

How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business - m_class
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-big-data-taking-teachers-out-lecturing-business

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JPKab
The part of the article that alarmed me the most was that the state of Arizona
has reduced state funding for the university by 50% over the past 5 years....

Wow. The baby boomers really are gutting the system that gave they benefited
from.

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fruchtose
It's worse than that. There are three public universities which receive
funding: ASU, University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University. So it's
not just one school. And Arizona schools may not be front page news, but these
are institutions with big contributions to Mars rovers, astronomy and biotech.
For instance, Lawrence Krass works at ASU.

It's really tragic how little Arizona higher education is supported, given
their accomplishments.

~~~
eitally
It's even worse than that. States are not only reducing their funding, but the
funding they do provide is nowhere near the operating requirements for major
universities. Consider my alma mater, the University of Virginia, which
receives about $8500 in funding per full-time student from the state (so
roughly $150m/yr). This is <6% of their $2.6b annual operating budget[1].
Compare this to the 45% of funds that comes from health center patient
revenues, or the 10-11% that each come from research/grants and gifts.[2]
Pretty ridiculous. Spending is out of control, of course, but even not-for-
profit schools are competing against each other for talent & grants, and the
best ways they seem to know how involve huge infrastructure & technology
investments, not to mention extra perks for students/faculty/staff.

[1]
[http://www.virginia.edu/finance101/state.html](http://www.virginia.edu/finance101/state.html)
[2]
[http://www.virginia.edu/finance101/budgeted.html](http://www.virginia.edu/finance101/budgeted.html)

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coldcode
In some ways I like it as I've always learned better on a self-paced system.
But no computer will ever inspire anyone to reach outside themselves and
become someone new. The best teachers are the ones who move their students in
directions they never even considered. There is no big data algorithm for
that.

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mathattack
I think the trend will be differentiated by goals... There are core classes
with known material that people don't look to for inspiration: entry level
math, accounting, etc. In the right circumstance, this should free up the
teachers to inspire for courses that do require more intense discussion and
guidance. For example: philosophy, political science, lab science, etc.

~~~
kaitai
Basic math has plenty of room for inspiration, from the Fibonacci series to
the combinatorics of counting to the concept of infinity. Sometimes those
topics come up spontaneously in class with a human teacher -- not nearly often
enough, but now and then. Are these cool and interesting topics that aren't on
some Common Core standards list ever going to come up if students simply work
through a computer program written by a corporate consultant and vetted by a
committee?

~~~
mathattack
Fair enough. Perhaps I'm biased by personal experience. Through an advanced
track in high school and a college minor in math, I didn't have one inspiring
math teacher. I got more inspiration out of Project Euler than I ever did from
formal math teaching. While it would be great to have inspirational math
teachers, perhaps I'm jaded when I say, "Why pretend?" And this is coming from
someone who believes Math should be appreciate for beauty in addition to
practicality. (Enough to put it in my name!)

~~~
kaitai
I'm biased by personal experience too, having taught math on a
college/university level for... ten years now. I have wanted to be the
inspiring prof. I've done it for maybe 20 students. I feel the failure
acutely.

I haven't given up yet but people (mathematicians, others) need to start
really thinking about what education should be for and how we can achieve
that. I love computers, science, (big) data. The folks implementing the
current innovations are not mathematicians/chemists/economists, and the people
choosing the current innovations are administrators or politicians rather than
researchers or practitioners. I am not willing to cede control to these forces
without a fight. What are we going to do to make sure that edtech is not just
a way to expedite credentialing while making students dumb and efficient
machines?

~~~
mathattack
I appreciate where you are coming from, as you bring much more real experience
into this than me.

Here's an open question, and I'm going to pull some numbers out of the air to
just make a point...

Let's say that you have a given math department with 10 faculty charged with
education of 4000 students, and your costs are fixed.

Which of these scenarios is best? 1) Each of the 10 teachers teaches 4 classes
of 50 people per year. Each student gets 2 ((10 _4_ 50)/4000 = 1/2 per year)
large courses over 4 years.

2) Each of the 10 teachers supports 1 large online classes of 400 people each,
and teaches 3 classes of 33. Each student gets 4 impersonal online classes
((10 _1_ 400)/4000 = 1 per year) and 1 smaller class per year ((10 * 3 *
33)/4000 = 1/4).

The #s are made up, but the idea is that with a fixed amount of resources, you
can have more small group classes with experts if you're willing to accept
very large online classes. Or - you can get a lot more classes for the same
cost if you're willing to take them online.

Again, this isn't a panacea, and doesn't work for every subject. It also
doesn't increase creativity, or encourage research.

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yaddayadda
"Sufficiently advanced testing is indistinguishable from instruction. In a
fully adaptive classroom, students will be continually assessed, with every
keystroke and mouse click feeding a learner profile. High-stakes exams could
eventually disappear, replaced by the calculus of perpetual monitoring."

I see this, combined with more adaptive selection of learning goals, natural
learner exploration, and a little bit of 'gamification' as the true future of
education.

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enry_straker
I didn't know folks had taken the khan academy model, given it the fancy name
of 'Adaptive Learning' and raking in the dough with proprietary software.

~~~
yaddayadda
The field of Adaptive Learning predates Khan Acadamy. In particular, one of
the key predecessor fields - Programmed Learning [1] - predates Salmon Khan's
birth.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning)

