Another lemma lay slain at her feet, another book was conquered. Knowledge flowed into her from the slain beasts and knowledge made her stronger. She was ready for the tests, and defeating them, advanced levels. She was not quite at the end yet, and she had made some mistakes, had died a few times, but her pace was still good. She was running at the front of the pack and her eyes blazed with determination, the aura of her competence visible from afar.
I make no secret of drawing some inspiration from the system of advancement in some games for some of these ideas, but I think this is as much because it plays directly on human psychology as for any other reason. So, then, the title is fairly self-explanatory. I am rather deeply dissatisfied with the current system – I am aware it works well for some, but for others, including myself and some of my acquaintances, it certainly does not. It gets the job done, just barely, but a complete overhaul could do it vastly better.
In essence, what I want is complete flexibility. An ability to decide everything, with the university serving to merely assess the quality of your decisions. As you might guess, lectures are terribly inflexible creatures, as such they are the first to go. Seminars should follow except in cases where they are absolutely vital to assessment or learning, which I do not think is the case particularly often. Set exam dates and course lengths are also particularly pernicious and should be expelled post haste. With all those gone, I also don't particularly see the need for the distinction of full time versus part time students, or for full-fledged enrolment or tight location restrictions.
You might be scratching your head wondering what exactly I'm actually leaving in at this point. Well, not much, I'll admit, the format I desire is rather different from most things around. Perhaps it is most similar to some of the standardised tests, such as the SAT. In essence, each student would sign up with a university for a nominal fee, and from then on would have only recommendations, not demands.
The university's primary role would be to offer an extremely extensive list of exams – one corresponding to a logical size of course. Some might cover the full material of a course as it stands right now, others might cover some fraction of that, others yet may be on even narrower topics. The exact logical scope of the content on each exam could be reasonably determined by choosing tight groups of knowledge, as mentioned in the previous post, and perhaps ensuring they are not too small to prevent the student from having to write too many or from getting by with information only stored in the short-term memory. Each student would then be free to come in to the university facility and write any exam at any time. The exam would be randomly generated from a large list of, say, several hundred questions on the covered topics for each individual student. That way even if the questions were publically available at all times, learning enough of them to have questions with which you are familiar appear on the examination would be exceedingly unlikely unless the topics of the exam were extensively studied anyway.
Scores would be assigned for the examination as normal, and would count towards the student's cumulative grade point average weighed by the size of the examination, much as is commonly done now. I would suggest, although this is unessential, that exams could be retaken endlessly, but with some small, and gradually increasing, penalty for each attempt in order to compensate for the increasing probabilities of luck. The university would charge some amount of money to cover the facility, monitoring, and scoring costs for each attempt. While this would encourage an extremely literal form of studying to the test, that is not actually an issue if the tests are constructed to be sufficiently comprehensive.
This of course brings up the question of what exactly students would study. Each exam would come with recommendations on appropriate materials from the university, and with samples. Discussion groups could also be made available for free, and professors or advanced students could act as tutors or could answer question for some appropriate fees. Some pre-recorded lectures could also be made available, much as they are often available presently, if deemed necessary.
To have this system be fully compatible with the current system, the attainment of some majors could occur upon the successful completion of a certain set of exams, while honours ranks could be awarded for the achievement of sufficiently high scores on this set. A university might then award an undergraduate degree upon the completion of a sufficient number of exams (weighed by size, of course).
I'll concede this leaves, the issue of special course types. Courses with labs could be pared down to labs and coursework being performed separately, with the labs having to be scheduled for some restricted periods of the year. Courses with an emphasis on discussion need to be carefully considered – what role does the discussion serve? I believe that it could be in most cases be restated as a requirement of papers to be graded (to be treated in much the same way as exams), with perhaps a smaller discussion component, which could perhaps partially be migrated to an online forum. Regardless, such courses in my experience, are vastly in the minority and workarounds which maximise freedom could be found even for them. For such programs as graduate education and postdoctoral studies, which require research more than course attendance, the course component could be streamlined along this system while research would be done as normal in institutions actually dedicated to it.
So with the outline done, what does such a system actually accomplish? Never one to be modest, I will say that it makes everything better. Hours and attendance rate become fully flexible, so anyone of any age and occupation may choose to engage in certified education, and have some results to show for it. It allows you to demonstrate any knowledge that you may have acquired through independent study and to do so cheaply. If you learned a natural or programming language on your own you would have an easy way to show that. If you learned large swathes of evolutionary biology or of political science, you could show that too. If you're a history buff, you could perhaps pick up a history major on the cheap. More than that, however, if you are in fact just entering university from high school and wish to learn something in preparation for work, you can do so very quickly. It is entirely conceivable to compress the standard four years of university into a half year for a sufficiently talented and determined individual. Indeed, a new meaningful metric could be added – perhaps GPA per month, providing an alternate, and I would argue potentially superior, metric for someone's capacity to learn. Anyone could take the four years they do now, but someone who wishes to complete her mandatory education all at once would be able to do that as well. It is not uncommon even presently for students to miss a lot of lectures and learn most of a course before the examination, and this system would render such behaviour meaningless and educationally neutral.
