[Phys-L] raising our game (was: MOOC proliferation)

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 11/09/2012 01:50 PM, Folkerts, Timothy J wrote:
> Sure, traditional lectures are shown to be pretty ineffective.  By 
> why should the MOOCs be limited to "traditional lectures"?

An excellent point.

> The model that springs to my mind is a single course, with "local
> experts".  Pretty much every 1st year physics course follows roughly
> the same schedule (with a few variations).  Why have 1000 professors
> each writing exams and deciding on appropriate homework and
> developing lectures and ... ?   Why not have a "model" course that
> many schools share?

Another excellent point.  This is the idea that I was ever-so-
clumsily trying to communicate in the "MOOC" thread.

MOOC is not the point. Promoting effective collaboration across
the worldwide community of teachers is the point.  As a means
to this end, we need to make resources more reusable.

Obviously I am not suggesting that we should rely 100% on lectures,
but zero percent is not the right answer, either.  Furthermore, 
there is the used-car principle:  If you are trying to sell a
used car for a good price, you should at least take it to the
car wash so that it looks clean and a little bit shiny.

What I mean by that is simple:  Before deciding that lectures 
are 100% bad, we should see if they can be improved.  Sometimes 
explanations are ineffective simply because they are lousy 
explanations ... even though they could easily be improved,
leading to much better results.  TJF mentioned homework, exams,
and lectures, and I will (temporarily!) focus the "lecture"
part of that.

In the spirit of raising our game, let's think about what the goal
should be, what the ideal should be.  I don't want a collection of 
MOOLL i.e. massively open online lousy lectures.  I've seen a few
really nice lectures in my time.  Start with somebody like Kip
Thorne who
  a) Is an absolute genius to begin with, and
  b) is a naturally gifted presenter, and
  c) might devote hundreds of hours of his own time and his colleagues'
   time preparing for a one-hour colloquium talk.

Imagine if every presentation at every school (from grade school
on up) could be "colloquium quality" as opposed to "stand in front 
of the chalkboard and wing it" quality.

Obviously your generic teacher at a generic school cannot
possibly spend hundreds or even tens of hours preparing each
presentation, and obviously that's not what I'm suggesting.  On
the other hand, if we could spread that work out across the
community, we could do vastly better than we are doing at present.

Interesting observation:  Once upon a time I compared some of
the Khan Academy lectures on thermodynamics to the corresponding
MIT Open Courseware lectures on the same subject. 
 a) The Khan guy was winging it, in the sense that there was 
  virtually no material prepared in advance -- no graphics, no 
  demos, no anything ... but he was smart enough to use a tablet, 
  which made it easy to capture his notes and put them on the web.
  The content included some truly amazing errors, such as the 
  assertion that at absolute zero everything stopped moving, 
  absolutely everything, and therefore atomic electrons crashed 
  into the nucleus.  He actually said that!
 b) The MIT guy understood the content better, but he was also
  winging it ... no graphics, no demos, no anything prepared in
  advance.  The downside was that putting the lecture online
  consisted of a low-resolution video of a guy writing on a
  chalkboard.

This leads to an obvious suggestion for every teacher:  no more 
chalkboards.  Use a tablet.  If you tried a tablet a couple of 
years ago, try again;  they've gotten a lot better recently.

Rationale:  Many reasons.  One important benefit is that you
can easily capture everything and put it on the web, for the 
benefit of your students *and* the benefit of your colleagues 
in the community of scholars.  Another super-important benefit 
is that you can more easily incorporate drawings and animations 
prepared in advance.  

Also:  You never need to wonder where you colored markers
walked off to :-)

Graphics are important.  When I was watching the Khan and
MIT presentations, I could not imagine how any student could
understand.  I'm a reasonably smart and well-educated guy, 
and as a general rule, if I can't follow the presentation, 
it's a safe bet the students can't either.

The lectures I watched were talking about various things
that might or might not be functions of state.  I kept
shouting at the screen:  Draw the picture!  Draw the picture!
But they never did.

Graphics are important, but they are also hard to do.  I spent 
maybe an entire day just making the three diagrams that the
Khan and/or MIT guys should have shown when talking about
functions of state:
  http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/path-cycle.html

Returning to my main point about collaboration: Obviously
nobody on this list can afford the time to single-handedly
make all the diagrams that are necessary ... but we should 
be able to borrow them from one another.  If I make a few 
and each other person makes a few -- and if we have a good
way to locate what we need when we need it -- we should be
able to improve the cost/benefit ratio by orders of magnitude.

Specific suggestion:  This includes putting diagrams online
in an /open/ format so that they can be modified by others.
I suggest .svg or maybe .eps ... as opposed to dead-end
formats such as .gif or .pdf, which can be displayed as-is
but not easily modified.

Similarly:  If you use a spreadsheet or other program to prepare
a graphic, put the program online, so that other folks can use
it, with or without modifications.  This includes /documenting/
the code, so that it is open and reusable in practice, not just 
in theory.  For more on how documentation works, see
  http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/documenting.htm

In the spirit of setting a good example, I have gradually been
making more and more of my spreadsheets easily available, and
making the diagrams available as .svg not just dead-end .png.
Also I documented some of the sneaky techniques I tend to use
in my spreadsheets:
  http://www.av8n.com/physics/spreadsheet-tips.htm
This however is still a work in progress.  If you find something
in a dead-end format and want the source, please ask.

=================

I have not forgotten the point about sharing homework and exam 
problems.  This is super-important, for all the same reasons.
Note that places like compadre help with the sharing of 
explanatory materials, but AFAICT don't even hint at sharing
homework and exam questions.
  http://www.compadre.org/

Part of the deal is that like computer code, exam questions
benefit from being /documented/, and writing the documentation
roughly doubles the workload.  However, this is still a good
investment, because if you increase the cost by a factor of
two (for the documentation) and then decrease the cost by a
factor of 1000 (due to sharing) it's a pretty good deal.

I'm not saying any of this is easy, but it's important.  We
should be doing a lot more of this than we presently are.

==

To repeat a point that has already been well made by others:
If there are /enough/ exam questions online, the fact that
students can google for them is not a problem.  In fact it
is a feature, not a bug, insofar as it makes the point that
the only way to handle the ensemble of exam question is also
the only way to handle real life:  You have to understand
the principles, because there is no hope of learning all the
possibilities by rote.