#eisgruber

Princeton's new president, Chris Eisgruber, said that video lectures will never replace lectures on stage:

Eisgruber at @TEDxPrincetonU: Video lectures will never replace "lectures on stages" | http://t.co/AaSg5ej7KS #MOOCs

— Daily Princetonian (@princetonian) November 25, 2013

Meanwhile, Stanford president John Hennessey said that we would move away from lectures and towards more tutoring and collaboration in the classroom.

I like Eisgruber a lot, but I have to side with Hennessey here. I've had fantastic lectures at Princeton, but I've also had terrible lectures, where the majority of students skipped half of the class. To combat this, some professors tried making a "participation grade" and counted attendance in class. I've had lectures so bad that students were willing to take a 5% hit to skip!

One solution is to get better lecturers, but I think the immediately actionable solution is to do more precepts! Princeton has a fantastic precept system, where 20 person classrooms can ask teacher questions, learn from each other and collaborate on homework assignments in class! I've rarely heard complaints about boring precepts.

Consumption of raw knowledge happens more easily at people's own pace - in a book or website. The real question is: how can textbooks need to be improved? I've had plenty of times where I read a proof in a textbook or a professor is teaching an example problem where I get lost - what was that variable again? What does that notation mean?

Bret Victor showed us that programming is more fun with instant feedback, when we can tinker with variables and inspect them at any point in the process. I wonder, in physics and mathematics education, how else can we use instant feedback? Imagine a problem where all the logical steps are explained out. If you don't understand one of them, you can click on a step and expand it - you could keep going down all the way to the theory and get explanations right there.