Students who schlep in for a 9 am lecture also have skin in the game! Commitment to the task, motivation, perhaps the all important desirable difficulties in learning, even a smidge of cognitive dissonance (why did I get up so early? Oh, yeah, I'm here to learn!), meeting their friends and colleagues, a quick q to the prof, signalling of their commitment to a collective endeavour, using a learning structure they are unable to impose on themselves, and so much more.
Attentional engagement in a zoom lecture is pretty poor. And students hate them!
In person set piece lectures working through a deep curriculum are valuable in their own right. And they're not easily transferable once you get get to honours level courses, as they are very often designed to meet curriculum and accreditation requirements that may be professionally or nationally specific.
MOOcs failed because they had no commitment threshold: if you were an affluent retiree you probably stayed the course, but the data showed that past the first lecture most people dropped out. I always felt MOOCs conflated and confused stage performing (lectures) with a rehearsed television series (they're just not the same thing).
Absolutely. The point of the lecture isn't really the content delivery, so much as the initial forced exposure to a set of ideas and the fact you're getting into a room with the same people week-in-week-out and being part of a cohort.
Speaking of my own undergrad experience (~16 years ago) the people who skipped lectures got bad grades even while telling themselves they can read the slides later. The four students who got a First were all active in the class and the extracurricular stuff happening in the department (guest lectures etc.).
Also, I think students are more atomised now, a bit less likely to stay on their devices and not make friends and plans, but that would be even worse if it was all online learning only.
All of this. When I was a prof and we recorded lectures, those students most likely to not attend in person were those who *most needed* the cultural and social capital of sitting in a classroom with their peers. They don’t know what they don’t know, and I thought the university was doing students dirty by not emphasizing the importance of showing up.
Yeah that was the one part of this article that quite strongly disagreed with - for whatever reason, zoom lectures are just not the same at all for me - the lack of interactivity, even the possibility of something interesting happening, the lack of peers to look around at and so on - mean I tend to zone out. About the only way I can watch a zoom lecture is by playing it at least 1.5x. No such issues in person - I can pay attention just fine.
I don't think the author is lauding Zoom, but rather criticizing the large-lecture format.
It's interesting to think of ways that a remote-learning interface could preserve many of the affordances that people DO actually like. There's no reason such a tool couldn't incorporate engagement, couldn't integrate testing/feedback - perhaps even with an AI tutor. Participants might even benefit from intra-communication (like whispering to your neighbor when the lecture covers something weird). Why would the lecturer even need to treat this as a one-shot event? Suppose the lecture is just a starting point, and many sub-discussions are supported by the interface.
What really surprises me is that these ideas are relatively easy to accomplish - to at least try. And yet I don't really see a lot of activity in this space. Zoom itself has a few desultory features. There are large LMS contraptions, but they tend to suffer from the same sort of ungainliness as Zoom. And, it must be said, focus on profit. (I admit I don't know much about less lucre-driven systems as MOOCs or khanacademy.)
I have a simpler and cruder take - professors are against AI at the moment because it has really messed up traditional ways of assessment, that the way to resolve that well is not fully understood at this time, and that the people most associated with AI are actively hostile to academics.
The hostility will fade when different assessment practices become standard and tech bigwigs realise a machine can't replace a tutor.
It wasn't that long ago when Wikipedia was the bete noire of professors.
Hello Paul. You ask a very good question. I've long thought that, for all the liberalism with wider politics, universities are remarkably conservative institutions in many ways.
I am also surprised that large scale lectures are still with us. Well, I say I am surprised but in a sense I am not surprised at all: it is explained by the conservatism of the institutions. But it should be surprising!
There was a time when the university lecture hall was the only place you could access good overviews/analyses/summaries of specialist but important knowledge, and that is why the large lecture hall was a great thing. But that time has now long past. We have free and easy access to enormous amounts of high-quality content, in all mediums: video (YouTube, etc), audio (podcasts) and written (Substack is one place, but also essays in NYRB, LRB and countless others). At all lengths and all levels. Consumable in your own time, wherever you want. And some of it better than you will get in any lecture.
Faculty do however still however have (at least) two unique skills and roles to play:
- Curation. While there is an enormous amount of high-quality stuff, there is also much dross and plenty of irrelevant stuff too. An expert is needed to curate. Making outstanding, comprehensive reading/listening/watching lists is more important than ever!
