Why Virtual Learning Can Be Better Real

I teach one of the most popular MOOCs in the world (massive open online course, massive online open course / MOOC), Learning How to Learn, together with neuroscientist Terrance Sezhnowski of the Francis Crick Institute at the Institute of Biological Research. Salka. Based on neuroscience, cognitive psychology and educational theory, our course explains how the human brain absorbs and processes information so that we all can improve our learning opportunities. Since its launch on the Coursera website in August 2014, almost a million students from 200 countries have enrolled in our course. We were watched by cardiologists, engineers, lawyers, linguists, 12-year-olds, and refugees from Sudan. We received various letters, for example: “I will be brief. I recently completed your MOOK and it has already changed my life so that you cannot even imagine. I just turned 29, I am in the process of changing my career to work in the field of computer science, and I have never been so great to learn. ”

I am very pleased to receive such feedback, as well as any teacher in any part of the world. They are not only enjoyable, but also show the impact on the MOOC. We all know about the importance of the education system and the benefits that society can get by improving this system, especially in the field of training people lagging behind in development. Online courses allow us to expand these opportunities - learning better quality for less money. The numbers are already impressive. More than 500 colleges and universities and 200 organizations and institutes offer their MOOK, which is used by more than 30 million people.

And while the “Learning to Learn” course turns out to be one of the most enjoyable impressions of my 20-year teacher career - and now I teach engineering at Auckland University in Michigan - I confess that I feel as if I am trying to justify myself. The success and educational potential of the MOOK is undermined by critical articles published in popular publications over the past couple of years. In the article “Trapped in the virtual classroom” in the New York Review of Books, David Bromwich, a sterling English professor at Yale University, stated that “the MOOC movement works with the trend towards mechanization” and “hinders integrated thinking about the content and goals Education ". In some studies, it has been estimated that online courses throw up to 90% of subscribers. Robert Zemsky, chairman of the Alliance for Higher Education at the Pennsylvania University of Education, wrote that MOOC’s prospects were diminishing, and they "were not interesting from a pedagogical or technical point of view."
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I would venture to say that the majority of people who deny the MOOK have no experience in creating and teaching online courses. In fact, the MOOC can also be beautifully decorated from an artistic and technical point of view, and they can have amazing pedagogical advantages. This is especially well seen in such a complex area as STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Math - science, engineering, technology, mathematics - the collective name of the exact sciences in the USA - approx. trans.]. Difficult to understand explanations in such areas sometimes just ask for re-viewing and rewind, require the ability to stop the lecture, so that an understanding of the subject could penetrate the consciousness. Regarding the percentage of people dropping courses, Kif Devlin, a Stanford mathematician, noted that some work related to the MOOC was based on traditional metrics of higher education, “misleading”. The reasons why people subscribe to the MOOC are different from those for which they subscribe to regular classes. “A lot of people are not going to finish the course,” Devlin writes. “They are only looking for education.”

In the best courses, students really receive material that inspires integrated thinking about learning objectives. Online courses can hold students' attention, and sometimes even better than live teachers. Creating a “Learning to learn” course provided an opportunity to take a look at learning and teaching from the outside. Terry and the online environment helped us overcome some of the problems associated with learning according to the traditional method, and gave the students a different look at the learning process.


Barbara Oakley and the neuroscientist Terrence Seinovsky for less than $ 5,000 have created an online course dedicated to brain and learning.

Chilean hermit spiders are among the most dangerous hermit spiders. One bite from such a spider can kill you. They are hefty - up to 3-4 cm. They are also very fast. Imagine that you noticed a Chilean hermit spider 6 meters away from you on the floor. Another look - and now he is half a meter away from you. This behavior will attract your attention, right?

We begin to study neural networks with why motion — especially the motion of an object approaching you — attracts attention. When the brain detects an approaching object, the neurons send a cascade of information to the amygdala of the brain, a center for processing emotions and motivation. The approaching movement is of great importance from the point of view of phylogenetics - so different creatures as insects, reptiles, birds and people react to it [Skarratt, PA, Gellatly, AR, Cole, GG, Piling, M., & Hulleman, J. Looming motion primes the visuomotor system. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 40, 566-579 (2014)].

As a result of evolution, the human brain learned to switch its attention quickly and often. Those who concentrated too heavily on the prey they pursued became the prey itself. So it is not surprising that people are not meant to sit in one place for a long time and constantly focus their attention on the teacher. Regardless of how interesting the subject of study is to us, the order of the lecture does not correspond to how the brain works.

