A student at the University of Manitoba describes a lecture there.
… The majority of laptops went from PowerPoint notes to anything but PowerPoint notes. Facebook.com profiles, Yahoo.com email accounts, music playlists, blogs, JUMP accounts — the list goes on.
My friend even searched Google images so she could show me how much the biology professor resembled a Bill Nye the Science Guy/Pringles mascot hybrid…
I began to wonder why so many people were so disengaged… Is it because all the notes are readily available on a student’s ANGEL account? Were the students uninterested because the teacher couldn’t possibly have made a connection with all [250] of them? And if the teacher can’t see you goofing off then you may as well goof off, right?…
October 6th, 2010 at 10:23AM
and then the question arises: why do they attend class at all?
October 6th, 2010 at 10:55AM
@ Tenured Radical:
First, so they can honestly say they attended x percent of classes and earned their baccalaureates. (If anything, exploiting students’ delusions is common in higher education.) And second, (pardon the aged colloquialism) it’s to get their meal tickets punched.
October 6th, 2010 at 11:16AM
How much money is really saved by these huge 250-person classes? A little back-of-the envelope analysis:
If we put the fully loaded cost of an instructor at $200K/yr (probably high, given the percentage of starving adjuncts, etc) and (s)he teaches 10 classes a year, then the total instructional cost per class is $20K **if** we allocate the total cost of the instructor to teaching. (Not reasonable if (s)he is also doing research, especially funded research.) Under these assumptions:
–If there are 250 students in the class, the cost per student is $80
–If there are 50 students in the class, the cost per student only goes up to $400
–If there are 30 students in the class, the cost per student is a diabolical number, $666
Pretty small differences in cost, it seems to me, given the difference in interaction that will occur, especially between the first and the second case. Pretty small differences in cost, too, in the context of total cost spent per student per year.
Any obvious holes in the above?
October 6th, 2010 at 9:33PM
An order of magnitude difference in per student cost and you think this is a “pretty small” difference? You must be a physicist.
October 7th, 2010 at 7:21AM
Shane…I’m not a physicist, but rather a money-grubbing business guy. “Order of magnitude difference” in cost of one aspect of a system needs to be considered in the context of cost of the *overall* system and of the value that the particular aspect contributes to that system.
I’m pretty sure that there are components of the iPhone and iPad that could have been cost-reduced by an order of magnitude-say, from $4.00 to $.40–and that a considerable part of Apple’s success lies in the suppression of internal proposals for such cost reductions.
I also feel pretty confident that there are aspects in the typical university’s cost structure that could be cost-reduced with much less impact on value than increasing class size from 50 to 250.
October 7th, 2010 at 8:43AM
Continuing the previous thought…I suspect there are many university administrators who, if hired by Apple in a fit of insanity and put in charge of the iPad product line, would ruthlessly cost-reduce the device itself—thicker, heavier, lower screen resolution, much slower–but then spend more than the savings by including an extremely fancy hand-made leather case. Which would not be optional–can’t get the iPad without the case.