In the New York Times “Science Times” of 6 December 2011 special section on the “Future of Computing” there is a short, somewhat hyperventilated column by Daphne Koller of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), with the somewhat improbable title of the “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education”1.
An institution which is at least four hundred years older than Koller’s Renaissance dating of its inception, the lecture hall is not likely to be replaced by anything soon. Her historical comparison with the flight of the workforce from the farm to the city, and the subsequent improvement of agricultural production is interesting but ominous. When workers flee the land and jam the cities (China, India, Africa) because that’s where the economy buys their labor, we have problems. Imagine a time when otherwise inexperienced, and half-trained graduates from online colleges flood the education market. Imagine brain-surgeons, or pilots who trained on YouTube videos.
But for today, I’ll stick to one issue: Fault Tolerance. When a lecturer comes to class unprepared and wings it (and who of us hasn’t?) the effect ranges from a brilliant, ad lib lecture to a waste of time, but still one where the student can at least catch a nap, tweet a friend, do the homework for the next class. How is it when the wireless goes down, the internet grinds to a halt, the projector blows a bulb, or the cloud develops sunspots? Nothing! no lesson!
In my own online classes I build in at least two levels of redundancy to guard against inevitable IT failures. And when all of them fail, at least there’s still a whiteboard in the corner of the room with time-dimmed markers. When the Learning Management System breaks in a distance course, there remains Elluminate, Skype, email, the telephone. I can do this because I have 50 years of experience
lecturing as well as wrangling balky IT for the past 30 years. But once “content providers” replace professors, and Google PageRank trumps the authority of literature searches, there’ll be a nostalgia
for the lecture hall of the past.
As for the Death of God, for the Death of Lectures (no comparison intended) the bells tolls too soon.