'With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it. ... Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.'"Seems a bit harsh...
Thursday, January 5, 2012
When Getting Rid of College Lectures Makes Sense
Slashdot has a discussion about an NPR story where a professor discusses the success he has had moving from lectures to active learning strategies. Fair enough. However, he drops this little nugget:
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Comment from Patrick Malone:
ReplyDeleteOverall, I don’t think the person commenting was hard enough. If all you have is a professor who lectures and gives multiple choice exams it isn’t good. In a case like that, I could see where all of the colleges of pharmacy in the country with a similar course (i.e., same subject, lecture only, multiple guess exam) would find it better to just get together and hire the best lecturer in the world on that subject to record the lecture for them each year (to get updated information) and buy new exams from them each year. They would probably spend less per college and get better results.
In any case, it is better with active learning (not exactly a new idea – I remember reading about 15 years ago that it was 100 years old at that time). There was a good news story about the efficacy of active learning at http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-as-teaching-tool?sc=emaf
Pat