.livejournal.com]

"a lot of the actual teaching is still happening interactively, in the forums"

Yeah, my one complaint about the class is that the professors and TA do not, in fact, use the forums. You can have office hours by Skype, but I'd rather see the course staff actually keeping track of the forum and stepping in when someone's struggling. (Some students ask really baffling questions that make me think they didn't understand the lecture at ALL, but I don't really know where to start in answering the question.)

But if the course were done really well, yes, I think the forums would take the place of a lot of the teaching.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

Ha, this sounds a lot like the dynamic I see at the intfiction.org forum, which has subfora for development in the popular languages (well, substitute "documentation" for "lecture"). The Inform forum there is more or less considered an integral part of the Inform-writing experience, and is recommended by the Inform website; several people involved with the creation of Inform hang out there.

What's interesting to me is that question-answering seems to self-sort pretty well, in that most people get useful and polite answers to their questions fairly quickly with no one person doing too much question-answering grunt work, because we all answer questions that involve just slightly less understanding than we have. So I'll usually answer things that are kind of subtle but familiar ("ah yeah, you're running into the [such and such] problem"), and whoever asked that will probably answer the questions about basic punctuation. (I get a sort of warm glow of achievement when my questions get answered by the people who work on Inform itself, because that meant it was, in fact, a pretty difficult problem.)

Unfortunately, the search feature for the forum is absolutely terrible, so we do get a lot of repeat questions. But unless it were really amazing, it wouldn't help with the total didn't-understand-the-lecture type questions, because if they knew what they were looking for, they wouldn't have a question at all.

[ikeepaleopard]

Is it google indexed? Everything I have ever wanted to know about cocoa is on stack overflow which I just search by google.

[zahariel.livejournal.com]

I also hang out on intfiction and have seen the same phenomenon. Usually if some newbie shows up with a newbie question, one of the semi-regulars will answer it within a day or so. And then one of the regulars asks some utterly obtuse deep magic question, and zarf and vaporware and frotz have some giant confused discussion about it and everyone else stares in wonder. Which I always find kind of funny especially if it happens by surprise.

[toorsdenote.livejournal.com]

"they will almost certainly be *teaching*"

Yeah, that's one scenario that occurred to me belatedly. As my friend Andrew said, nobody LIKES teaching calculus. It's something that has to be done before you can do the fun stuff with students. So, ideally, professors can spend the time they're NOT lecturing on the basics doing more interesting teaching with smaller groups of students.