danielford

This is a good article, but it only touches on the main issue with learning styles. Multiple independent groups of educational psychologists (if I remember correctly it was three) reviewed all the articles they could find on learning styles. They found that the majority of the studies had poor experimental design, since they were missing proper control groups. Of the remaining studies there were more examples of negative results for learning styles than positive results. This was pretty damning, given the publication bias for positive results in academic research. The article links to one of these reviews, but here is another one: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....

I teach science, and it's frustrating that nearly all of my students can tell me their learning style. Their previous teachers have taught them about learning styles as a way to improve their studying, and they've jumped on that information. But the literature indicates that matching instruction to a learning style doesn't improve learning. This is a total waste because we're effectively giving students a magic talisman to help them learn science, because once students find out it's wrong they'll be less likely to take our advice on studying, and because the time we waste on it could be spent on telling people about real things that actually improve learning.

They choose the topic. I'm fine with anything in biology, medicine, chemistry, and even some social science topics. Some of them run into trouble and others don't depending on what they choose.

I've considered removing the assignment a few times, but there's no skill more essential to success in science than the ability to synthesize different research articles into a coherent whole. I wouldn't feel like I was doing my job if I stopped assigning it.

Community colleges like the one I work at can't afford the journal fees. One of my assignments involves reading several peer-reviewed articles on a narrow topic and writing an explanation of the research. Every semester I have students that struggle with finishing this assignment because the articles they need are inaccessible.

I teach community college biology, and I agree that we're really bad at teaching critical thinking. But the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) cited by this article was graded by a computer last time I checked. Here's a direct quote from one of their papers a few years ago:

"Beginning in fall 2010, we moved to automated scoring exclusively, using Pearson’s Intelligent Essay Assess or (IEA). IEA is the automated scoring engine developed by Pearson Knowledge Technologies to evaluate the meaning of text, not just writing mechanics. Pearson has trained IEA for the CLA using real CLA responses and scores to ensure its consistency with scores generated by human raters."

Link below: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/06/06/cla/cla.pdf

Most of you are more knowledgeable about technology than I am. So I'll leave it to you to decide if using an algorithm to grade an essay-based exam of critical thinking is a valid approach to this problem.

I teach biology at a community college and most of the services listed in that article wouldn't improve my courses. I've already switched three of my four courses over to open textbooks, which students can download for free or purchase for the cost of printing. I use Openstax for these.

https://openstax.org/subjects

For the online learning software, I've also dumped the publisher products and switched to the free spaced-repetition software Memrise.

I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market.

> We didn't know how to talk or study or dress or think the way our peers did. It took me years to learn.

Please tell me everything about this. I teach at a community college and my students come from the middle class, the working class, and the place I can't see.

Yes that's wrong, but the paper that corrected this misconception wasn't published until January of 2016. I think you should give them at least a year to update before unleashing the disapproving scowl.

Here's a news article about this and how to avoid it if you ever have to go on a program like the Daily Show.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-23/don-t-eve...

The most disappointing YC-backed product I tried was Stypi.

I teach community college and sometimes I wonder about the thought processes behind some of my students' papers. Paul Graham linked an essay he wrote in Stypi, where you could watch him write it in real time. This was clearly the greatest computer-assisted tool for teaching writing ever, and I immediately incorporated Stypi into one of my writing assignments. I wanted to know how much my students proofread, how they structured essays, and what they struggled with as they wrote. I was so excited about it that I wrote the entire assignment in Stypi and linked my students to the replay in case they were interested.

It was a disaster. So many students lost essays in browser crashes or were flat out unable to use the software. I ultimately had to apologize to my class, give everyone an extension, and cut Stypi out of the project.

Apparently they were acquired though, so I guess they made someone happy.

When I was a kid I put water wings on my ankles so I could walk on the water like Jesus. I fell over within 0.5 seconds of entering the pool and they held me upside down with my feet sticking out. I remember thinking I was going to die right up until my Mom jumped in and saved me.

I teach at a community college, and as it was explained to me by our financial aid office, student aid isn't paid out until a few weeks in as a mechanism to prevent financial aid fraud. Every year people sign up for classes, collecting their financial aid money, and then never show up. Community colleges are the primary target for this type of fraud, since we have open admissions.

The federal government is not okay with this, so they instituted a system of mandatory reporting where we have to keep track of whether or not a student shows up during the first few weeks. That way they know who not to send aid to when that time is up. If we fail to properly report this then the college is expected to send money to the federal government to make up the difference.

So it's not a trick on our part to get you to use the campus bookstore. I personally encourage my students not to use the bookstore, since I think marking up the prices on textbooks is inappropriate. I've also pushed hard for the adoption of open textbooks in my department, but it looks like that's going to be at least two years away.

Here's a link to either the study you're looking for, or a similar one: http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/139295/1/2002%20NASSP%2...

I teach and that more or less sums up my current view on the subject. Academic departments and journals of education produce a large amount of crap that later turns out to be poorly researched. This results in nonsense educational fads like learning styles, when there is no good evidence for them:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.p...

I'm in agreement with Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, that the college education major should be abolished. Instead students who aspire to be teachers should get a degree in any other field, and take a few courses on classroom management.

Thanks for the link to that review article, I'm definitely going to be reading it. However, I disagree that summarization isn't a valid form of practice testing.

I've seen the sort of summarization described in the original post used as a form of practice testing. For example, a similar method (5 minutes reading, 10 minutes writing a summary, followed by 5 minutes re-reading, and another 10 minutes of summarization) showed very good results in this article.

http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/journal/karpicke-sci11a....

I second this. I went to a very forgiving graduate school (at least two chances on each part of the process), and a lot of people still didn't make it past the first couple years.

