4 ms·

I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly mot

by kaitai 6y ago

I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners. We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No. I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning. I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.

mbrameld 6y ago
Were those online classes purely asynchronous or was there a teleconference some number of times per week? I wonder if the difference in performance is due to accountability. It's easy to slack off when you don't have to look the teacher in the eyes and explain why you didn't do what you were supposed to do.
kayoone 6y ago
Interesting, but why are you glad it’s over? Too intense?
- kaitai 6y ago
  A couple reasons: with the probable decline in numbers of students (particularly international students) I see furloughs and firings in the future at my former university. Pay cuts and furloughs are coming in my industry as well, but because the base pay is higher, there is farther to fall -- and I mean that in a good way, because I'm still living as if I made half my salary. But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.
raister 6y ago
I understand you. All the long ours in preparation, planning, interacting, evaluating, and for me, the compensation for all that was quite ridiculous to tell you the truth. Students only interested in the course's diploma, asking questions like 'why am I seeing this?', 'how to apply this in the real world', 'give me a practical example in your practice' (knowing that I was only a lecturer, not a practitioner in the field, the list goes on and on. I don't miss being on classes - what I miss is interacting with good smart students, to tell you the truth. They were the ones I target my efforts. Your reason may be other, mine was this.
JackeJR 6y ago
My experience in learning math is that the textbooks try to provide what is right. And what is right typically becomes excessively verbose to the point that the main idea gets lost in the rightness. This is what in person coaching gets you. You get the intuition of the idea, ignoring all the nitty gritty and only when you have a firm grasp of the intuition do you explore what this intuition also means for different cases and hence the nitty gritties. Having experienced this myself many times over, I now know exactly what to look for in a book when I am self learning. I don't know how this skill is to be taught but if remote learning was to succeed, different methods of learning needs to be outlined and taught to the students and get them to learn to select one appropriate for their learning styles and subject.
- jmiserez 6y ago
  The issue is that those are usually two separate books. Students need intuition and a broader overview, but experienced professionals usually want rigor, unambiguity and completeness. In my experience there are actually very few books that do both, and I've also had professors that don't seem to find it too important to convey intuition (or even think it's counterproductive as intuition breaks down at some point).
- swiley 6y ago
  IMO: as long as they’re organized well verbosity is good. Ever tried to read a theology book? They’re just walls of text, no nice theorem: and def: to guide you; that’s when verbosity makes things hard. On the other hand very concise books that force you to think in order to pull meaning out of them can be a lot of fun if you have the time. Also (another opinion) you get intuition doing practice problems and playing with the idea(s), it’s almost impossible to get intuition just by reading.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    When I meet verbosity in non-fiction books I get suspicious that it's there to conceal something, not reveal.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners. Interesting. I'm currently taking a Course through Rutger's University Online, and so far I and most in my class are also weeks ahead of schedule, and are just awaiting grading on our final projects. As for my grade on it: mine was based on an actual project I did while I was at BMW so I documented the entire process. I used it to get promoted and sent back to VW as I thought I was a better fit there so its well detailed and I got sent back in a month after, so it worked. > I call it self-teaching for a reason. I'm a big proponent of home schooling and online learning. I'm an autodidactic person, so I just took notes of what would be on the exam and tried my best to incorporate it when I studied at hoome and tried to find usecases to relearn it later and how I would actually understand it for future use. Its how I learned calculus, my last math class, after failing algebra because I tried doing everything the instructor's way in class--I had to go everyday to get the first failure dropped from my GPA. To be honest, this is why I never did well in school for things that mattered on paper: I often got Bs and Cs most years and I was always told I was being an underachiever with much higher potential. The truth is I just realized that Schooling and Education are two very different things and the former did very little provided I landed a job in my career. The classes I often got As in I just didn't care and repeated whatever the instructor said back to them or told them what they wanted to hear. Rote learning is a poor way to instruct, but it scales so they do it. To this day I can still recall all of my essential amino acids, their molecular structures, most functional groups reactivity and about 50 reaction mechanisms and can explain them in depth because I found utility in them for my career within the laboratory: I graduated 11 years ago. Whereas when I went to office hours back then most of my peers found it hard to do that from semester to semester. I was a Cell/Molecular Biologist (that's where most of the jobs were) but excelled at Biochemistry and Microbiology because that's where my interests were but you probably couldn't tell from most of my grades. When I went into the Industry is when I really shined. I think Online learning appeals most to people who have had an independent educational development environment, and thrive within it. I never took honors classes in school or university but in HS I was recommended for a few so was made to sit in them for a week and left as it looked like a hassle (the instructors heavily grade on class participation) only to find out later that they did that to weed the herd and the teacher often gave lots of time for independent learning to my dismay. > I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh. I think the only two professors, or teachers for that matter, that I ever liked and enjoyed speaking with iwere grinding away to be able to say the same one day. They did it because it was pre-requisite for funding their lab/research and tenure, none of them seemed to like it very much but they were awesome at it despite that because they approached the material from an Industry perspective and often went against conventional wisdom. I still my remember Chemistry professor eating his lunch and going over certain reactions on the dry board and then going to the teacher's protest afterward to try and get back pay for teaching back-back summer courses during the budget/strike days in the CSU/UC system... I wrote on my class evaluation that 'this University does not deserve him.' And I meant it, too, he went to Oxford for his BSc and Edinburgh for his PhD and post doc, I just thought what a waste... but he later told me in private over some drinks its because his wife taught there with tenure and his kids didn't want to leave CA so he turned down offers before the financial crises so afterward he was stuck. I hope he is well.
belorn 6y ago
> We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books The best teachers are those that can induce pro-learning behavior in others, and books are a good medium to learn from once induced but quite poor in inducing the necessary behavior by itself. Videos are usually better than books, but tend to fall behind compared to the best in-person teachers. That said, no school is actually teaching people how to trigger pro-learning behavior in themselves. It is always assumed that either students learn it as a side product from all the other classes, or it is the responsibility of the teacher. That in my view what is missing from the picture when we a transitioning away from in-person education system into a online system.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Plenty of schools and colleges include a 'study skills' class. It's just usually in a 'general studies' class and focuses on mnemonics and mind-maps.
  - chosenbreed37 6y ago
    I wonder if the pro-learning behaviour previously mentioned is something qualitatively different from the study skills. I mean study skills offer the mechanics for studying better. But I guess what we're looking is for something that triggers a desire/willingness to learn. I imagine that most people who have completed high school or even undergraduate courses must have experienced this at some point at some level for some subject matters. Whatever we call it, once this has been activated it becomes easier for the student to successfully direct their own learning to some extent.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Idk I’ve always felt like the “study skills” classes where just a way to extract money from freshmen without having to teach anything.
- rsfern 6y ago
  I took an evidence-based teaching course in grad school, and one of the things that really stuck with me was this idea that teaching should be continually framed around clear learning goals and a growth-oriented mindset. I think a clear value proposition is something that’s really lacking for students at all levels. I remember a lot of vague “you’ll need this later” sentiment from my time in school, which is just not motivating. That and counteracting the “I’m just not good at math (or whatever subject)” mentality would go a long way to addressing this self-learning issue

