CS73N Meeting 05 Notes: Education
Started by Gio Wiederhold, 24 Feb.
2000, updated 9 May 2005.
Topics Covered briefly
Education is an enterprise that affects a large fraction of our population. Many people are students from their 5th to their 30th years -- 25 years. That fraction is still increasing as society and technology change and require frequent updating of one's skills. Even the assumptions about a student's future options, made when entering college, are likely to have been overtaken by the time of graduation.
Education
The classical model of education and training is based on direct communication between a teacher and the student or students. A student from the 19th century could fit right into our class today. That would not be true in most work settings. Implicit is that education is inefficient today in most of it's aspects:
1. Preparing educational material
2. Gathering students together
3. Presenting the material
4. Testing the effects of the education
To be effective traditional education addresses small groups of students, physically collocated with the teacher. Adoption of TV broadcasts has effectively enlarged the size of the class that can be addressed by one teacher by electronically expanding the classroom to include the locations served by the receiving sites. It has not improved the two-way interaction in teaching, which Despite the significant advantage TV has brought, the model is fundamentally unchanged: one teacher providing instruction to a number of students in real time.
Viele
schlafen, einer spricht, dass nennt man eben Unterricht
(Translation: Many sleep, one person speaks, that's what called education).
The use of video recording technology allows a student to "attend class" in a delayed time mode, reinforcing the one-way teacher-classroom model. There have also been other successful applications of technology to the education and training process, but the overwhelming majority of ETLL providers remain entrenched in the classic model, or introduce slight variations to it.
Stanford, through its SITN program, has provided remote education, transmitted from Stanford to class rooms in industrial sites. This pogram has been has been fairly suceessful and effective when the sites receiving the programs had a tutor assigned. Problems are due to delays in getting homework in or out -- but homework is still based on paper.
How will this model work for other colleges?
The potential loss of individual teaching opportunities is already causing reactions in some teacher organizations who rightfully fear that acquisition of costly material from remote institutions will diminish their interaction with students. Such concerns will delay the adoption of information technology in education but cannot halt it. Education today is based on information in books, although five hundred years ago some reputable authorities did not expect printing to be useful [Hibbitts:96]. Electronically mediated information is likely to become the principal carrier of information for education, and effective teachers will learn how to manage and exploit it. How to make remote education effective is still poorly understood. For instance multi-media presentations can easily confuse and reduce retention, while music can help keeping students aroused.
How these capabilities will change the process and structure of education is hard to predict, but it seems unlikely that another hundred years hence much time will be spent by teachers standing in front of a class and holding forth.
Alternatives are flexible, interactive, virtual colleges of people sharing a common learning objective, and sufficient commonality of background to be able to work together. The teacher, if there is one, is mainly a mediator.
Testing is costly and consumes much effort, since it scale mainly with the number of learners. There are interesting projects in testing automation and assistance, but there is no clear success yet. If automation has costs, there have to be cost-saving benefits, and those are hard to realize.
Training
[Conversation with a manager at H-P]
I wanted to respond to your recent message regarding on-demand education. Based on our discussions with engineering and education/training managers at SITN's member companies you're right on target. What we're hearing is that practicing engineers, and the companies that pay for their education, want "control" of the teaching and learning. They want control over the place and time (ideally at the desktop or even at home), pace, and even the scope and sequence of the material --- and not be constrained by the barriers imposed by the traditional on-campus class. If you wish, I can send you an outline of our assessment of the industry environment and engineering education.
The idea of smaller increments of instruction is something SITN has been working on with Stanford faculty in the development of non-credit short courses. These are programs that average five hours in length and are typically broken into one hour increments. The programs are taped and offered as a five hour course on satellite and on video tape. In the future these courses could be divided up and offered as modules available on-line from video servers. The products (including regular 30 hour courses designed to be broken into stand alone modules) could also be converted into CD-ROMs with the entire course indexed for easy access. In fact, we have developed a CD-ROM demo of a repurposed engineering class that might serve as a model for future development.
Stanford faculty have offered about 15 short courses over the last 20 months in a range of engineering disciplines. Examples include: C++ (Cheriton), Digital Circuits (DeMicheli), T-CAD (Dutton), Composites (Tsai), Cryptography (Hellman), Turbulence Modeling (Bradshaw) and Design for Assembly (Barkan). Our target is to have at least one of these a month, eventually ratcheting it up to three a month using both Stanford faculty and distinguished industry experts.
As Jeff Ullman alluded to in his recent note, a few of us (Jeff, Fouad Tobagi, Dale Harris, Dwain Fullerton et al) have been trying to figure a way to run an experiment to get some of the School's televised classes and short courses available to customers on-demand using video servers. With the real possibility of some resources to get this idea started (and Gibbons endorsement), I suggest those who are interested gather to talk about next steps. It would probably make sense to have a few potential industry customers in attendance at one of these sessions so that they can provide a reality check about what we have in mind -- they are the ones who are going to pay to receive the programming. For example, Hewlett-Packard's corporate engineering education group is currently delivering our 250 courses to the workstation as a live signal, but they are very interested in having a menu driven "pull" system. Their idea is to have SITN repurpose existing video product into smaller increments so that an H-P engineer can "pull" modules of instruction or information when and where needed. I know H-P would have an interest in discussing this concept with Stanford engineering faculty. Since H-P represents over 50% of the School's external engineering education business we should listen to their suggestions. H-P and other SITN companies might also have resources they wish to add to the mix.
