Sharing Nicely

I just saw a great presentation by Haishuo Lee who works at a technical University of Taiwan. He presented a model that I think holds a lot of promise for UWC and other Universities in Africa as well.

The University created video lectures for three of its foundational courses (in this case Calculus I and II and Physics) and offered students to take the electronic courses or attend the traditional courses. The pass rates and amount of learnings were similar — and very high — but the time that lecturers spent on these courses was much lower (preparing lectures went down from 8 to 2 hours per lecture, and spending time with students went down from 8hrs every two weeks to 2hrs every two weeks). Professors had more time to spend on other things, including research and working one-on-one with students that have problems, yet the quality did not go down. One lesson was that it is important how the course is designed and provided – in this case with regular quizzes. Students also reported that they went back to the materials frequently after they had completed the course – when they needed to refresh their skills.

The full paper is here.