I also disagree with the author's point that a Ph.D. is about changing the world. My seven years of hard work culminated in a thesis that had a negligible impact on the universe. Many of my friends justifiably felt the same way. I set out with the intention of making the world a better place, but reality had other ideas. It's hard to see how spending those seven years at a startup company could have been worse in that respect.

I've played a few of these games, and I also think it's an issue with the core mechanics. Each match can be around forty-five minutes long. So it's really easy to dig a hole for yourself and spend a lot of the game getting repeatedly beat down. Then add in the high learning curve, and small teams. This means that a single player who's learning the game or trying out a new strategy can potentially cause his entire team to lose.

If you intentionally set out to design a game that turned all your players into assholes you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better system.

These simulations are wonderful. I'll be showing some of them to my microbiology class later this semester when I discuss vaccines.

I wish there was a simulation for ring vaccination though. It would be a nice visual aid for explaining how smallpox was eradicated.

One reason for new buildings on college campuses is that donors and the government are much more willing to give funds for that purpose than they are for salaries and benefits, which make up the bulk of most college budgets. So, I understand your frustration if you're angry about tuition rising while your college is erecting a new building every three years, but those are usually two separate piles of money, and there's not much your college can do to change that.

That said, I still flinch every time I hear about a new building on our campus. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the perception that colleges are living large while tuition rates climb, and I feel we should be more conspicuously frugal to combat it.

I teach college biology, and I've never seen a textbook in my discipline that wasn't written in a soporific and meandering style. Some are worse than others, but I've never seen a textbook I thought was good.

If I needed to fill a gap in my knowledge or learn a new subject I would never resort to a textbook until I had exhausted every other available option.

The most memorable part of the movie for me was when the interviewer asked Jiro what it takes to be a master of your craft. He started off mumbling standard old-man stuff about hard work, and then he mentioned something I've never heard before, that you should never complain about your job.

I was thinking about this in the context of my teaching. In general teachers complain about their students three times as much as students complain about their teachers. Here's an example, take a look at the Chronicle of Higher Education's forum on teaching:

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?board=25.0

The overwhelming majority of the activity there consists of complaints about students, with "the thread of teaching despair" currently at 447 pages. There are even entire websites devoted to the practice, like College Misery.

It's not like I've never vented about my job, but I've also always been a bit uneasy with the practice. After reflecting a bit, I think it's because time focused on what other people are doing wrong isn't spent figuring out what you should be doing right.

So as an experiment I'm going to force myself not to complain about any aspect of my job during the coming semester. If I'm happier and better at my craft by the end I'll adopt it as a long-term practice.

Not an option. Moving my teaching materials to other programs would be a mountain of work at this point, but in five years it will be exponentially worse.

PowerPoint is the main issue. I've made a lot of animations for my courses that I'll have to remake from scratch if I switch programs.

PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote are more important to my job (I teach) than any other program. But none of those features will improve my work, and the impending subscription service makes me want to look at other options.

I'd be interested in seeing recommendations for alternatives.

I sent Greenspun's article to one of my students last semester, after he expressed an interest in academic research. He reported that the article was incredibly discouraging, and he shifted his career plans back to medicine.

Pointing out the landmine in his career path was my most rewarding moment as a teacher in the last two years. I'm relieved that he won't waste seven years getting a Ph.D. like I did.

I agree this won't revolutionize research, but I also think it will work really well as a funding model for certain types of researchers.

The first are researchers at small liberal arts colleges. While these institutions specialize in teaching, their faculty are often pressured to publish, but not given a lot of funding or time to write grants. If I were teaching at a small liberal arts college, I'd seriously consider this as an alternate funding model.

The second group consists of people who do research that is really interesting to a small subset of individuals, but not particularly well funded. My lab in graduate school specialized in aging research. While I was there the funding situation was brutal, and somewhere around ninety percent of the grants in our area were being rejected. There's no way a project like Microryza could have covered the costs of the entire lab, but a direct appeal to the singularity-crowd might have brought in enough to help keep things working smoothly while times were tough.

The last college I taught at had a similar set-up for Introductory Biology with McGraw Hill's Connect software. I was very unhappy about the cost to the students, but felt obligated to make it worth points, since students who were forced to use its adaptive learning system in previous years performed better than those who weren't.

I really wish there was a free or open-source adaptive learning system for biology courses, in the same way that the Khan Academy has one for learning math.

I couldn't find enough information to figure that out. I started by looking for Calleja's articles on PubMed, but nothing popped up. Eventually I found his LinkedIn profile, but all it had was the link to his company:

http://www.fermentalg.com/

The parts of that website that aren't in french were useless for figuring out how it works. To speculate based on my incredibly limited information, it looks like he might have some GFP-transgenic algae that fluoresce when the light inside the apparatus hits them. This means his setup isn't necessarily carbon-neutral since you still need electricity to power the lamp. Assuming I'm right it may also be way more expensive than it looks. I remember the bulbs for fluorescent microscopes were one or two hundred dollars back when I was in graduate school, and the one they're using is way bigger.

The stuff about algae consuming carbon dioxide is true. They're photoautotrophs. But I'm not sure what the advantage of this is over just putting giants vats of algae everywhere, or letting them do their business in the ocean.

I've been surprised by the lack of technical ability in my college classes, especially from students that are my age or younger. This semester, a student told me she couldn't find a program to write a short assignment. I sent her a link to OpenOffice and was baffled by how excited she was about it. She informed me that she was writing papers nonstop, just because she was happy to finally have a tool that let her do it. And this wasn't a dumb person either. Last week she was half a point away from a perfect score on an exam that would have ruined my semester back when I was in college.