“If some educators have their way… the lecture course will soon occupy the same dustbin of history as the chariot race. ‘I don’t think the solely lecture-based course will survive,’ says Carol A. Twigg, director of the Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. ”And,” she adds, ‘it shouldn’t.’
The freshman lecture course has always made economic sense: a student-teacher ratio of 700 to 1 helps underwrite all those small seminars for juniors and seniors. Now Ms. Twigg intends to convince institutions of higher learning that they can save even more money while improving the quality of education. Since 1999, the center has awarded $6 million in grants to 30 institutions of higher learning to reimagine the large-enrollment introductory course by introducing technological elements. Beginning this academic year, the most successful course redesigns are being passed on to 20 new institutions, which two or three years from now, if all goes according to plan, will pass their own refinements on to other institutions, and so on, until each course model is factory-ready to ship to any college that wants it. The hope is that these alternative approaches will redefine the freshman experience once and for all.
THIS challenge to the introductory lecture course is hardly the first. For decades, progressive educators have been critical of what they call a push technology. It’s all information, no interaction. It’s unidirectional: lecturer-active, student-passive. It’s indiscriminate; the same lessons reach each student regardless of individual interest, skill or intellect….
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for one, is rethinking the prevailing model on its own. It is converting its infamously daunting introductory physics lecture courses to what it calls Technology Enabled Active Learning, or TEAL. The principal coordinator of the effort, John Belcher, used to teach the university’s introductory physics courses and, he says, ‘I wouldn’t go back.’ The failure rate in the classes was typically 10 to 12 percent, he explains, but ‘most notable was that only 40 percent of the students were coming to class by the end of the term.’ And it wasn’t just his classes that suffered attendance drop-off; other M.I.T. professors working within the large lecture format reported that attendance at the end of the semester would rarely rise above 50 percent. ‘Whatever you think of the pedagogy of large lectures,’ Mr. Belcher says, ‘if students aren’t coming, it’s a problem.’ …
So far, five distinct pedagogical models have emerged. One simply supplements the lecture with online quizes (as was the case in the University of New Mexico’s general psychology course) or small problem-solving groups (as in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s introductory biology). Another model substitutes online sessions for one or two of the weekly lectures, either in a scheduled computer lab (as in Pennsylvania State University’s introductory statistics course) or anywhere anytime (University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s introductory Spanish).
A third model offers a smorgasbord of options; in fact, it’s called the ‘Buffet’ model. Instructors at Ohio State University, the institution that created this model, work with the 3,250 students taking introductory chemistry to match individual backgrounds, skills and goals with an appropriate combination of laboratories, projects, videos, study sessions, good old-fashioned homework and large lectures.”
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