Hybrid Education 2.0

What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing?

According
to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no "what if"
about it. Earlier in the decade, Carnegie Mellon set out to design
software for independent learners taking courses through the
university’s Open Learning Initiative, an effort to make courses freely
available to non-enrolled learners. But rather than merely making
course materials available to non-students, like MIT's famous
OpenCourseware project, Carnegie Mellon wanted to design courses that
would respond to the individual needs of each student. It currently has courses in 12 different subjects available on its Web site, mostly in math and science.

In the process of testing the software on Carnegie Mellon students
to make sure it would “do no harm” if used, the researchers found that,
over a two-semester trial period, students in a traditional classroom
introductory statistics course scored no better than similar students
who used the open-learning program and skipped the three weekly
lectures and lab period. . . .

As intriguing it was to find that a computer program could prepare
students to pass tests just as well as a professor, the researchers
seem more excited by a hybrid application of the open-learning program
that, instead of replacing professors, tries to use them more
effectively. By combining the open-learning software with two weekly
50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they
found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material
in half the time.

So what exactly is the pedagogical model Carnegie Mellon has
discovered, that has inspired such faith? Essentially, it’s an online
program that teaches students itself, rather than just being the medium
a professor uses to teach. Furthermore, it leverages the opportunity to
interact directly with a unique student — an opportunity a professor
addressing dozens of students in a lecture hall does not have. . . .

In other words, the software acts like a private tutor, quizzing
students constantly as they work through linear lessons and adjusting
in accordance with how quickly they show they are grasping different
concepts. . . .

The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically
dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face
component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the
software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what
concepts could bear reinforcement. For example, if a statistics
professor notices in the data he receives from activity in the
open-learning program that a great number of students struggled with
the assessments the program gave while teaching conditional
probability, the professor could use the class periods to hold a
discussion with his students about that concept until he is confident
they get it — a preferable alternative, Thille says, to rolling
through concepts didactically and hoping they stick.

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