- And once the material is first consumed, it needs to be summarised, consolidated, used and reflected on. How does this stuff hang together? How can I practice these skills? You need experts to answer these questions well. This means that the classroom — as opposed to the lecture hall — is also more important than ever.
If we were starting from scratch today we would not do what we currently do. Sticking with the old ways is conservative indeed.
Oh wow, this article really got me thinking. I never really stopped to consider why so many professors lean conservative — but it makes sense when you look at how academia can attract more traditional thinkers. It’s tough balancing differing perspectives when you’re in a space where things can get intense. Personally, I’ve been trying to focus on finding opportunities that are more in line with what I’m interested in, and I found AcademicJobs.com to be pretty chill for exploring research assistantships and teaching roles. Definitely worth checking out if you’re in the academic grind too!
"As one example, seminars are a wonderful institution; they’ve been around at least since Socrates, and there’s every reason to keep them. Administrators sometimes chafe at their expense—it’s not efficient, they will tell us, to have a prof sitting with a dozen students instead of teaching hundreds. But professors are right to insist on their value."
Same here in the UK; I envy Sisyphus his boulder.
However!
"If we are going to have lectures at all (and this is hardly obvious), why have students schlep over to campus at 9 AM to watch them on a hard seat in an auditorium? Why not record them and let the students watch them whenever they want? Actually, if we’re going to do that, why do the lectures have to come from a prof on campus?"
We have done this in the UK with what is called "lecture capture". Basically, the lecture is still done live, but students don't actually have to come to it because they can just watch it online at any point later. The result? It has been terrible for most students. 1) because they are students, and if they don't get their ass into the room in the first place, they typically end up not watching the lecture at all because hyperbolic discounting et cetera, and 2) you learn much more effectively listening to a real human in real life than watching a screen, and 3) when a critical mass of them stopped turning up, they stopped learning from each other because they're not having conversations with each other before and after lectures anymore. (Surprise, they also feel more lonely and more isolated, which doesn't exactly help learning, as well as their souls.)
But a few years ago the other universities started doing it, and because we were told we exist in a competitive market, we had to start doing it too. Even though it's been bad for all of the students - hilariously, grades went down the year they introduced this. (Inflation has of course seen a return to baseline, but that's hardly a satisfying fix.) And of course now it can't possibly go away because it cost millions and it would give the other universities a "competitive advantage" over us when they told 17-year-olds they can just watch things on YouTube instead of getting their ass out of bed.
I have an acquaintance who was an endowed chair at Cambridge. He told me once that things at Cambridge change very, very slowly. And he thought that was a good thing. I think about that a lot.
I completely forgot about Straight Man! it’s spot on, but at the campuses I taught at, no geese, a one legged duck and a flock of aggressive turkeys at another
15 years ago I was hoping for the students that MOOCs would work, and worried for myself that they would. But they turned out not to. It still seems that there should be something like this that can replace the large in-person lecture, but it’s not clear what can (or how that system works at all).
MOOCs did actually work, and continue to do so. The likes of sites like Coursera and Udemy count hundreds millions of users.
It just happens to be that MOOCs do not suffice as an alternative to higher learning institutions, nor an activity that those institutions can make central to their model.
Similarly there are numerous popular educational YouTube channels serving a similar if more diffuse purpose. Public, mass consumption content production is not a good fit for universities though.
That's fair - I was using a definition of "work" that assumed one set of goals that may not be the goals of many audiences. YouTube videos do work great, and MOOCs can be more structured than that.
I personally love Dennett's concept of "tools for thinking", and can't figure out why we can't create "networks for learning". These days, hosting big sites is dirt cheap, and basic infrastructure programming is easy.
The big thing that seems to be missing is that without the in-person social aspect of it, students seem to have a hard time remaining attentive through the duration of a lecture, and an even harder time continuing with the class through the duration of a term. Of course, neither of these things is all that close to 100% even with the in-person structure of a large lecture, but they're more like 70-90%, rather than the 10-20% we often see with MOOCs.
The issue isn't on the computer side - it's on the social side of how you get a human being to continue interfacing with the system.
