U. explores interactive learning

The University is looking into creating an online platform that will allow for interactive learning, Deputy Dean of the College Clayton Marsh said at the Council of the Princeton University Community meeting on Monday. The platform would change learning on campus while offering course materials to a much broader audience beyond the University.

Marsh said he is currently in close conversation with faculty members from different departments about an interactive online learning program. While he declined to name specific departments, he said they included two departments in engineering, several in the social sciences and one in the languages.

President Shirley Tilghman said she and other administrators are very interested in initiatives to expand interactive learning, citing the successes of such programs at Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. She noted, though, that many of these courses were “technically oriented” and therefore they might uniquely “lend themselves to this kind of approach.”

“Maybe a challenge that Princeton is in a better position to address is: ‘Are there ways of making this technology useful in the social sciences?’ ” she said.

In the fall, Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and Tilghman asked Marsh and Dean of the College Valerie Smith to begin generating a conversation with faculty members regarding an online learning initiative. According to Eisgruber, work done by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng served as a catalyst. The two professors developed an online teaching model and founded a start-up company called Coursera in fall 2011. Today, the company offers courses to over 250,000 people in 172 countries.

While Coursera’s approach is global, Eisgruber said its success also shed light on ways to improve teaching on campus.

“Members of the senior [administration] and some faculty members had already been considering whether we could find ways to enhance learning in large classrooms,” Eisgruber said in an email. “So the timing of the Stanford venture was excellent.”

At the CPUC meeting, Marsh explained how Coursera’s software works and attributed the success of the program to a process he termed “flipping the lecture.” In this model, the professor would record the lecture material and then break it up with interactive exercises every four to five minutes to test retention of material before moving on.

Between lectures, the instructors could see in which sections students had the most difficulty. When classes reconvened, they would focus on particularly problematic parts of the lecture.

Marsh said the Stanford instructors found that students were more engaged with these online materials and came to class better prepared. This allowed for more creative use of class time. Marsh said Ng even taught two versions of the same course, one for which students had taken a prerequisite and one which caught them up using online material. He found that the groups of students performed equally well.

After meeting with Eisgruber, Marsh and Smith then formed several ad hoc focus groups, bringing together faculty members to gauge interest and readiness for the Internet platform in the academic community. This past winter, Koller and Ng were invited to campus to meet with interested faculty members.

In an interview after the meeting, Marsh said that the idea generated “tremendous buzz” among educators on campus. He has since discussed the issue at a meeting of faculty chairs, met with the Faculty Committee on the Library and Computing and held many one-on-one conversations with specific faculty members.

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Marsh noted that while this would be effective in teaching on campus, instructors he spoke with were particularly interested in the ability of their material to reach beyond the University.

“We recognize that faculty are incented by the idea that their courses could reach a much larger audience,” Marsh said after the meeting. “They can put these online materials on the web for the whole world to work through. This will lead them to experiment with new approaches,” he explained.

Though Marsh recognized that the education system at the University involves much more than just lectures, he expressed his belief that having material accessible online would be a positive addition.

“These online materials standing alone are still far better than nothing for many people who don’t have the benefit of studying and coming to a campus like Princeton,” he explained.

Exact methods for implementing an online interactive learning tool are still under consideration. A call for proposals about electronic resources will go out in the late spring or summer. Marsh stated that his office is actively looking for the best platforms now, citing MITx, Coursera and Udacity as potential models.

He also said the University was considering using the 250th Anniversary Fund, a fund for "innovation in undergraduate education," according to its website, to support the online initiative.

“We hope this summer we’ll be trying some interesting things to be rolled out this fall. It’s a very exciting time, and we’ll see how this goes,” he said. “It could be wonderful in certain contexts and not in others. Clearly this is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Marsh added that he is aware of the limitations of online learning.

“This is an important priority for our office, to the extent that this technology can be used to enhance what we do on this campus,” Marsh said. “We don’t want online lecture materials to replace student-faculty interaction. We don’t want this to be an outsourcing sort of force on our campus.”

Used properly, Marsh said, online materials could have numerous benefits.

“It can ease barriers to entry, even be available for students to preview in the summer,” he said. “These will serve almost like course trailers, for people to be comfortable with the course in advance.”

Marsh added in the interview that representatives from Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Carnegie Mellon will be on campus next week to conduct an external review of how the University supports the use of academic technology. He said he hopes this survey, which will look at everything from the use of Blackboard to i>clickers to Piazza, will help the office think in fresh ways.

“They will do sort of a 360 to think about how we’re resourcing this, how we’re set up and how we’re organized,” he said. “Hopefully that will produce important recommendations.”

In addition, Eisgruber has met with USG leadership to get a sense of which tools students would find most helpful. Currently, students have access to resources such as Piazza and lecture videos posted online.

Megan Wellons ’15 said she watches videos of Adrian Banner, a lecturer in the mathematics department, whose review sessions for certain classes from 2006 to 2008 are available online. Links to them can be found on the Undergraduate Engineering Council’s website.

Though she said she learns better in person and has issues with the video player, Wellons said the lectures provided a good opportunity for review. “It’s nice that you can use it whenever. You don’t have to go somewhere at a specific time.”

Eisgruber said he understands that there will be such issues with an online learning system.

“We’re going to have to experiment, and sometimes reverse course, to make sure that we improve teaching and avoid mistakes that lead to disengagement,” he said. “The only sure thing is that nobody can predict with any confidence where we’ll be 10 years from now: This is a field where the technology and the culture shift very rapidly.”