This is the problem of learning. The question of whether teachers help us learn is considered almost heretical. Intuition says they should. And they actually help - the best of the teachers seem to penetrate our heads to understand what exactly we need in order to experience that very moment of “aha!” - the moment of understanding. They can fascinate, bewitch, inspire to learn - even in those subjects, the development of which seems too difficult. Clear explanations, inspiration, humor, concentration on certain points of pressure on misunderstanding - all this helps us move on.

However, counterintuitive research has shown that teachers are not very good at helping us learn. In 1985, the Primary State of Knowledge in College Students Physics, performed by Physics Professor Ibrahim Abu Halun and David Hestenes, it was shown that by placing students in a classroom with a traditional teacher with a blackboard and chalk, we can achieve only a small amount of progress in the subject - even if this teacher has awards [Halloun, IA & Hestenese, D. American Journal of Physics 53, 1043 (1985)].

The work of Haloun and Hestenes stirred up the scientific education community. How did it happen that traditional methods work so poorly? Researchers who have dealt with the implications of this have begun to test new, improved teaching methods. A fruitful study of the physicist Richard Hake and others has found that interactive participation in the class, including large classes of 100 students, improves the performance learned per semester, compared to the traditional approach [Hake, RR Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey courses for physics courses. American Journal of Physics 66, 64 (1998)]. Apparently, students' attention can be held, allowing them to talk and work with each other along the way.

Many college classes have switched to this method of teaching. A meta-analysis of the results that Scott Freeman performed with colleagues for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that “active learning” improves teaching to the exact sciences so much that not using it is pedagogical criminal negligence [Freeman, S., et al . Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 8410-8415 (2014)]. But learning is not only interaction. Sometimes the more interactions, the slower we go. Usually supporters of active learning (and I am one of them) believe that good learning requires a balance between the time for explanations and the “active” time during which students cope with the materials themselves, often through interaction with fellow students [Oakley, B., Brent, R., Felder, RM, & Elhajj, I. Turning student groups in effective teams. Journal of Student Centered Learning 2, 9-34 (2004)].

The solution to the paradox about the value of teachers is in the context of research papers studying the learning process. Tutors can keep students' attention, not only giving clear explanations, but changing topics, asking questions, organizing, if necessary, breaks. In traditional classrooms, even the best teachers can not fail to cause boredom during a long lesson.

These discoveries demonstrate the nature of our brain, loving to shift attention. They are controlled by subtle and subconscious factors, and their influence is stronger than we are ready to admit. Our inability to maintain concentration on long periods of time, coupled with our desire to try everything ourselves and discuss everything with others, reduces our ability to use traditional teaching to the fullest.

With the development of the Internet, another approach to learning has emerged - the “inverted” class. Professors record a video presentation so that it can be viewed at home, synthesize knowledge and develop key ideas. In the classroom, however, time is spent on answering questions and working together: solving problems, discussing problems and concepts in teams, working on what students have misunderstood, doing it alone. In this kind of personal interactions, the role of both the teacher and the students is high.

The development of the "inverted" class led to the creation of the MOOK as the next frontier in training.

My, perhaps the biggest resource for creating Learning to Learn was that I myself was a very bad student. I somehow made it through the lessons of mathematics and the exact sciences. I only took up additional mathematics classes at the age of 26, when I returned from the army. Bad job prospects are a great motivator for changing careers. I could not study while listening to lectures - in the classroom my attention was attracted by everything except the teacher. I could succeed only by turning into a transcript - and later learning what was written with the right speed and in my own way.

Starting to learn mathematics as an adult, often I was on the verge of despair. Sometimes it seemed to me that textbooks and teachers conspired to explain everything in the most mysterious way possible. When a professor who has been doing Fourier or Laplace transformations all his life, said something like: “Of course, it’s obvious that ...,” I was trembling, because I knew that it would not be obvious to me. I am slowly learning - often it took me a long time to realize that some thing was actually quite simple.

Terry and I have created “Learning to Learn,” so that the students themselves grasp this simple subject. We wanted to combine the benefits of training with a tutor with lessons learned from game developers and TV creators. From the rapid development of events in Grand Theft Auto to the money rolling from the Breaking Bad series that rolls into a tumble dryer, movement is an important part of gaining access to students' subconsciousness and holding their attention.

