Communicating Is So Inefficient
Let’s not slow down the student pipeline by giving individual attention.
By Mel Chua
After years of observing engineering education, I’ve finally figured out what our goal is: minimal student-teacher interaction.
In this model of the teaching-learning world, human contact between faculty and undergraduates is a sign that there must be a bug in the system. Whenever we see it, it indicates an error, a flag that something has broken down somewhere. It requires halting the production line, which is always bad because it means we produce less of… I’m not sure what, but making less of it is bad. We operate under the Japanese kaizen model, where we expect all the workers – that is, teachers and students alike – to freeze the conveyor belt when they notice a defect. Ideally, we’ll reach the point where we have no defects and never have to interrupt production.
In the meantime, we – unfortunately – have to pause the conveyor belt once in a while. Did the teacher not explain a concept clearly? Stop the (lecture) line and ask a question! Does a student not understand the homework? Stop the line and ask a question! Did the automatic Web-based grader display an error message? Is a piece of lab equipment broken? Stop the line and call a TA for some human-contact intervention!
In an ideal engineering classroom, the factory line would hum along perpetually. Lectures, or better yet, flipped and pre-recorded videos, would pour content into student brains. Labs would give systematized (yet individual and hands-on) learning experiences. The tedious work of human interaction would be done entirely by older students, whose time is far less valuable than that of faculty. It’s simple arithmetic. We can scale our resources by replacing wasteful faculty-student interaction with computers and graduate students. This frees faculty time for more valuable things – like department meetings and filing expense reports – instead of being taken up by questions from uneducated teenagers.
The trouble with student interactions is that they’re utterly unpredictable. You can’t budget time properly for them because you don’t know how long they might take, since students’ questions are so open-ended. They may even be nontechnical questions, like “how do I decide what to be when I graduate?” or personal crises such as family illnesses – or worst of all, vague things like “hopes” and “dreams.” Young people. Tsk.
Under this paradigm, it’s not difficult to see why studio-style teaching has trouble catching on in engineering education. Projects require ongoing physical space so teams can return to work on their projects throughout the day. This effectively “blocks” a studio-style classroom from being used during other “shifts.” Besides, the projects take up space that could be used to pack more bodies into your lecture hall. It’s a terrible waste of resources. Studio faculty members spend most of their time giving formative feedback on individual projects. This isn’t just time-consuming; it’s subjective and unstandardized, and therefore unfair.
Honestly, I’m not sure why this “studio” teaching model is so popular in the fine and performing arts. It produces so few young professionals per unit teacher. It certainly can’t be a way to educate self-starters with a confident grasp of their unique voices. How could they develop any sort of skill, given such a dearth of objective assessment? They must have come up with a better way by now. I mean, if they filmed theater class exercises, they could use facial and voice recognition to assess performances without any need for an audience.
Wouldn’t that be better?
Mel Chua, a graduate student in Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, has a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Olin College.