Re: [Phys-L] MOOC proliferation

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

While this has some similarity to Mazur's method, it lacks some important
features.  The students talk to each other rather than to the professor.  A
give student might talk to 4 other students and they express different
ideas, then they work them out.  If you sufficiently intelligent software it
may work as well, but then again it may not.  There was a program called the
physics tutor which used some AI to teach students, but students failed to
make conceptual gain.

I contend you need much more than just correction.  Students need to have
other live people to talk to and to bounce ideas off of.  In the give and
take they construct better understanding.  Now if you are going to have
lectures, there is one form that works better.  It is having a couple of
peers talk about the concepts and even expose disagreements.  Professors
explaining things do not work as well.

Before you can have AI doing the job, there needs to be a lot more research
into how to do it.  Just putting something together by seat of the pants
won't work all that well.  True it might be just as effective as
conventional courses and certainly a lot cheaper because then you can fire
99% of the lecturers.  At present the homework services do not have good
methods for grading anything other than simple items such as multiple choice
or fixed number answers.  To make progress with AI it has to interpret hand
drawn graphs, bar charts, vector diagrams...  Then it should be able to
parse verbal/written explanations and understand a whole variety of syntaxes
to make judgements about the understanding.  Just looking for key words is
not enough.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> I see a couple interesting aspects to this.
>
> ONLINE LECTURES.  Sure, traditional lectures are shown to be 
> pretty ineffective.  By why should the MOOCs be limited to 
> "traditional lectures"?   Interactivity can easily be built 
> in -- the students have to type a number or answer a multiple 
> choice "concept test" question or draw an arrow to show a 
> specific force vector.  It would be simple to incorporate 
> these every few minutes and have the software provide extra 
> "instruction" for those who give a wrong answer (with 
> different feedback depending on the specific wrong answer).
>
>
> MOOCs IN GENERAL. 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?  Then much of  the behind the scenes "grunt work" is 
> taken care of, leaving the "local expert" as tutor and lab 
> instructor and even "friend" (who is on the students' side 
> against the faceless "course team" who get to play the part 
> of the "heavy").
>
> The exams could have multiple questions on each topic 
> (analyzed to know which are easier and which are harder) so 
> that "studying to the test" would not work, and not every 
> exam would have to be taken at the same time on all campuses. 
>  (One potential problem would be developing a rubric so that 
> each "local expert" graded consistently on exam questions or 
> labs that require hand-grading.)
>
> This also provides the students a better comparison of how 
> they really stack up.   Performance in the course would tell 
> you not only how you compare to the 5 - 500 students in your 
> own school, but also with students around the country.  There 
> would be no more "well, he got an A at a community college, 
> but would he have cut it at MIT?"