Not only do professors have skin in the game, they're also probably less capable of seeing any problems with the game in the first place -- they won it, and nobody gets mad about the rules of a game if they keep winning! To have become a professor, one must have been really good at navigating the academic system as currently constituted. And that can make it easy to (incorrectly) think that the game is well-designed and easily navigated. I'm a graduate student now, and my peers (myself included, until recently) often don't seem to understand why students would resort to using AI when they could just come to office hours and learn the material. But we're forgetting that we're the students who wanted to go to office hours and could easily learn the material, and that most students are not like us. We're a game-winning minority -- we shouldn't be shocked when the losing majority is less inclined to follow the rules that worked for us.
"nobody gets mad about the rules of a game if they keep winning"
Yes, and also it goes even deeper than that. People who win often don't recognise the shortcomings of the game they excel at. All their experience tells them that it works!
Absolutely -- which lends itself to conservatism, since things like AI or MOOCS or anything else then strike one as solutions to problems that don't even exist
"Few professors at American universities can teach as well as these scholars..." Is this true? One thing which I find crazy is that basic pedagogical skills are neither taught nor required for professors. Teaching is, at least nominally, their primary function and yet there is hardly any emphasis placed on it.
What's false? Is it your contention that professors get extensive pedagogical training and selected for their pedagogical skills rather than their research or publishing accomplishments?
Yes. Most professors in the US are at teaching institutions where their teaching is regularly evaluated by peers and students; where they can opt into pedagogical training if they want to; they are typically hired after years of a kind of apprenticeship working as TAs in graduate school. Except at R1s, teaching is a central part of tenure and promotion.
I have had brilliant professors who are terrible at teaching and TAs who are far better at teaching than the brilliant professors for whom they TA. My point is that, although teaching is nominally a professor's job, they are not selected for the expertise in teaching. Rather they are selected for things like research and publishing. Sure perhaps they can opt in to training and are evaluated, but this is a far cry from being experts in the skill of teaching. I want the skill of doctoring to be required of my doctor, not merely having him opt in to doctor training.
Have you been involved in search committees? Do you know how hiring and T&P actually work at the majority of US institutions? I don’t think you have or do.
Address the issue: Are professors hired primarily for their skill in teaching or for other reasons? The nominal purpose of professors is to teach. The purpose of doctors is to doctor. The purpose of firefighters is to fight fires. In the latter two cases, the individual's skill in the thing they're supposed to do is by far the most salient hiring criterion. In the case of professors it's simply not.
I agree with other responses that real departments are not as bad as you say. At most, a prof may be tolerated in spite of their poor teaching, but these are just tails of the distribution.
But isn't this really just down to human nature? Everyone protects their turf, including professors. Right? (For the record, I think AI is ruining higher ed, but your argument strikes me as one of straight=forward self interest). Or am I missing something?
Time to litigate MOOCs again! My only brush with a MOOC is when I was visiting Princeton for a year and found my colleague, the great ethnographer Mitchell Duneier, teaching one in his office. He was enthusiastic: students were excited and it increased his, and higher ed's, reach to students who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity. I was aghast. It was good for some students, presumably, but bad for the professoriate if it reduced the demand for professors (which was obviously self-interested) and also bad for scholarship, learning, and enlightenment generally if it shrunk the size of the scholarly community to a handful of scholars producing this highly-rated online content, itself based on research conducted by scholars supported, in large part, by (non-MOOC) undergraduate teaching. I could go on about the advantages of having an expert standing in front of you, ready to take questions, relate your question to another student's or events on campus, meet during office hours, and connect your excellent questions in class to your other assignments when it came to writing a letter of recommendation.
Of course, it's great to have those lectures online, just as it's great to publish the books of famous scholars. Students should absolutely spend their summers studying those and come to class well ahead of the game (as Guive, another commenter, did). The problem isn't the availability of the content--contrary to some, professors never treated knowledge as a carefully-held secret, as least not since the invention of the printing press--but the idea that it can substitute for the in-person experience. Of course, AI, being much more interactive, poses some unique challenges, so none of this means that it'll go the way of MOOCs, though I'm definitely in the Luddite school of "if we could only hope."
About what to do about student writing. After going to several seminars here at Cornell (Ctr f Teaching Excellence) I see only two possibilities: a, Abandon all takehome writing since it will all be mass plagiarism by AI; use oral discussion and presentations instead. Or, b, have few enough students that you can use a process of interlocked drafting and peer-reviewing where you are so close to the students and their drafts process that AI becomes impracticable. Both a and b are time-consuming. The latter method has the advantage that it salvages at least some of the learning that goes on in writing. (A prominent effect of the current mass plagiarism by AI is to take away the core of learning by writing, the formulation of thoughts -- and thus contributing to the ongoing mass brain atrophy by AI).