In our course we constantly use movement. Using the chromakey screen, I can suddenly move from one edge of the screen to the other, or move from a full-length image to a picture with one face. Or, while I’m laughing at the side of the screen, I can scroll in one of the parts of the image video, in which my daughter, moving the car on the track, pushes it onto the lawn - a perfect example of what can happen when you have not yet developed management skills. These are all video tricks, but they work by keeping the students' attention.

One of the tricks used by many great scientists is to try to imagine that you are transferred to what you are trying to understand. Einstein imagined how he was chasing a ray of light in order to better formulate the theory of relativity. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock represented herself in the kingdom of "jumping genes", for the discovery of which she was awarded. We can help our students develop an intuition that is not inferior to the intuition of Nobel laureates, animating objects into video in a way that cannot be achieved in the classroom. We can enter the cell's mitochondria, or observe the interaction of ions, or get into the spiral of the Euler equation.

Now in the classes the technology of two images is often used - slides from PowerPoint are shown on the screen, and the instructor stands next to it. Often in the video we see an imitation of such an approach, when there is a talking head in the corner of the screen (similar to the limited movement possibilities of a still image), and the main picture is shown on the whole screen.

But this approach increases cognitive load. Two different pictures on the screen have to be processed simultaneously. But when using a chromakey, a professor can pretend that he goes around a Greek vase the size of himself. In a biology video, a professor may point to highly enlarged cell structures. In engineering video - on a counter flow in the heat exchanger. Such a combination of the professor and the object under discussion reduces the cognitive load and concentrates the pupils' attention on important details - even if these details are very small in real life. All this makes it easier for students to understand key ideas.

Metaphors and analogies are just as important as reducing cognitive load. The “re-neural use” theory says that for understanding metaphors or analogies, we often use the same neural circuits as for understanding the most discussed concept [Anderson, ML Precis of Phrenology: Neural reuse and the interactive brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, 1-22 (2015)]. Teachers of the exact sciences can sometimes be scornful of reducing their material to stupid analogies. But such teaching tools are extremely important - they serve as intellectual ladders that help students deal with complex ideas using existing neural circuits.

Good online courses create the impression that the professor speaks directly to the student. Concentration on the camera looks like the attention paid to the student. Pupils develop a sense of familiarity - we are regarded as friendly tutors. We, of course, do not replace teachers in the classroom. We only serve as an additional personalized resource, despite the fact that we explain fairly extensive areas of knowledge. I also want to note that each of the lectures I recorded for the course is the best lecture I've ever given in my life.

Online classes allow you to conduct advanced polls. Testing is one of the very best ways to learn [Keresztes, A., Kaiser, D., Kovacs, G., & Racsmany, M. Cerebral Cortex 24, 3025-3035 (2014)]. Tests in key areas of the video, dozens of questions for verification at the end of each module can seriously improve students' understanding of the material. Sometimes teachers point out a study that showed that students studying physics are not taught at the time of explanation, but because of their mistakes. But physics, unlike most topics, is replete with erroneous ideas, because of which students tend to skip explanations, thinking that they already understand some question [Bilalic, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. Why good thoughts block better effects (set) effect. Cognition 108, 652-661 (2008)]. Mistakes made in intermediate online questionnaires may cause students of physics — or any other subject — to return to an explanation again.

In general, online video allows students to do what their brain is prone to - first concentration, then repetition of the most difficult places of the material, then a break. They can take tests themselves, or I can interview them. They can stop the video and stare at nowhere, wondering, until it clicks in their head. They can discuss the subject on the forum with friends from Zimbabwe or Chile. In the usual two-hour lesson it is impossible to implement.

Not all MOOKs are so wonderful. But with the increase in their diversity and quality, students' choices also increase. They can feel the richness of the material and the choice of lessons, and if they do not like something, then move on. The MOOC itself is not a panacea for improving learning. It will be the result of many efforts: MOOK, new textbooks, the teachers themselves. Online resources do not replace personal trainers - they serve as tools for high-quality personal training and good materials for testing knowledge.

Terry and I spent no more than $ 5,000 on “Learning to Learn”, and made it mostly in my basement. I didn’t have video editing experience - before that I was only able to press the record button on the camera. Most of the moving images were created using PowerPoint slides. Therefore, I appeal to the critics of the MOOC. Create your online course.Write the most interesting and deep lecture of all that you gave in life. If you do not like the result - re-shoot until you are satisfied. Come up with questions for the test based on common errors. And you will learn more about online course opportunities than you expect. More importantly, you will set an example of openness to learn for students around the world.