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I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are goo
by Natsu 11y ago
I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level.
I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.
- kirsebaer 11y agoThe National Science Foundation (or other group) should produce high-quality video lectures for all courses.
- j2kun 11y agoIf this caught on all mathematics departments would lose funding and no longer be able to fund research. It's a strange conflict of interests.
- Natsu 11y agoI would hope there would be funding from somewhere, at least at the state/federal level. Mathematical research has proven very important to a number of advances in the sciences, even research that was once thought to have no practical use.
- j2kun 11y agoI think a pretty overwhelming majority of math research funding comes from the fact that math departments are service departments for engineering, physics, etc. The NSF spends a total of just under 250 million per year on math research. The DoD and DoE also have around 100 million each. Some mathematicians estimate [1] about 30k mathematicians in the US, which at a conservative salary of 50k per year (!) is already 1.5 billion. In other words, either gov't agencies would have to roughly triple their funding (just for math), or about a third of mathematicians would lose their jobs. These are, of course, very rough estimates. [1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicians-are-there http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicia...
- Natsu 11y agoI think you meant two thirds would lose their jobs :) And yes, I don't know where the funding would come from if math education was commoditized, as perhaps it should be.