The future of education: more opportunities, less communication?
Ziv Katzir, a Y-DATA lecturer at Adversarial Learning course and a PHD student at BGU on why coffee breaks are no less important than the actual classes.
Ziv Katzir spent most of his adult life working for Verint Systems` Cyber Intelligence division, (which recently completed an IPO and is now listed in NASDAQ as “Cognyte”). He started there as a programmer, ended up becoming CTO of the cyber intelligence division, and held this position for approximately four years. At the end of 2017 he decided to take a break and pursue his PhD. Two years later he came across an opportunity to lecture at Y-Data. But just as he started, the pandemic hit, and he had to move from lecturing in class to nailing the skill of Zoom presentations. As it saved students’ time, the lecturers’ preparation process became more difficult and demanding.
“The lecture should be as complete as possible,” says Ziv about his new teaching experience. “The presentations have to be structured differently, they need to be more interactive and gradual, as you can’t simply hop and skip with learning. Gradual nature of the presentations helps people follow you. They also have to be a lot more graphical. For instance, I prefer a white board, a set of markers and a laser point, and it took some time for me to realize I actually need a tablet instead. All the physical assistance tools need to be replaced. I have to mimic the whole process in a digital way as well as illustrate things visually. At the same time, it’s more difficult to pay attention to everyone, I need to be more focused on the signals I get from the students. This means I have to be as fluent as possible when it comes to the slide order, for instance, as I can’t focus on the presentation itself.”
Even though it’s the third time Ziv is lecturing this particular course this year, he finds himself practicing more than before, to make sure he can push the lecture to a somewhat lower energy level to be more attentive to the class. For him it is all about connecting with people, the interactions he can have with them, and Zoom for sure diminishes that to a minimum. It’s much harder for a teacher to track the involvement of his students into the process, to see who’s there and who’s not, while in a real class just one look into their eyes says it all. The regular pauses for questions which are beneficial in a classroom won’t help much on Zoom since it can be increasingly difficult to make sure that everyone on the call is equally synchronized. Yet, there are some benefits of online lecturing that Ziv pays attention to:
“Lab classes are much better now. Back in the classroom days everyone had their own classroom monitor, and when someone had an answer or proposition, we had to bring their screen to the forefront whilst sharing all the other screens. Zoom gives you that and it’s less complicated. When you combine it with things like Google Collab or Jupiter everything gets in its right place all of a sudden. I can share information from my own laptop, which dramatically improves the process.”
When we talked about the future of education in general, it was hard to reach one common denominator. On the one hand, Ziv finds the modern digital revolution exciting and fascinating. It allows the same content to be delivered to many people at once, but at the same time such approach doesn’t trigger interest or promote curiosity, it becomes more of a broadcast, a unidirectional kind of teaching. Still the accessibility of online courses made a lot of people doubt a traditional way of studying, and inspired them to go above the usual education perspectives.
“The main positive aspect of the Covid crisis, to some extent, is the fact that the educational systems around the world have started changing. Think of it this way: if the physical classroom doesn’t play a role anymore, why would I go to a university in my own country? Why wouldn’t I apply for the best university for whatever it is I want to study? This creates a whole new set of opportunities, doesn’t it? This is what we have to think about on the macro scale. Digital and online learning is a welcome change, and we need to focus on making it better.”
When it comes to the micro level of learning, one can not underestimate the importance of the community. Professional network is crucial in many different places, in Israel in particular. Attending classes in person is an essential part of learning about the proper opportunities, meeting people from different disciplines, participating in discussions and coming up with new ideas. Zoom takes that away from people, so it forces us to schedule a monthly get-around with a lecturer or use other platforms to fill this social gap the online learning creates. As social creatures, human beings need each other. Getting to know people better, learning something about their personal life, what their interests are and what they may have in common with one another is an inevitable part of building a network. When you bond with somebody, you’re able to help them and get help when needed.
“One of the best things a person can acquire attending programs such as Y-Data is their professional network. Such programs are a way to establish one. All the chit-chat and the coffee break conversations are as important as the educational part itself and the knowledge that one acquires. We are seeing people from the previous years and people from the Yandex community come into the program, and the interaction between all these people on the global scale is one of the major strengths of the program for sure. This is where Zoom and the programs alike definitely fall short,” Ziv concludes.
Coming back to frontal classes won’t be easy and quick, Covid is not yet defeated and for many students switching from offline to online might seem challenging. Ziv thinks that going back to a classroom is like restoring your membership in a gym:
“No one likes going to the gym, but you always feel great after a training session, right? It’s going to be difficult to bring people to a real-life meeting, since that involves getting them out of their established comfort zone, which became quite strong during the pandemic. At the end of the day, they will feel excited and energetic after the meeting, no doubt about that.”
Despite all the difficulties caused by the pandemic, Ziv truly enjoys his experience with Y-DATA. Above all he highlights the true commitment of the students, the essential support of teaching assistants and the well-thought structure of the program.
“The program is pretty difficult, make no mistake about it. Students have to maintain their day jobs, full-time in many cases, and they’ve got like two or three courses a semester, with homework for all of them every week. Yet it is still very balanced. It takes a considerable amount of time to make a data scientist out of a programmer, and I think Y-Data is great in this regard. It promotes gradual learning, since it progresses from the very easy stuff to the advanced parts. You’re learning NLP, time series, adversarial ML, all of which are advanced elements of data science.”
Ziv was born to teach — he is calm, patient, punctual, attentive to others, he clings to the little things that matter, doesn’t lack a sense of humor, and has an internal passion for guiding, instructing and just talking to people. He compares his lecturing experience to parenthood: teacher is the one who knows, the one people turn to for knowledge, the one they listen to and consult with. What he likes the most is when students make him think about things he maybe didn’t see, or ask questions that can challenge him, the ones that require some time to answer. According to his own experience, the most important thing one needs to become a good teacher is simply to love teaching. Having that, all other problems are probably going to solve themselves in time.
“If you want your students to understand what you are trying to teach them, you have to be mindful, observant and attentive to their responses. In many cases things I thought to be simple took a long time to understand, and vice versa — things that were harder to explain instantly clicked in class. You also need to be creative in a way you approach things. We move from a physical classroom to the online setting, what do you do? Your first class consists of predominantly master students, while the second — of bachelors, how do you approach this? You might have a class with a huge knowledge gap between some groups of students. How would you deal with that? You need to be creative to adjust the material you’re teaching to the class in your care. Regarding my specific course, I truly believe that one needs to conduct simple experiments and be playful with data. If you have a massive, complicated concept in mind, you need to break it down and do something simple, as simple as playing a game. Through such simple games I personally get a much better understanding of what deep neural networks are and what really happens under the hood, for instance. I share those games with my students, and as time flies, they ask for more. This is what I do, the things I bring to my classes. I always recommend thinking of the simple things. How can I prove my hypothesis by doing the simplest thing possible? Failed or not, when your experimental setup is simple, there are very few explanations you can come up with. When your experiment is overly complicated, encompassing many steps and pre-conditions, understanding the results can take a year. Chances are you won’t understand the result at all. You want to be able to move forward, and these baby steps I support help you with that.”
