education

UCLA animal behavior professor Peter Nonacs describes his experiment in learning by doing: "Cheating to Learn: How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midterm".

So last quarter I had an intriguing thought while preparing my Game Theory lectures. Tests are really just measures of how the Education Game is proceeding. Professors test to measure their success at teaching, and students take tests in order to get a good grade. Might these goals be maximized simultaneously? What if I let the students write their own rules for the test-taking game? Allow them to do everything we would normally call cheating?

Naturally, nearly the entire class decided to work together.

This is what I consistently find when I do game theory experiments with my classes. Students who work hard and contribute always tolerate free riders. When I explicitly point out the apparent unfairness of the situation, students sometimes articulate frustration with free riders, but shrug their shoulders. If Nonacs thinks he has taught them something new, he should sit in more classes.

There is much discussion in online education about the "15-minute rule": that content longer than 15 minutes will lose students' attention. Part of this is because of the intrinsic pain of watching videos on a computer. But part is rooted in classroom observations, that students in lectures tend to become distracted and lose their attention for a lecturer after some period of time. Interestingly, the education research shows that this is more complicated. For example, Karen Wilson and James Korn [1] found that individual variations among students swamped any time effect for attention and effective recall or note taking.

It is clear that students' attention does vary during lectures, but the literature does not support the perpetuation of the 10- to 15-min attention estimate. Perhaps the only valid use of this parameter is as a rhetorical device to encourage teachers to develop ways to maintain student interest in the classroom. If psychologists and other educators continue to promote such a parameter as an empirically based estimate, they need to support it with more controlled research. Beyond that, teachers must do as much as possible to increase students' motivation to “pay attention” as well as try to understand what students are really thinking about during class.

Probably the most useful bit is this:

The information processing that occurs during classroom tasks resembles a large working memory task (D. J. LaVoie, personal communication, March 21, 2005). Students receive information from the instructor and must hold the information long enough to record it in their notes or do whatever else they need to do with it. Whether students will be able to maintain their attention in class depends on their working memory capacity as well as their motivation and arousal (Pashler, 1998).

This suggests that instructors should provide multiple cues to promote effective use of working memory during their classroom presentations. Specific callouts to reading materials -- preferably search terms in an ebook -- might be helpful. And visualizations ought to be consistent between lecture and readings, so that students can calibrate their note taking.

As for online presentations, I still think that short is better. But more to the point, they should also be calibrated to other material, such as online readings and quizzes, so that note taking will be more productive.

References

Dan Ariely is an economist at Duke University who has been teaching a massive open online course on behavioral economics to 140,000 students, titled "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior". He recently sat down with the PBS NewsHour to answer questions and share perspectives about the MOOC: "The Plusses and Pitfalls of Teaching Online". It is a long piece with many useful parts, here's a sample:

there's a great deal of room for variance once you have over 140,000 students in a class. There's a substantial probability that at least some students will be engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful, and passionate about the class. And indeed, the discussion boards for my online class show just this -- a select group of students truly stand out as motivated individuals who are taking the content seriously and thinking critically about how ideas can be developed and applied to the real world.

In this regard, the diversity of backgrounds is also a huge benefit in online classes that are available internationally. We hear from students of different ages from around the globe who have so much to contribute. And they not only contribute by sharing their perspectives with their professor and teaching staff, but also with their fellow students.

Ariely also discusses some of the negatives of a very large student sample: the greater likelihood of disgruntled students looking to draw attention in a public forum, for example.

This is a really concern for me as I prepare my course, "Human Evolution: Past and Future" (which I announced here earlier this week). A fraction of my students may have goals that include promoting creationist or fringe ideas, for example.

We are working on some strategies in both the design of the course and the materials that will help to focus students of all backgrounds on the science, while hitting their learning level appropriately. That aspect of the course will really be an important target of our assessment and research efforts. Can we engage this diverse audience productively, increasing science and evolution literacy while stemming possible attempts to derail the process?

From Eli Dourado at The Ümlaut: "‘Binge Learning’ is Online Education’s Killer App".

Binge viewing is so common that it is now beginning to affect the production of television shows. Increasingly, shows are made for bingeing. They have more intricate plots and recapitulate fewer past plot points. Viewers give the shows their undivided attention, and writers and producers respond with better TV.

I thought of these facts this past weekend when I tried an online course for the first time. Because I wanted to brush up on my programming skills, I signed up for a Udacity computer science class on Friday. I was drawn in by the fact that there were no deadlines—I could put the class off if I got too busy for it. This concern was somewhat unwarranted, as I had finished half the class by Sunday evening. I realized that I had binged—on a class.

The concept of "binge learning" seems a useful addition to the conversation about online learning. One issue about MOOCs pointed out by several commentators has been that an "open course" and "open materials" are different issues, that have different strengths. Having materials totally open means that a student is free to race through them as fast (or take as long) as desired. Open materials allow binge learning.

An "open course" means that anyone can enroll in it. But the materials may be timed so that they are available only at particular times, and they may be restricted in access only to enrolled or registered students. Many students in an open course may find themselves unable to keep up with the pace of instruction. Others may be willing to work much faster, but the organization of the course may restrain them from binging on the material. It's the comparison of watching a television series broadcast week by week, instead of watching an entire season over the weekend on Netflix.