OP
jchunter
iPF Noob
- Thread Starter
- #16
IMHO, Your comments are well taken and on topic. Right behind videos not playing at all should be a discussion on how effectively online courses present the subject matter when they do play.
IMHO, MIT deserves a lot of credit for putting most of their courses online "as-is" because, though imperfect, they do allow students to escape the surly bonds of space and time. They don’t have to travel to a classroom and they can study the material at any time of day or night. Even fragmentary class material could be valuable to a motivated student who is prepping for a course ahead of actual enrollment.
To your point, selecting the best and most organized presenters to video tape is a no-brainer. Also, there are simple techniques that would improve the video presentations, such as close micing the presenters because open classrooms make a lot of noise and echoes reduce word recognition. Higher video resolution would also help.
Interactive graphics would allow far better presentation of abstract phenomena such as electromagnetic field dynamics. Carnegie Mellon (CMU) has several new courses that use these techniques but of course, they use Adobe Flash Player, which means that I have to use my "Grandpa Box" (desktop computer) instead of the iPad to evaluate them.
Most of all, I feel that learning equations and doing classical homework problems has always been woefully inadequate to teach the application of theory to solving real problems. Interactive Tutor programs that provide immediate feedback on the student’s approach to problem solving would be far better. Classical textbook homework problems have never been effective because human paper graders are usually so slow that the class has already moved on by the time the student discovers his mistakes.
A few years ago I tried CMU’s Andes Physics Tutor, an early experiment that does very little teaching and a LOT of problem solving. Andes allows the student to declare a coordinate system and the variables (scalar and vector) that he needs to solve the problem. The student is then free to write the equations needed to solve it. If Andes doesn’t like his equations or his choice of variables, it will tell him immediately. OTOH, if likes them, it will do the computational grunt work required to solve them and give the student an instant grade on his efforts. All in all, if I had had such a Tutor when I first studied Physics, I would have understood it far, far better.