by kaitai 6y ago

mbrameld 6y ago

Were those online classes purely asynchronous or was there a teleconference some number of times per week? I wonder if the difference in performance is due to accountability. It's easy to slack off when you don't have to look the teacher in the eyes and explain why you didn't do what you were supposed to do.

kayoone 6y ago

Interesting, but why are you glad it’s over? Too intense?

kaitai 6y ago
A couple reasons: with the probable decline in numbers of students (particularly international students) I see furloughs and firings in the future at my former university. Pay cuts and furloughs are coming in my industry as well, but because the base pay is higher, there is farther to fall -- and I mean that in a good way, because I'm still living as if I made half my salary. But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.

raister 6y ago

I understand you. All the long ours in preparation, planning, interacting, evaluating, and for me, the compensation for all that was quite ridiculous to tell you the truth. Students only interested in the course's diploma, asking questions like 'why am I seeing this?', 'how to apply this in the real world', 'give me a practical example in your practice' (knowing that I was only a lecturer, not a practitioner in the field, the list goes on and on. I don't miss being on classes - what I miss is interacting with good smart students, to tell you the truth. They were the ones I target my efforts. Your reason may be other, mine was this.

JackeJR 6y ago

My experience in learning math is that the textbooks try to provide what is right. And what is right typically becomes excessively verbose to the point that the main idea gets lost in the rightness. This is what in person coaching gets you. You get the intuition of the idea, ignoring all the nitty gritty and only when you have a firm grasp of the intuition do you explore what this intuition also means for different cases and hence the nitty gritties. Having experienced this myself many times over, I now know exactly what to look for in a book when I am self learning. I don't know how this skill is to be taught but if remote learning was to succeed, different methods of learning needs to be outlined and taught to the students and get them to learn to select one appropriate for their learning styles and subject.

