
How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business - Anon84
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-big-data-taking-teachers-out-lecturing-business&print=true
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ZeroGravitas
The widespread availability of mass produced books should have taken teachers
out of the lecturing business. I'm not sure if it's true that lecturing
started because books were so expensive that one person read out the one
chained to the lectern and everyone made their own copies, but it feels about
right. It certainly makes much more sense than the modern spectacle of someone
reading bad powerpoint slides badly. But books didn't supplant lecturers, nor
did radio, television, VHS video tapes, computer aided-learning, nor the
internet.

Yet they should have. Ask anyone who actually wants to learn stuff and you'll
find they, naturally, use all these tools and reserve the precious time they
spend with an actual expert to mentoring, hands-on skills, subjective
evaluation, asking clarifying questions etc. Imagine how stupid you'd feel to
hire a world class expert in something and get them to read you a summary of a
chapter of their book.

But in Higher Education, having someone, who doesn't really want to teach, has
no real aptitude for it and who probably isn't hired, paid or promoted on the
basis of how good they are at it, stand in front of a large room of students
is basically their equivalent of Homeopathy. A logically preposterous notion,
contradicted by all available evidence of efficacy, that mind-bogglingly
survives into the 21st century.

No matter how bad this stuff is, and any bit of software being sold to higher
education is basically terrible for much the same reasons that nearly all
enterprise software sucks, it can't really be any worse than the status quo.

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Loughla
We have this same type of thing for a select few number of courses on our
campus. Don't let the PR spin get you, these courses are adopted to save money
for the college, anything else is a fortunate side-effect.

They seem, in theory, to work quite well. In reality, though, the 'adaptive
learning' algorithms are simply "answer x correctly, go to y; answer x
incorrectly, go to w" sort of things. They have fancy charts and graphics
showing 'knowledge clusters' and 'though pattern analyses', but really, it
boils down to my original statement. I've tested, re-tested and counter-tested
these programs using various skill levels and completely random answers.

X is right, proceed to y. X is wrong, proceed to w.

From the 2-3000 students I've seen run through these courses in the last four
years, there are three types of interaction with this model: those that love
it and do well (but would also love and do well in a structured classroom),
those that hate it and do poorly (but would also hate and do poorly in a
structured classroom), and those that have absolutely no idea why they're
being forced to work with a computer that doesn't allow you to answer
questions.

I may be a bit old fashioned in my pedagogy and educational theory (yet I'm
only in my 20's), but there really do seem to be students that simply respond
better to being able to ask questions and receive answers from a living-
breathing human being.

Really, the only benefit outside of cost savings to employees and
administration of universities and colleges is that these programs allow us to
find the exact point at which a particular student's understanding begins to
break down. That's new, and fascinating (and brings up whole new concerns on
privacy in my opinion).

~~~
yaddayadda
I can't post a long response, but there are many other student-driven reasons,
including self-pacing, self-direction, accessibility, drastically reduced
discrimination

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analog31
I'm not employed as a teacher, but one thing that I learned in a traditional
classroom setting was how to teach. I observed fifty teaching styles, and the
subtleties of adapting to those being taught. I use those skills every day. If
anything, an economy that expects more of us to become entrepreneurs, teaching
skill will become more valuable, not less.

I'm betting my career on some things never going obsolete, such as the laws of
physics and being able to explain a concept to a non expert or skeptic.

For one semester, I taught the "terminal" freshman math course. The syllabus
that I was required to follow was obsolete by thirty years. The switch to
online course should really be accompanied by a vigorous debate over the
content that is being taught.

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tbrownaw
I thought "big data" meant huge volumes that can't fit in a traditional db
(despite that those can scale to several terabytes), or sometimes data
collected from multiple unrelated detailed sources (such as correlating local
weather, the stock market, and recent cricket scores with how much time your
employees spend on HN). This doesn't sound like either.

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yaddayadda
Previous post discussion -
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120548](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120548)

