
“Will this be on the test?” – Rethinking online education - sarahkpeck
https://medium.com/@thisissethsblog/will-this-be-on-the-test-237ae9cc53b4#.vfsvlzb4m
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Animats
Look at how the military does technical training. It's quite different than
traditional education. They're in a hurry, they're paying the troops, and they
have a job ready for them.

The military approach involves far more physical aids than usually seen in
education. Big boards where all the components of a system are laid out are
common. There's lots of practice on mock-ups of real equipment. Simulators are
common, and not just simulation programs. Many simulators have real system
components and controls.

Here's a classic simulator for warship damage control.[1] This is a Royal Navy
(UK) installation; the US Navy version is called the USS Buttercup.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGEl5DE_q1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGEl5DE_q1Q)

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kdkooo
Why does the percentage of dropouts from an online class matter? Do the issues
raised in this article really need to be addressed? There are still so many
people benefiting from successfully completing these courses, and learning new
information. Do the people who don't, or who try and then give up, really
affect the value of the opportunity online education brings?

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vinchuco
It depends. What is the final purpose of education?

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taneq
> As soon as education gets difficult (and useful education always gets
> difficult) it’s social pressure, peer pressure and our own need to fit in
> and achieve that often keeps us going.

What, no mention of the sunk costs to date? By the time a course gets
difficult (second year, third year, wherever your course got hard), quitting
will cost you a year of your time and a lot of money.

I would expect major factors contributing to online course dropout rates to
be:

1) Often there are no prerequisites enforced, so people get ambitious and find
themselves out of their depth very quickly.

2) Once they get stuck, all they're losing by dropping out is a few
afternoons' worth of reading a web page.

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skywhopper
I never fail to be surprised at the venom reserved for lecture as a core part
of education. Sure there are poor lectures, but the good, engaged lectures an
be remarkable learning opportunities. I learned the most in my college classes
that had great lectures.

~~~
capnrefsmmat
The available evidence shows that lectures are _extremely_ poor at delivering
conceptual understanding to students, even when delivered by relatively
accomplished professors.

In a wide range of lecture-based introductory physics courses, for example, if
you measure conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics before and after
the course, you find that students only learn about 25% of what they didn't
understand at the beginning.[1] (And students usually do pretty poorly on the
pre-test.) With interactive teaching methods, you can boost that to 50%.

The problem is that students don't have to engage with the material during
lectures -- so if they hold misconceptions, they misinterpret the lecture in
light of them, rather than realizing their errors. This can be seen in lecture
demonstrations, for example, where students don't learn anything from just
watching a demo, but _do_ learn if you force them to think about the problem
and make predictions first.[2]

There's a methodology based on these concepts, Peer Instruction, which has
students actively engage during class time by making predictions, explaining
their reasoning to other students, and answering conceptual questions posed by
the instructor. This has excellent results when tested.[3]

This is a hobby horse of mine[4], and I think we need to judge our claims
about education using the evidence, not our personal experience. Particularly
because we are the least capable judges of our learning: as students new to a
field, we are completely unqualified to judge how well we understand the
field.

[1] Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-
thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics
courses. American Journal of Physics, 66(1), 64–74.
[http://doi.org/10.1119/1.18809](http://doi.org/10.1119/1.18809)

[2] Crouch, C. H., Fagen, A. P., Callan, J. P., & Mazur, E. (2004). Classroom
demonstrations: Learning tools or entertainment? American Journal of Physics,
72(6), 835–838.
[http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1707018](http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1707018)

[3] Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer Instruction: Ten years of
experience and results. American Journal of Physics, 69(9), 970–977.
[http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249](http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249)

[4]
[https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2012-10-19-shutup.html](https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2012-10-19-shutup.html)

~~~
Joof
Looking at [4] they use it to say that a teacher / professor is necessary over
coursera or similar.

Given that almost all courses I took in college were the lecture / hw / exam
model, I don't think that conclusion fits their claim.

Video games are excellent at teaching in a similar manner (the witness is very
much like a math course that just happens to be made up). I see no reason why
the digital medium can't have an equal or better experience. Good coursera
courses often seem fairly interactive and the lecture itself isn't necessarily
the focal point of the class.

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Joof
Why not give them accreditation? Clearly completing them is an accomplishment.

There are other reasons to 'drop out'. I like to save courses on coursera
because I can't do them during the imposed timeframe. Sometimes I don't really
need the full course and only bits and pieces. Maybe I just want to check it
out and the opportunity cost was very low.

Don't solve problems when there aren't any. The biggest one is accreditation.
I was trapped in college far longer than I would have been if MOOCs were
accredited courses.