I think we have to replace “take-home writing” with “writing lab”. There should be computer labs all over campus where a student can log in, and the reading materials for their class all show up, and they have access to a word processor, but no internet browser. (And there are proctors ensuring you don’t use your phone.) Instead of writing papers at home, they should sign up for hours in the writing lab and write them there.
Interesting idea -- but more like for exam time, or for writing based only on what is already in your head, no reference to anything on your computer or on the internet or in the university library accessible only by the internet connection... ??
I have been asking recently about cutting off internet connections for exam rooms. The reason is, Meta glasses can apparently silently read and suggest answers just by looking at the question. A new kind of cheating device. I think I saw one pair, on a student, in one of my pen-and-paper only in-house exams in December.
The professor should be able to set things up so that when you log in in the writing lab, you have all the class readings show up - and if they want, they could probably upload an extra few dozen background readings someone might want. I could imagine a version that even has a JSTOR-only browser or something.
That point about the Meta glasses is one that I hadn't considered...
Yes. But it's also important to distinguish testing from learning.
Or maybe they need to be integrated - that we aim for a critical AI tutor that not only helps you through the material, but also administers continual testing and is then responsible for rendering a grade.
Yeah, we need a bunch of different things for a bunch of different parts of the learning process. The suggestion I'm making here is just for how students learn the basic skill of writing paragraphs and organizing paragraphs into an essay.
Fascinating analysis. So that's why I favor a new world order based on free love and at the same time don't allow my kids to speak up at the dinner table. Makes perfect sense. I can only imagine the same thing applies in spades to smarty pants professors. Thanks for sharing.
Ha, I feel like I’m the same way either way my kids. Think whatever you want to think (the more out there, the more I’ll encourage it) but you’ll learn arithmetic, algebra and how to write cursive if I have to personally ensure it.
Students who schlep in for a 9 am lecture also have skin in the game! Commitment to the task, motivation, perhaps the all important desirable difficulties in learning, even a smidge of cognitive dissonance (why did I get up so early? Oh, yeah, I'm here to learn!), meeting their friends and colleagues, a quick q to the prof, signalling of their commitment to a collective endeavour, using a learning structure they are unable to impose on themselves, and so much more.
Attentional engagement in a zoom lecture is pretty poor. And students hate them!
In person set piece lectures working through a deep curriculum are valuable in their own right. And they're not easily transferable once you get get to honours level courses, as they are very often designed to meet curriculum and accreditation requirements that may be professionally or nationally specific.
MOOcs failed because they had no commitment threshold: if you were an affluent retiree you probably stayed the course, but the data showed that past the first lecture most people dropped out. I always felt MOOCs conflated and confused stage performing (lectures) with a rehearsed television series (they're just not the same thing).
Absolutely. The point of the lecture isn't really the content delivery, so much as the initial forced exposure to a set of ideas and the fact you're getting into a room with the same people week-in-week-out and being part of a cohort.
Speaking of my own undergrad experience (~16 years ago) the people who skipped lectures got bad grades even while telling themselves they can read the slides later. The four students who got a First were all active in the class and the extracurricular stuff happening in the department (guest lectures etc.).
Also, I think students are more atomised now, a bit less likely to stay on their devices and not make friends and plans, but that would be even worse if it was all online learning only.
All of this. When I was a prof and we recorded lectures, those students most likely to not attend in person were those who *most needed* the cultural and social capital of sitting in a classroom with their peers. They don’t know what they don’t know, and I thought the university was doing students dirty by not emphasizing the importance of showing up.
Yeah that was the one part of this article that quite strongly disagreed with - for whatever reason, zoom lectures are just not the same at all for me - the lack of interactivity, even the possibility of something interesting happening, the lack of peers to look around at and so on - mean I tend to zone out. About the only way I can watch a zoom lecture is by playing it at least 1.5x. No such issues in person - I can pay attention just fine.
I don't think the author is lauding Zoom, but rather criticizing the large-lecture format.
It's interesting to think of ways that a remote-learning interface could preserve many of the affordances that people DO actually like. There's no reason such a tool couldn't incorporate engagement, couldn't integrate testing/feedback - perhaps even with an AI tutor. Participants might even benefit from intra-communication (like whispering to your neighbor when the lecture covers something weird). Why would the lecturer even need to treat this as a one-shot event? Suppose the lecture is just a starting point, and many sub-discussions are supported by the interface.
