Investing some time during the years 15-22 to equip yourself with a quantitative analysis toolkit is something that’s definitely rewarded in the marketplace. And you can find all the relevant textbooks, lectures, information, etc. online already. And yet the number of people who’ve self-taught calculus is tiny. I personally left off my math learning after taking the AP Calculus test in high school and sometimes toy with the idea that I ought to learn more math. After all, I pretty frequently find myself writing about studies that use quantitative techniques I don’t really understand. I even downloaded an MIT lecture course off iTunes for free to refresh my existing base of math knowledge and lay the groundwork to pursue it further. But did I actually watch the lectures, study, and learn the stuff? Of course not!The thing most in short supply in life is not opportunity to learn but effort and motivation. A college campus is, for many people, a great motivational machine.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Why Internet Learning Isn't Taking Off
It takes too much self-discipline. Matt Yglesias:
This is a particularly interesting tidbit for me as I have two children enrolled in a charter school that mixes a traditional school experience with online learning. Three days a week the kids, aged 4th-8th grade, participate in a traditional classroom education, for two days a week, they work from a "moodle" environment at home.
ReplyDeleteThe "moodle" days are by far the most pressured part of this school experience.
I don't know that I agree that it isn't taking off. Most colleges offer online learning. Katya, I think that learning online for children may be a tougher task, but with appropriate course design can be very successful. My four year old plays learning games online that are very successful. I watched him refocus mirrors to bounce a beam of light and hit a target yesterday as well as use "white blood cells" to kill various viruses. I'd say that is very good use of online resources for learning.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to adult learning I have found that online programs have been a godsend for someone like me. I have a hard time sitting through a lecture, but with online classes I can do some work, take a break, come back and resume. I can also continue working and bounce between multiple sources.
I also find that with online learning (at least with formal classes) the curriculum has to be crystal clear. It can't be fudged. There can be no instructor entering the classroom on that day distracted or semi prepared. Goals, objectives, expectations and due dates are set out from the beginning. Unfortunately this has not always been the case with my in person classes.
One more benefit is that I find the quality of responses from my classmates is usually higher. My guess is because there is often a week or so for classmates to respond to one another's papers and writings. Instead of having to respond or not in the course of an hour class there is time to digest what someone has proposed and respond in a thoughtful manner.
My observation about on-line learning... In terms of what John's discussing, I can't help but concur that it would have slow growth. But in terms of the incursions of computers into the learning experience...
ReplyDeleteIt's pervasive, and mildly in a way I think of as alarming. There is a fair amount of sophisticated incursion, but a lot of it--it's of the unforgiving "if you don't enter the characters correctly, your grade is screwed."
It's pretty easy to see the upsides without considering the true cost of kids having to enter for the coding of the machine rather than the knowledge independent of the machine.
The Moodle environment--I can see that it's the bread and butter of the future. My kids are using it in two classes--their "untraditional choice" day school option, but also for the gifted and talented math program they tested in to.
In that latter class, the "WebWork" element has been much praised--it generates identical problems with variable numbers for different students. The kids then go online and do their own problem set--but can ask questions in a student-to-student forum if they get stuck. They can answer questions as many times as they want--though a log *is* created, so their TA can see if the pattern of their responses looks like guesses or thoughtful attempts at problem solving.
This seems like an excellent model for learning, and apparently has cut down the kids' homework time without impacting their test scores.
But for every successfully integrated computer learning experience... I feel like there's a counter of a bad one. There's still a lot of work to be done, and a lot of thought to be put into the best way to do this.