Dissolving the First Year of University

Redesigning STEM Education

Backdrop

• Public coffers around the world are facing austerity pressures. The Australian government, for example, is quick to try saving money by capping university places. Meanwhile, the cost of education has been rising faster than CPI. How do we make education more accessible?
• The debate about “quality vs. quantity”: how do we improve access, with current levels of resources, while maintaining the same or higher quality of education for a broader audience?
• The dichotomy of the role of universities: traditionally universities were elite institutions, and today they compete on research prowess. How do we balance this goal with the mission of providing higher education?
• Over-commercialisation of education: in Australia and other places there’s a danger of rampant deregulation and “outsourcing education” leading to profit-driven vendors selling promises of mobility to the masses, while shortchanging students with declining quality of delivery.
• A widening skill gap in the new economy, a STEM crisis in labour supply, in teaching, in the educational workforce, and in learning.
• We also have widespread “maths anxiety” and “maths alienation” with people ending up thinking they’re “not smart enough” and giving up on acquiring useful skills because of a rigid academic calendar.
• Work and learning are more than just means of making a living, we also find meaning through creative pursuits. As the aggregate productivity in a highly developed welfare state continues to improve, we’ll find it increasingly necessary to ward off crises of idleness.

But really, having gone through the first year of university with many STEM courses, here are just some ideas on how the experience could be improved.

Pedagogical Stagecraft

Lecturers at Aalto shun recordings for fear of being replaced by holographic robots, then weeks later you go back and browse through the lecture slides and nothing makes sense any more. At Macquarie we at least had lectures recorded and automatically posted online. Sometimes you learn quite a lot just by watching the lectures over and over at a later time.

Over the year our university added more IT support for lecturers to record themselves more easily, still it makes you think: what if everything could be professionally produced? The prime example is Al Gore’s movie. It had a very effective way of presenting ideas and making an argument. Why not have lectures that are just as entertaining? Why not leverage the art of stage presentation to make points of science and knowledge more salient?

Al Gore on a scissor lift to highlight his argument

We can think about what makes a course good — one of the original highlights of MOOCs was the quality of teaching — if we look at Coursera or EdX, a main selling point was that students all over the world could “learn from the best”, namely top/leading universities, by virtually sitting in the same lecture halls, listening to those who “wrote the textbook” on the subject.

What’s needed is a blend of “taught by the best” and “taught by the best at teaching” — these two may not always coincide— experts on the cutting edge have insights on how the basics relate to breakthrough applications — then there are high school teachers or tutors who are really good at explaining the concepts. To be good at knowing the subject, to be good at explaining it, to be good at presenting to the public, all this could be too much to fall upon the shoulders of a single academic, perhaps we can achieve excellence through a collaborative effort.

Udacity has largely perfected the recording of lectures in the conventional format

Let’s think beyond recorded lectures — the current initiatives have already put those online — this is about how to design lectures from the ground up. This is about putting the power of NetFlix behind education:

• Experts of the field would provide guidance on what to be taught
• Course designers come up with ideas for how to best explain the concepts
• Evidence-based approach: focus-groups of learners to test the delivery
• Professional production support for presentation, filming etc.

Lecture-length and lecture-style videos from Big Think

Making Economic Sense

In numerous universities across Australia, the same linear algebra, same biology, same introductory topics are taught over and over in various entry level course units. It goes naturally that some courses are better organised than others, some lecturers are more entertaining than others. Wouldn’t it be great if every student could learn from the very best?

If we had a “Floating University” for these entry units, a “National Courseware Infrastructure”, we could pool all the resources together at the national level to produce much more compelling teaching materials.

Professional stage support at Slush 2017

Production is costly. But it’s even possible to pool resources across borders: Australian Algebra is the same as New Zealand Algebra. This kind of pan-national initiatives can be a solution for the “Big Giants Riddle”, namely how can startups in small nations, mostly playing on KickStarter levels, compete with large multinational behemoths like Amazon or Google.

Flexible Course Plan and Variable Tracks

In Finland and Germany, the university programmes are quite different from those in Australia — they are more flexible and self-guided. In Australia we had exactly 4 units every semester with exactly 3 credits each, whereas in Finland and Germany, course units are of varying weights and students mostly follow a self-service model: pick some courses, find learning materials, attend exercises, read a textbook, write some essays, and go to exams — in the end collect enough credits and fulfills the program requirements to get a degree. This could also explain why their model is less costly.

Even in 1991 and earlier, there were setting designs that inspired a sense of wonder.

If we had an open platform for the first year of university, the commitment level can be variable, it’s easier for people to “give a it go” and see if they are prepared to study further. This in turn makes education more accessible. It also allow a “variable track” model where not everyone has to start and finish at the same point but instead according to one’s own pace and preferences.

“Voice out of the ether” style from Khan Academy

We can also have peer-to-peer learning support (run by students, volunteers, philanthropic organisations, commercial suppliers, with some publicly funded infrastructure and spaces), AI-powered guided exercises (AI is already able to grade exercises and provide immediate feedback better than human agents), and round-the-year exams in assessment centres for accreditation.

Applied Epistemology

To go further than recorded lectures we need a new model of knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge, one that comes with modularity and “deep zoom” for levels of detail and and an adaptive dependency graph. We have to develop a package manager for knowledge.

Animations for Crash Course

If each piece of knowledge or key concept can be atomic, it will help get rid of the “learning deadweight” (visiting the same basics over and over again, often inevitable when we go through university courses with artificially delineated units in different disciplines).

Physical Spaces

Now if the whole nation could pool its resources together to deal with the first year, we would be left with more funds for other project: labs, R&D, and not the least, architecture around the university.

If we dissolve the first year of university, that does not mean people should become isolated, rather, with all the extra resources, the university should get people to meet more often, foremost by providing the facilities. As the admin resources are freed up from the repetitive teaching, there would be more funding for organising tutorials, discussions, peer-to-peer study meetings, etc.

Architecture is the primary goods in an economy.