My thoughts on iTunes U: It will help, but the problem in education is institutions

Making lectures (and supporting materials) widely available is good, but the idea that learning is some sort of procedure done to the student by the educator is flawed; learning is something that the student makes happen, by practicing the materials.

Walter Lewin does make physics fun to watch, but watching Lewin’s lectures won’t make anyone a physicist. Solving Lewin’s problem sets will. (Lewin may motivate people into doing the work necessary to become a physicist — and that’s a great contribution right there —but without slogging through the math no one becomes a physicist.) MIT’s rule of thumb is that learning is 1% lecture, 9% self study, 90% solving the problem sets.

Putting the lectures online — possibly in a mix of text, occasional talking head, interactive content, and links to references — is a good idea; instead of using the class time for them, we can use the class time for problem solving and discussion. This, of course is a major change to how education is practiced, so I expect most classes will continue almost unchanged.

Addendum: Some time ago I saw some new “smart classrooms” which were to be used for exec-ed; these classrooms had hundreds of thousands of dollars of presentation equipment and cheap, uncomfortable chairs. That’s upside-down: students’ discomfort will make a much bigger negative dent on their learning experience (and these are middle-aged students with the ailments that entails) than the minor positive of the high-resolution projectors and other machinery. Hey, I understand that the money might have been earmarked for technology, but chairs are technology too.