Is It Time To Dismantle the Lecture Hall?
In this debate, the question might not be so much about whether online education is effective, but whether it could be any worse than the existing model.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 04/03/14
When Anant Agarwal was in college, he would "follow the professor for the first five minutes" and then get lost and spend the next hour scrambling to keep up with note-taking. That's no way to run a learning model, said this professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and CEO of edX, the storied MOOC site founded by Harvard and MIT.
On the other hand, "Online education will not replace the great colleges." People learn from each other when they "work together, live together, sleep together," said Jonathan Cole, professor at Columbia University and author of the 2011 book The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.
Then again, contended Ben Nelson, the practice of paying a professor to teach just a few students each year is not exactly an economically viable model. Those who oppose the rise of massive open online courses are critiquing the current state, "not what the potential is," added this founder and CEO of Minerva Project, a university opening in fall 2014 where students will live in close proximity and take classes online.
Of course, asserted Rebecca Schuman, MOOCs can be "great fun," but they're no replacement for college. This adjunct professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a columnist for Slate and the Chronicle of Higher Education said she believes that "more clicks means less contact."
So go the arguments for and against (and for and against) the idea of online learning walloping the tradition of face-to-face instruction. As higher education evolves, has the lecture hall model become obsolete? In a debate hosted by Intelligence Squared on the campus of Columbia University, two teams of academic experts squared off to settle that question.
Agarwal and Nelson supported the motion that the world needs "more clicks and fewer bricks." Cole and Schuman spoke against the motion.
The series in which this debate was featured is based on "the traditional Oxford-style debate format." A motion is put forward, with one side proposing it and the other side opposing it. Before the discussion begins, members of the audience use a clicker system to show their pre-debate opinions. Then each debater delivers a seven-minute opening statement and a moderator opens the debate up to questions from the audience. Finally, the debaters each have two minutes to summarize their arguments and the audience casts its votes again. The winner of the debate is not the side with the most votes but the side that has converted more of the audience to its position.
An Early Vote for Tradition
Before the debate — titled, "More Clicks, Fewer Bricks: The Lecture Hall is Obsolete" — began, the audience was definitely on the side of tradition. Fifty-nine percent were against the motion; 18 percent were for the motion; and 23 percent were undecided.
And the arguments were set forth. Agarwal shared the story of two students who took his edX course on circuits and electronics, thereby gaining access to resources they otherwise wouldn't have. One student, who came from a family of 14 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had to leave university to go to work after the death of his father. Ten years later MOOCs were enabling him to get back to his studies in order to "get a better job." The second, a 15-year-old student in Poland, did "really well" in Agarwal's course, applied to MIT and was accepted. He's now a sophomore.