I just attended a course in evolutionary game theory. This course was given by Ben Polak Yale University. Yet I am not party to the United States. I just looked at the course here because the university has had the excellent idea to film it and put it online for free.
How would you feel if your friend told you he took lessons from a teacher on the internet? The first thing we said is that it's worse than the real thing on the internet. First, you can not interact with the teacher. Then, in the same way that a play on TV is not worth being seated in front of the actors (in any case, my opinion), immersion is much smaller than the real thing on the internet and can be greatly limited by poor video.
However, I am very excited about this innovation. What are the benefits? First, it is completely out of the stress of running "linear" of a classical education. A passage is not clear? One can pause the time to find an item on the internet in its course, or elsewhere, and / or go back and revisit the difficult passage. A passage is boring ? It is free to fast forward or even skip over the following week.
somewhat controversial issue on which I want to happen is: can we replace some courses "live" by being "virtual" university? The benefits are immediately apparent: staff savings, the ability to reuse the course of the best teachers who can be on the other side of the country and increased comfort for the student who can go at their own pace. The first small problem is that "go at their own pace" can also mean "always procrastinating viewing the course" and spend thirty hours a time to look all over the night before the exam. The second downside is that the courses on the internet may be less useful than the true course. The lack of interaction with the teacher or other students can make learning more difficult. Poor sound quality may hinder understanding of the course, especially if it is not given in the native language of the student.
Difficult to tip the balance clearly on one side or the other. Therefore three researchers have set up a controlled experiment to see if the current "online" are also effective for learning the course "live". In a university where they do not mention the name, they recruited a number of students to participate in this experiment in exchange for a little bonus on the final note. These students were randomly assigned to two groups: one group where they can not access the online courses but only filmed in the classroom, and a group who has been barred access to the classroom but who had access to online courses.
They then compared their test scores and realized that both groups had, on average, results almost similar. The only group that had access to the internet courses did not do worse than released the group that attended classes in the room. However, some subgroups of students, including students with lower initial levels had slightly lower average scores when they only had access to online courses, but it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions .
Similarly, certain elements remain unclear: is it that students in the group who were attending classes in the room had no opportunity to cheat and look at the course on the Internet, eg using a complicit in the other group? The authors believe that it had to happen at least a few times because some students are almost never came to class!
A promising initiative in any case deserves to be more experienced. I doubt that the French are getting into sacks quickly. A slight hope in terms of major schools perhaps?
0 comments:
Post a Comment