[davidbanham]

> My ideal alternative would be to remove lectures entirely and to have interactive labs where teachers and TAs help students complete assignments based on assigned readings. The instructor for the course would be responsible for overseeing the teaching assistants and preparing the course outline. The TAs would help guide the students in completing the assignments or mini projects. Then a couple of time a semester there would be larger projects that tie together what the students have learned.

_yes_.

This seems so obvious to me. I am completely mystified as to why all universities seem to be ignoring it. I worry that it's just because videotaping lectures and putting them online is so much easier than actually re-evaluating the pedagogy.

[neaanopri]

I'm in a class that's doing it right now. There are problems.

Often nobody knows what's going on. You can argue that confusion is good, but it's not fun and it feels wrong. You can argue that class should be challenging and active, but this method led to a minor student revolt.

Discrimination and prejudice happen. Women are underrepresented (with respect to the ratio in the class) in the conversations that happen.

We haven't figured out the right incentive structure to make people actually do the readings yet. Sometimes people don't do them.

Personally, I love this new method. It has problems on the scale of a 60ish person class in a technical subject (nonlinear dynamics). When we're working in small groups, that helps, but whenever we try to do something as a class it devolves into an impromptu lecture (most of the time by a student).

If we want to learn this way we need to know how to scale it. It seems drastically more effective, and I think that college would be so much better if this method was normal.

[xerophyte12932]

One of my teachers in College managed to pull it off splendidly. The course was Algorithms. I suspect the normal format for an Algorithms course is that the teacher would write an algorithm and explain how it works and its merits/demerits etc... in short, a lecture.

What our teacher did was: 1) Write a small piece of pseudocode on board and called it a "unit" 2) Present a problem to the class. 3) Ask students to come up with solutions that used the unit (or modified it a bit. 4) Allow Students to present their solutions to the rest of the class. 5) Allow the class as a whole to debate on competing algorithms. 6) (If applicable) Reveal the name of the algorithm the class has just derived. 7) Repeat

The teacher rarely ever lectured. He just presented problems and let the class figure a way out. Occasionally he would nudge us in a direction we weren't considering, but mostly he was there just to ensure things run smoothly and that's all.

On the whole, it worked out great. Before the class I knew most people had trouble designing algorithms. At the end, even the weaker students had a pretty good grasp on the subject because the format itself encouraged everyone to contribute and thus learn.