Changing the Way Undergraduates Are Taught
Washington University in St. Louis has received a $562,000 National Science Foundation grant to research changing how undergraduate students are taught. The new “active learning” approach, led by associate professor of computer science and engineering Kenneth J. Goldman, replaces passive learning through lectures with a stronger emphasis on studio courses that involve team projects and interdisciplinary collaboration. “Passive learning can be done effectively out of class. We want students to interact in the classroom more instead of hearing a lecture,” Goldman says. “We will be making video and audio from lectures available on the Web. We can then assign these, much like reading assignments, so that students can arrive in class ready to do something with that knowledge.” Undergraduate courses affected by the change will be divided into two groups–foundation courses that will concentrate on fundamental problem-solving skills, and studio courses in which students apply their fundamental knowledge. Students will experience active learning and frequent critiques from faculty and students in both types of courses. As passive material is phased out, it will be made available through an online course management system so students can view the material to prepare for in-class learning. The course management system will also be used to track where the class is in the curriculum and allow students to keep portfolios of their project work. “People are attracted to computer science and engineering because it is a creative discipline,” Goldman says. “Educational research shows that if students are creating during class, rather than sitting there listening, motivation will be higher and the students will learn more.”
Washington University Record (St. Louis) (10/25/07) Fitzpatrick, Tony
October 31, 2007 at 10:34 am
wished UOM could be like that….but here, instead of moving forward and using new ways for learning, we are adopting the old style of “lecturing”. And some months back, the management of the university seemed rather proud of adopting this more “lecturing” attitude by herding as many students that can fit into a lecture theater and listen to lectures (and thus successfully reducing interaction between students and lecturers)
Way to go…
January 28, 2008 at 1:08 pm
The post is interesting, but the concept seems to be utopia, really. Can the mentality of people who’v been taught rote-learning from the go be changed within short cycles of intense 15-week marathons?
Besides, as mr Meetoo once said to a CSE 1 batch, most students are just oriented towards CSE coz there was nothing else to do, “cse by default”. in my own class there were so many who didnt even know why they were there, n had no interest in gettin a computer to calculate insertions into a red-black tree or the coordinates of a circle on a screen.
The other problem is the sheer bulk of the curriculum and the inertia. I was disillusioned on my first day at uni when i’d prepared and read and done the exercises, only to find i was the only one to have done so. How many students will really read the material given online? I personally would have loved to find the lecture contents online before the class instead of after.lol
I think that together with changing the way under-grads are taught, unis must focus on changing the way under-grads learn, which is a much more difficult thing to do… at uni, no1 will worry abt anything that isnt marked.