What really surprises me is that these ideas are relatively easy to accomplish - to at least try. And yet I don't really see a lot of activity in this space. Zoom itself has a few desultory features. There are large LMS contraptions, but they tend to suffer from the same sort of ungainliness as Zoom. And, it must be said, focus on profit. (I admit I don't know much about less lucre-driven systems as MOOCs or khanacademy.)
As a wise man told me “Everything is possible when you don’t know what you are talking about”
I have a simpler and cruder take - professors are against AI at the moment because it has really messed up traditional ways of assessment, that the way to resolve that well is not fully understood at this time, and that the people most associated with AI are actively hostile to academics.
The hostility will fade when different assessment practices become standard and tech bigwigs realise a machine can't replace a tutor.
It wasn't that long ago when Wikipedia was the bete noire of professors.
Hello Paul. You ask a very good question. I've long thought that, for all the liberalism with wider politics, universities are remarkably conservative institutions in many ways.
I am also surprised that large scale lectures are still with us. Well, I say I am surprised but in a sense I am not surprised at all: it is explained by the conservatism of the institutions. But it should be surprising!
There was a time when the university lecture hall was the only place you could access good overviews/analyses/summaries of specialist but important knowledge, and that is why the large lecture hall was a great thing. But that time has now long past. We have free and easy access to enormous amounts of high-quality content, in all mediums: video (YouTube, etc), audio (podcasts) and written (Substack is one place, but also essays in NYRB, LRB and countless others). At all lengths and all levels. Consumable in your own time, wherever you want. And some of it better than you will get in any lecture.
Faculty do however still however have (at least) two unique skills and roles to play:
- Curation. While there is an enormous amount of high-quality stuff, there is also much dross and plenty of irrelevant stuff too. An expert is needed to curate. Making outstanding, comprehensive reading/listening/watching lists is more important than ever!
- And once the material is first consumed, it needs to be summarised, consolidated, used and reflected on. How does this stuff hang together? How can I practice these skills? You need experts to answer these questions well. This means that the classroom — as opposed to the lecture hall — is also more important than ever.
If we were starting from scratch today we would not do what we currently do. Sticking with the old ways is conservative indeed.
Oh wow, this article really got me thinking. I never really stopped to consider why so many professors lean conservative — but it makes sense when you look at how academia can attract more traditional thinkers. It’s tough balancing differing perspectives when you’re in a space where things can get intense. Personally, I’ve been trying to focus on finding opportunities that are more in line with what I’m interested in, and I found AcademicJobs.com to be pretty chill for exploring research assistantships and teaching roles. Definitely worth checking out if you’re in the academic grind too!
Limitations on a person's ability to understand complex systems + the importance of skin in the game = Hayek / Taleb
But I'll always be a socialist when Bloom orders the salad and I get the lobster.
"As one example, seminars are a wonderful institution; they’ve been around at least since Socrates, and there’s every reason to keep them. Administrators sometimes chafe at their expense—it’s not efficient, they will tell us, to have a prof sitting with a dozen students instead of teaching hundreds. But professors are right to insist on their value."
Same here in the UK; I envy Sisyphus his boulder.
However!
"If we are going to have lectures at all (and this is hardly obvious), why have students schlep over to campus at 9 AM to watch them on a hard seat in an auditorium? Why not record them and let the students watch them whenever they want? Actually, if we’re going to do that, why do the lectures have to come from a prof on campus?"
We have done this in the UK with what is called "lecture capture". Basically, the lecture is still done live, but students don't actually have to come to it because they can just watch it online at any point later. The result? It has been terrible for most students. 1) because they are students, and if they don't get their ass into the room in the first place, they typically end up not watching the lecture at all because hyperbolic discounting et cetera, and 2) you learn much more effectively listening to a real human in real life than watching a screen, and 3) when a critical mass of them stopped turning up, they stopped learning from each other because they're not having conversations with each other before and after lectures anymore. (Surprise, they also feel more lonely and more isolated, which doesn't exactly help learning, as well as their souls.)
