But who’s left to teach all those less-than-ideal students at San Jose State? Living, breathing professors. Any administration that’s seriously thinking about signing a license with a MOOC provider to automate the teaching of those students who need living, breathing professors the most will have to think about Thrun’s pivot before it lets the robots take over. If they have their own self interest at heart (let alone the interests of those students), they won’t do it. I think that is something to celebrate.
It’s also worth noting the incredible irony here. MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses. However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer without the guidance that living, breathing professors provide to people negotiating its rocky shores for the first time. People need people.
That means that the only way to open higher education to the masses is to hire more people to teach, either in person or online. Accept no austerity-inspired technological substitutes because bringing quality higher education to the world won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will be good for the world in the long run.
Jon Breitenbucher on 05 Mar 13"Professors might be surprised by what the data tell them. Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard, drew murmurs from the crowd-which mostly consisted of Harvard and MIT faculty members-when he showed research indicating that students at a lecture have brain activity roughly equivalent to when they watch television." - this doesn't seem to surprising. There are some other interesting ideas mentioned like "Maybe we could have 100 people register for a seminar," Mr. Rabkin said. The students could work through the first 12 weeks independently and online, "and that teacher can finish the seminar five different times in the course of a 15-week semester, spending the last three weeks with each of those groups of 20."
Amyaz Moledina on 13 Mar 13I agree with this brain activity finding. Students constantly come to me and say "I understand what you are saying in class but when you ask me questions outside of class I do not know what to do." They are not paying attention. Even when I teach to the test, the results from online questions are equivalent (I need to check this formally). This has forced me to rely more on solving open ended problems in groups and getting students to write their own answers. So my principles class is turning into a first year problem solving seminar!