A Better Way
Universities puzzle me in their approach to teaching students. Equally puzzling is the metrics we use to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of university education. These institutions are the engines of innovation, yet despite the constant influx of public funds into unviersities, they seem to exist in a perpetual state of under-funding. How could we improve the university system to maximize the value for dollar?
To start with: could we be getting more value out of professors’ time? It seems to me that professors spend an inordinate amount of time on activities that could be consolidated across institutions. For example, how many professors prepare new notes, slides, exam questions and assignments for a course that they’re teaching for the first time? And yet how few of those professors pass that material along to the next professor that teaches the course?
Wouldn’t it make sense for any material prepared by a professor to be shared as widely as possible? Of course, some in the academic community point out that this material is subject to copyright, but come on people, just how many different ways is it possible to reincarnate the material in a first year physics course? Isn’t sharing information a core principle in the heart of the academic community?
A first step: establish an open source online repository for learning materials that professors can check out, update as required, and check back in. I envision a library of notes, quiz questions, exam questions and lab experiments that educators could mix and match as required by their course. As the best and brightest minds make incremental improvements to the materials in response to student feedback, the repository would approach the “best” way to present university material.
The potential benefits to professors are enormous: less time on class preparation, less time spent by students on copying down notes (assuming all the materials are available electronically) leading to better class discussions and improved comprehension of class material. Universities could even eliminate course textbooks, allowing them to raise tuition without protest; after all, what’s an extra $20 a credit hour if you don’t have to spend $100 on a course textbook?
With such a repository of learning materials, quiz and exam questions, it would only be a matter of time before people started knitting this information together into comprehensive online courseware. Imagine being able to sit at your computer, read about a topic, answering questions after each section of reading to test your understanding. The next step would be intelligent software that would “branch” after each set of questions, proceeding to the next topic if you achieved a satisfactory score on the questions, or proceeding to an alternate format of presenting the material if you didn’t. Really intelligent software might even customize its choice of presentation format over time to match a student’s preferred learning style (learn by example, visual learner, etc).
Why aren’t we doing this now? Well, in fact there are a number of efforts to produce these learning object repositories using existing technologies, such as XML and the World Wide Web. But the development of this technology has been slow, most likely the result of how we evaluate the effectiveness of our university education system. You only have to look at the methodology used to generate university rankings, such as Maclean’s University Rankings or the Financial Times MBA Rankings, to realize that university rankings have little to do with the quality of education received by students. Since when was the number of publications generated by faculty a reliable measure of how well a student is being taught? Or the amount of grants received by faculty?
If we’re really concerned about how well the minds of tomorrow are being shaped, we need to re-align our method for evaluating and ranking universities to coincide with our goals for post-secondary education. Only in that fashion will the incentives be properly fashioned to prompt universities to take the corrective actions required to adopt new teaching technology, freeing professors to do more research done and, in turn, improve our country’s ability to innovate.