On the institutional side, undergraduate education would be much more cost efficient and affordable. Students could engage in it part time while working without the need to save up for long periods of time. Professors would be in a delicate position, however. On the one hand, many would be out of a job, on the other, those who are actually fully dedicated to research would have all the same money allotted to them and more, and would be able to engage in research full time. Indeed, teaching and research have always been something of an odd couple and separating the two may prove advantageous.
The current state of universities seems primarily influenced by their nature at inception, with only a very minimal amount of evolution having taken place since then. While this state may have some merit for certain people, it is certainly not for everyone, and their purpose, goals, and nature need to be rethought from the ground up. The option I seek is the path of maximum freedom and cleanest execution, letting students make their own choices and aim for their own goals, unfettered.
I have had similar thoughts about how education could be run more flexibly. The only consideration I would add is a system to encourage students to teach each other, not entirely unlike student tutors, but more widespread. Concievably you could even turn this into free-to-learn system by modeling it off of certain free-to-play games.
ReplyDeleteSuppose students paid not in one chunk, but for what they used. Universities could sell a form of university currency to students. Taking a test might cost 30 'Coins' for instance, but students could also earn these 'Coins' by doing things to further the education of their peers. A student who has passed a level four test could be qualified to offer tutoring to someone studying for a level one test of the same topic. The student being tutored might pay them one 'Coin' for the service and, if they pass, the option of having the school credit the tutor with an additional 'Coin' at no expense, making their efforts worth twice as much for doing a good job. Students might also be granted a coin for grading tests they have already passed.
Teachers could still offer classes or tutor, but set a coin charge for attending. Since students pay at each instance of doing something at the school they will be less likely to try and BS their way through a test or sleep through a boring lecture. Indeed, the teachers who students did not consider worth their time would quickly find their pay cut if part of it was based on how many coins students invested in them. The ultimate form of a student evaluation.
In summary: This flexibility would allow students to chose how they want to learn. They could self teach at the cost of a suggested book and the test, or for slightly more, compliment this by seeking help from a tutor, or for slightly more listen to the ramblings of a well educated professional who would ramble better (because his paycheck is on the line) and be listened to more (because nobody is going to pay at the door to sleep through the production). It also would allow students who are tight on cash to make up for that in a way that supliments the education of others.
On the whole, that's a pretty good addition. The only real problem I see is that by bringing lectures and professors back in you likely retattach the whole thing to some sort of schedule, since you can't have every lecture running all the time (unless it's recorded which brings it back to my original plan). I also don't see much of a point to having lectures at all with all the alternatives in place. Still, I could be in error and lectures could indeed be absolutely required for some students to do well or something. So perhaps lectures would be run if there were enough demand for them to actually make them pay for themselves, keeping in mind the fairly high cost of lecture room space.
ReplyDeleteHaving students able to grade exams and the like also sounds like a good idea. It would probably be nice to have two additional things, however: the grading should be easy to contest, and the right to provide this service should probably be reserved to those who scored fairly highly on their own examination (say, over eighty per cent or thereabouts). That way the grading should be of a higher quality, and the system might even provide a slight additional incentive for students to do well.
Also, as a slight modification, I don't particularly see any need for an alternate currency. Just running the system with real money instead of coins should be fine and would allow graduating students to have some minor thing to do if they can't find a job. Keeping real world money would also reinforce students' understanding of the actual costs of each action and avoid scenarios where they might purchase more coins than they can use or where they might attend some lecture just because they had some left over. It would also help keep transfers between universities and whatnot easier. But this is a minor concern, of course.
The reason for the tokens was two fold.
ReplyDelete1. It allows for a very simple transfer as apposed to continually having to write a check or have cash on hand. For the school, it's much less of a nightmare financially because students could buy a large quantity of tokens at once. There's simply less to process. The school already has its money, from there it's just a matter of letting the tokens filter through the system to be sold again.
2. Since students are gaining these in exchange for tutoring, if they use real currency instead of tokens the process is no longer just an internalized school system and becomes a taxable income. Knowing the government, they'd stupidly tax it and then give it back which is completely unnecessary and inefficient.
The transfering between universities issue is a point I hadn't considered. It's probably asking too much to expect all unviersities to have an identical token system, but if they all used one there could be an exchange rate. I suppose worst case the college could allow students to sell them back to the school at some predetermined fraction of their cost.
I don't see any reason why lectures need to be on a scheduled basis. Suppose a professor put up an overview of various lectures he's willing to give for some amount of tokens. Arbitrarily for the example let's call it 200 tokens. Obviously, one student wouldn't want to spend 200 tokens to prepare for a test that only costs him 30 to take, but if 25 got together the lecture series would only cost them 8 each. Since there is no specific schedule this class could easy be run in a week or two. Free tutoring from the professor during the time of the lecture might be included, depending on what sort of a deal the students work out.
I'm not entirely sure how well it would work without a test run, but I hesitate to cut out lectures without seeing how well they hold up in the system. People tend to learn differently, so more options lends to more versitility.
As for the grading, yes, I imagine students who score better would be given first chance to do grading or tutoring.