jmiserez 6y ago
The issue is that those are usually two separate books. Students need intuition and a broader overview, but experienced professionals usually want rigor, unambiguity and completeness. In my experience there are actually very few books that do both, and I've also had professors that don't seem to find it too important to convey intuition (or even think it's counterproductive as intuition breaks down at some point).
swiley 6y ago
IMO: as long as they’re organized well verbosity is good. Ever tried to read a theology book? They’re just walls of text, no nice theorem: and def: to guide you; that’s when verbosity makes things hard. On the other hand very concise books that force you to think in order to pull meaning out of them can be a lot of fun if you have the time. Also (another opinion) you get intuition doing practice problems and playing with the idea(s), it’s almost impossible to get intuition just by reading.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  When I meet verbosity in non-fiction books I get suspicious that it's there to conceal something, not reveal.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners. Interesting. I'm currently taking a Course through Rutger's University Online, and so far I and most in my class are also weeks ahead of schedule, and are just awaiting grading on our final projects. As for my grade on it: mine was based on an actual project I did while I was at BMW so I documented the entire process. I used it to get promoted and sent back to VW as I thought I was a better fit there so its well detailed and I got sent back in a month after, so it worked. > I call it self-teaching for a reason. I'm a big proponent of home schooling and online learning. I'm an autodidactic person, so I just took notes of what would be on the exam and tried my best to incorporate it when I studied at hoome and tried to find usecases to relearn it later and how I would actually understand it for future use. Its how I learned calculus, my last math class, after failing algebra because I tried doing everything the instructor's way in class--I had to go everyday to get the first failure dropped from my GPA. To be honest, this is why I never did well in school for things that mattered on paper: I often got Bs and Cs most years and I was always told I was being an underachiever with much higher potential. The truth is I just realized that Schooling and Education are two very different things and the former did very little provided I landed a job in my career. The classes I often got As in I just didn't care and repeated whatever the instructor said back to them or told them what they wanted to hear. Rote learning is a poor way to instruct, but it scales so they do it. To this day I can still recall all of my essential amino acids, their molecular structures, most functional groups reactivity and about 50 reaction mechanisms and can explain them in depth because I found utility in them for my career within the laboratory: I graduated 11 years ago. Whereas when I went to office hours back then most of my peers found it hard to do that from semester to semester. I was a Cell/Molecular Biologist (that's where most of the jobs were) but excelled at Biochemistry and Microbiology because that's where my interests were but you probably couldn't tell from most of my grades. When I went into the Industry is when I really shined. I think Online learning appeals most to people who have had an independent educational development environment, and thrive within it. I never took honors classes in school or university but in HS I was recommended for a few so was made to sit in them for a week and left as it looked like a hassle (the instructors heavily grade on class participation) only to find out later that they did that to weed the herd and the teacher often gave lots of time for independent learning to my dismay. > I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh. I think the only two professors, or teachers for that matter, that I ever liked and enjoyed speaking with iwere grinding away to be able to say the same one day. They did it because it was pre-requisite for funding their lab/research and tenure, none of them seemed to like it very much but they were awesome at it despite that because they approached the material from an Industry perspective and often went against conventional wisdom. I still my remember Chemistry professor eating his lunch and going over certain reactions on the dry board and then going to the teacher's protest afterward to try and get back pay for teaching back-back summer courses during the budget/strike days in the CSU/UC system... I wrote on my class evaluation that 'this University does not deserve him.' And I meant it, too, he went to Oxford for his BSc and Edinburgh for his PhD and post doc, I just thought what a waste... but he later told me in private over some drinks its because his wife taught there with tenure and his kids didn't want to leave CA so he turned down offers before the financial crises so afterward he was stuck. I hope he is well.

belorn 6y ago

> We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books The best teachers are those that can induce pro-learning behavior in others, and books are a good medium to learn from once induced but quite poor in inducing the necessary behavior by itself. Videos are usually better than books, but tend to fall behind compared to the best in-person teachers. That said, no school is actually teaching people how to trigger pro-learning behavior in themselves. It is always assumed that either students learn it as a side product from all the other classes, or it is the responsibility of the teacher. That in my view what is missing from the picture when we a transitioning away from in-person education system into a online system.

michaelt 6y ago
Plenty of schools and colleges include a 'study skills' class. It's just usually in a 'general studies' class and focuses on mnemonics and mind-maps.
- chosenbreed37 6y ago
  I wonder if the pro-learning behaviour previously mentioned is something qualitatively different from the study skills. I mean study skills offer the mechanics for studying better. But I guess what we're looking is for something that triggers a desire/willingness to learn. I imagine that most people who have completed high school or even undergraduate courses must have experienced this at some point at some level for some subject matters. Whatever we call it, once this has been activated it becomes easier for the student to successfully direct their own learning to some extent.
- swiley 6y ago
  Idk I’ve always felt like the “study skills” classes where just a way to extract money from freshmen without having to teach anything.
rsfern 6y ago
I took an evidence-based teaching course in grad school, and one of the things that really stuck with me was this idea that teaching should be continually framed around clear learning goals and a growth-oriented mindset. I think a clear value proposition is something that’s really lacking for students at all levels. I remember a lot of vague “you’ll need this later” sentiment from my time in school, which is just not motivating. That and counteracting the “I’m just not good at math (or whatever subject)” mentality would go a long way to addressing this self-learning issue