Lecture vs. Online Course Delivery: Do Lectures Help?

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Speaker
Richard Scheines
Philosophy Department, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Over two quarters in the winter and spring of 2000, we delivered a Course on causation and statistics to almost 300 students at UCSD. We used traditional lecture/recitation format to deliver the course to one group of students, and we used web-based modules and recitation to deliver the same material to another group. On pre and post tests, the groups hardly differed, and if anything the web-based group did better. In this talk I will present the course we created, explain the experimental design and execution, and detail the results. Many issues germane to web-based education figured in our experience, and will in the future be explored more systematically. For example, what effect do simulations, interactive “virtual labs,” different kinds of feedback, the use of cognitive tutors, collaborative learning, educational context, and mastery learning have on student outcomes? In this context, I will describe tentative plans for future work.

Speaker's Bio

Richard Scheines is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, as a well as a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery. His primary Research focus is on the relations between causal knowledge and statistical data, but he has been active in educational computing since the late 1980s, when he developed an intelligent tutor for Formal Logic.