A significant computational challenge is presented by the need to more carefully define the skills needed to perform real job functions, assess the level of relevant skills in employees and applicants, and define the course modules necessary to make up the difference. The skill assessment work that is being done today is still largely a craft, performed by highly trained professionals without significant technological support. As a result it does not scale to the nationwide application that is necessary in order for the new, skill based ETLL model to become a reality. These processes need to be automated, which will require programs that are capable of dealing with large amounts of information and perform processing that can deal with and resolve the ambiguities that still plague the "soft sciences." Probabilistic rather than deterministic processing will be necessary, suggesting the need for Artificial Intelligence or "Fuzzy Logic" applications. To automate and scale the current "expert" processes will demand both sophisticated software and high capacity, high speed computational hardware.
Entertainment and education
Expectation for education are changing. Students are used to the pace and soundbytes of TV. Multimedia presentation are expected. Paper text books are boring, and getting to big.
The information technology that will be used for modern education will adopt many concepts from entertainment: reliance on graphics, interaction, instant replay, multiple paths to reach goal, etc. [Brutzman:97]. The initial uses of the Internet in education are simple, and similar to access requests by scientists and consumers [Perrochon:96], but material specific for on-line education is being developed by a variety of places [diPaolo:99]. The tool providers will have to reengineer the tools developed for creating entertaining games to make them suitable for authoring by teachers. Much work is required by educators to present and maintain educational material [VernonLP:94]. The market for an educational product has to be larger than a single classroom to be viable. Such markets now exist in industrial training, where students cannot be brought together at one time in one place. Acceptance of distributed high-quality academic material will start where colleges cannot cover all topics of interest to their students, and will broaden as successes are attained.
Study material is likely to adopt hypertext formats. Section would be presented only if the student indicates that more information or background on a topic is desired. There may be sections that would be blocked untill the student has read a pre-requisite section or answered questions indicating competence.
Technology
The interface between the individual and stored courseware modules (e.g., simulations) must facilitate the identification and presentation of the desired ETLL modules with minimal demand for specialized technical knowledge or skills.
The Information processing system must also keep track of the ETLL records of millions of individuals and maintain currency of skill databases and skill-based ETLL course modules stored in simultaneous multiple locations on the network. The information processing system and must enable course modules to be selected from competitive offerings, acquired and paid for electronically (using electronic commerce processes).
One of the principal advantages that digital technology can bring to the ETLL process is the ability for the student to "learn by doing" in simulated environments. Simulations have the advantage that they are safer and less expensive than the actual experience, and can be more controlled in ways that will optimize the learning process. Creating simulations of this quality will place large computational demands, particularly in those cases where the simulation itself must be capable of being reproduced on platforms that are inexpensive enough to be commonplace in the home or office.
The tools that information technology has to provide to serve education are similarly uncertain. It will be important for the industry to track changes and provide the means to bring education forward. Primary needs will include authoring tools for materials in all the media that will be used. It should also be easy to insert simulations and present the results in a visual meaningful form [CypherST:99]. Most of the material will be copyrighted, but obtaining permission to use must be convenient.
Examples
geometric constraint solving
We are pleased to announce the availability of an electronic primer on
geometric constraint solving developed for the ONR research community. The
primer is an electronic book available on world-wide-web through XMosaic. It
can be read following four predefined "tours", or following hyperlinks.
The primer also contains instructions on downloading the constraint solver to
be run locally, on Sun workstations, as well as the capability to run the
constraint solver locally at Purdue. The URL access is
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/pjv/book/intro.html
The tours are as follows:
- 1. Overview The overview tour provides an introduction to geometric constraint solving with emphasis on our approach to constraint solving.
- 2. Tutorial The tutorial tour is a hands-on guide to using our two-dimensional constraint solver.
- 3. Theoretical Foundations The theoretical basis for our constraint solver is detailed in this tour.
- 4. Implementation This tour presents the theoretical and technical aspects of our constraint solver which are necessary in order to be able to implement a constraint solver similar to ours.
There is also a bibliography arranged alphabetically by author.
[Christoph M. Hoffmann,
Pamela J. Vermeer,
Radiology
Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits are now available online!
The University of Washington School of Medicine has designated the digital
teaching file on the UW Radiology Webserver for credit hours in Category I of
the Physicians Recognition Award of the American Medical Association.
The URL for this server is: http://www.rad.washington.edu/
Other learning modules are currently available on this server and will also be
available for CME credit soon. This server includes the following items:
- 1. Radiology Teaching File
- 2. Anatomy Teaching Modules
- 3. Radiology Exhibits from UW
- 4. Information on UW radiology residency and fellowship programs
- 5. Image processing software written by UW faculty
For further information, contact:
[Michael Richardson, M.D. <mrich@u.washington.edu>.]
Harvard Business School
To create course material they are doing Video logging of Harvard Business school material. The result is then made available for remote intercative learning.
Video logging breaks a video tape into logical segments (by speaker, change of scene, change of topic, intermediate music, etc.), and then creates index entries for each segement, so the the information in that segment is rapidly accessible. For each segment a key frame is identified and shown. Information extracted includes words from speech-recognition, , close-captioning, face recognition, speaker voice identification, etc.
Faculty involved there [Larry Bouthillier (*contact?); Sandy Pentlam (sp?)]. Examples found by search on `stock', 'Cyberposium 99'.
New School for Social Research - University Cybercampus , New York
Notes
See also the
references.