But a few years ago the other universities started doing it, and because we were told we exist in a competitive market, we had to start doing it too. Even though it's been bad for all of the students - hilariously, grades went down the year they introduced this. (Inflation has of course seen a return to baseline, but that's hardly a satisfying fix.) And of course now it can't possibly go away because it cost millions and it would give the other universities a "competitive advantage" over us when they told 17-year-olds they can just watch things on YouTube instead of getting their ass out of bed.
DON'T DO IT!
Yep
I have an acquaintance who was an endowed chair at Cambridge. He told me once that things at Cambridge change very, very slowly. And he thought that was a good thing. I think about that a lot.
I completely forgot about Straight Man! it’s spot on, but at the campuses I taught at, no geese, a one legged duck and a flock of aggressive turkeys at another
15 years ago I was hoping for the students that MOOCs would work, and worried for myself that they would. But they turned out not to. It still seems that there should be something like this that can replace the large in-person lecture, but it’s not clear what can (or how that system works at all).
MOOCs did actually work, and continue to do so. The likes of sites like Coursera and Udemy count hundreds millions of users.
It just happens to be that MOOCs do not suffice as an alternative to higher learning institutions, nor an activity that those institutions can make central to their model.
Similarly there are numerous popular educational YouTube channels serving a similar if more diffuse purpose. Public, mass consumption content production is not a good fit for universities though.
That's fair - I was using a definition of "work" that assumed one set of goals that may not be the goals of many audiences. YouTube videos do work great, and MOOCs can be more structured than that.
What do you think is missing?
I personally love Dennett's concept of "tools for thinking", and can't figure out why we can't create "networks for learning". These days, hosting big sites is dirt cheap, and basic infrastructure programming is easy.
The big thing that seems to be missing is that without the in-person social aspect of it, students seem to have a hard time remaining attentive through the duration of a lecture, and an even harder time continuing with the class through the duration of a term. Of course, neither of these things is all that close to 100% even with the in-person structure of a large lecture, but they're more like 70-90%, rather than the 10-20% we often see with MOOCs.
The issue isn't on the computer side - it's on the social side of how you get a human being to continue interfacing with the system.
Not only do professors have skin in the game, they're also probably less capable of seeing any problems with the game in the first place -- they won it, and nobody gets mad about the rules of a game if they keep winning! To have become a professor, one must have been really good at navigating the academic system as currently constituted. And that can make it easy to (incorrectly) think that the game is well-designed and easily navigated. I'm a graduate student now, and my peers (myself included, until recently) often don't seem to understand why students would resort to using AI when they could just come to office hours and learn the material. But we're forgetting that we're the students who wanted to go to office hours and could easily learn the material, and that most students are not like us. We're a game-winning minority -- we shouldn't be shocked when the losing majority is less inclined to follow the rules that worked for us.
"nobody gets mad about the rules of a game if they keep winning"
Yes, and also it goes even deeper than that. People who win often don't recognise the shortcomings of the game they excel at. All their experience tells them that it works!
Absolutely -- which lends itself to conservatism, since things like AI or MOOCS or anything else then strike one as solutions to problems that don't even exist
"Few professors at American universities can teach as well as these scholars..." Is this true? One thing which I find crazy is that basic pedagogical skills are neither taught nor required for professors. Teaching is, at least nominally, their primary function and yet there is hardly any emphasis placed on it.
That’s completely false.
What's false? Is it your contention that professors get extensive pedagogical training and selected for their pedagogical skills rather than their research or publishing accomplishments?
Yes. Most professors in the US are at teaching institutions where their teaching is regularly evaluated by peers and students; where they can opt into pedagogical training if they want to; they are typically hired after years of a kind of apprenticeship working as TAs in graduate school. Except at R1s, teaching is a central part of tenure and promotion.
I have had brilliant professors who are terrible at teaching and TAs who are far better at teaching than the brilliant professors for whom they TA. My point is that, although teaching is nominally a professor's job, they are not selected for the expertise in teaching. Rather they are selected for things like research and publishing. Sure perhaps they can opt in to training and are evaluated, but this is a far cry from being experts in the skill of teaching. I want the skill of doctoring to be required of my doctor, not merely having him opt in to doctor training.
Have you been involved in search committees? Do you know how hiring and T&P actually work at the majority of US institutions? I don’t think you have or do.
Address the issue: Are professors hired primarily for their skill in teaching or for other reasons? The nominal purpose of professors is to teach. The purpose of doctors is to doctor. The purpose of firefighters is to fight fires. In the latter two cases, the individual's skill in the thing they're supposed to do is by far the most salient hiring criterion. In the case of professors it's simply not.
I agree with other responses that real departments are not as bad as you say. At most, a prof may be tolerated in spite of their poor teaching, but these are just tails of the distribution.
But isn't this really just down to human nature? Everyone protects their turf, including professors. Right? (For the record, I think AI is ruining higher ed, but your argument strikes me as one of straight=forward self interest). Or am I missing something?
Time to litigate MOOCs again! My only brush with a MOOC is when I was visiting Princeton for a year and found my colleague, the great ethnographer Mitchell Duneier, teaching one in his office. He was enthusiastic: students were excited and it increased his, and higher ed's, reach to students who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity. I was aghast. It was good for some students, presumably, but bad for the professoriate if it reduced the demand for professors (which was obviously self-interested) and also bad for scholarship, learning, and enlightenment generally if it shrunk the size of the scholarly community to a handful of scholars producing this highly-rated online content, itself based on research conducted by scholars supported, in large part, by (non-MOOC) undergraduate teaching. I could go on about the advantages of having an expert standing in front of you, ready to take questions, relate your question to another student's or events on campus, meet during office hours, and connect your excellent questions in class to your other assignments when it came to writing a letter of recommendation.
Of course, it's great to have those lectures online, just as it's great to publish the books of famous scholars. Students should absolutely spend their summers studying those and come to class well ahead of the game (as Guive, another commenter, did). The problem isn't the availability of the content--contrary to some, professors never treated knowledge as a carefully-held secret, as least not since the invention of the printing press--but the idea that it can substitute for the in-person experience. Of course, AI, being much more interactive, poses some unique challenges, so none of this means that it'll go the way of MOOCs, though I'm definitely in the Luddite school of "if we could only hope."
About what to do about student writing. After going to several seminars here at Cornell (Ctr f Teaching Excellence) I see only two possibilities: a, Abandon all takehome writing since it will all be mass plagiarism by AI; use oral discussion and presentations instead. Or, b, have few enough students that you can use a process of interlocked drafting and peer-reviewing where you are so close to the students and their drafts process that AI becomes impracticable. Both a and b are time-consuming. The latter method has the advantage that it salvages at least some of the learning that goes on in writing. (A prominent effect of the current mass plagiarism by AI is to take away the core of learning by writing, the formulation of thoughts -- and thus contributing to the ongoing mass brain atrophy by AI).
I think we have to replace “take-home writing” with “writing lab”. There should be computer labs all over campus where a student can log in, and the reading materials for their class all show up, and they have access to a word processor, but no internet browser. (And there are proctors ensuring you don’t use your phone.) Instead of writing papers at home, they should sign up for hours in the writing lab and write them there.
Interesting idea -- but more like for exam time, or for writing based only on what is already in your head, no reference to anything on your computer or on the internet or in the university library accessible only by the internet connection... ??
I have been asking recently about cutting off internet connections for exam rooms. The reason is, Meta glasses can apparently silently read and suggest answers just by looking at the question. A new kind of cheating device. I think I saw one pair, on a student, in one of my pen-and-paper only in-house exams in December.
The professor should be able to set things up so that when you log in in the writing lab, you have all the class readings show up - and if they want, they could probably upload an extra few dozen background readings someone might want. I could imagine a version that even has a JSTOR-only browser or something.
That point about the Meta glasses is one that I hadn't considered...
Yes. But it's also important to distinguish testing from learning.
Or maybe they need to be integrated - that we aim for a critical AI tutor that not only helps you through the material, but also administers continual testing and is then responsible for rendering a grade.
Yeah, we need a bunch of different things for a bunch of different parts of the learning process. The suggestion I'm making here is just for how students learn the basic skill of writing paragraphs and organizing paragraphs into an essay.
Are you serious? "critical AI tutor helping you through the material"?
I do not believe this -- unless, were you joking?
"AI tutor" guarantees no learning.
"Critical" cannot be associated with an AI.
Fascinating analysis. So that's why I favor a new world order based on free love and at the same time don't allow my kids to speak up at the dinner table. Makes perfect sense. I can only imagine the same thing applies in spades to smarty pants professors. Thanks for sharing.
Ha, I feel like I’m the same way either way my kids. Think whatever you want to think (the more out there, the more I’ll encourage it) but you’ll learn arithmetic, algebra and how to write cursive if I have to personally ensure it.