Peter Cochrane: Teaching technology

Teachers may prefer PowerPoint over chalk and blackboard, but nothing has fundamentally changed in teaching in 6,000 years, argues Peter Cochrane

Since I first started learning about science and engineering, so much has changed. For me it began with logarithms, slide rules, early mainframe computers, pens, pencils and lots of paper.

My first degree was spread over five years, with around 40 hours of staff-student contact per week, including one day dedicated to laboratory work.

The syllabus spanned, maths, physics, nuclear physics, chemistry, materials, thermodynamics, control systems, power generation and distribution, analogue and digital computing, electronics, radio, line transmission, telecoms and economics.

Students today are as capable as any prior generation, but they have been educated down 'soda straws' of specialism

Further post-graduate degrees of two-to-three years were ever more specialised and benefited from the arrival of mainframes, pocket calculators, PCs, and ever more extravagant laboratory and field work. The net result was far more work per unit time in ever narrower domains to a greater and greater depth with the new ‘standing on the shoulders' of prior studies.

Fast forward to today and such an under to post graduate progression is unthinkable. Subjects are far more focused: Control systems, telecoms, electronics, computer science and so on come as three-year duration degrees in their own right.

Staff-student time is now around 22 hours per week, while laboratories and ‘hands on' experience have largely been expunged. On the up side, students are highly IT literate, have laptops, and can access mainframes that only Seymour Cray could dream of, and even lecture theatres and libraries are electronic.

For nearly five decades I have injected 10 per cent of my energies into education and I can say that students today are as capable as any prior generation, but they have been educated down 'soda straws' of specialism.

We have the internet: rich in online presentations, short courses, MOOCs and networked teams and capabilities [but] teaching itself has seen little fundamental change in 6,000 years

This has benefited technological progress greatly, and specialists are always in short supply, but we are now deep into a new era where broad and capable generalists are needed. Companies, industries and technologies have become multidisciplinary, but we no longer have the courses to service this rapidly growing and increasingly diverse need.

So the big question is: how are we going to address this?

On the one hand, we have the internet: rich in online presentations, short courses, MOOCs [massive open online courses], and networked teams and capabilities.

On the other, teaching itself has seen little fundamental change in 6,000 years. We've moved on from the sand pit and the pointed stick, to chalk and blackboard, to marker pens on white boards, and then to typed text and pictures on PowerPoint presentations. Surely we can do much better?

The art of learning is well known. For example, going all the way back to a Chinese Proverb, often wrongly attributed to Confucious:

"I hear and I forget, I see and I understand, I do and I remember"

And Michael Faraday, whose lectures always included practical demonstrations:

"To day we made the grand experiment of burning the diamond… beautiful…"

In a world of IT savvy students, laptops, tablet computers, PCs and apps, why are we not constructing virtual experiments in which the students can engage?

It appears most teachers have yet to graduate to movies and animations embedded in PowerPoint. What use text and static pictures projected onto a screen? Students gain nothing - and what a waste (of probably) the best teaching tool we ever created.

As I engage more deeply with academia in the coming years I intend to augment ‘chalk-and-talk' and animated PowerPoint by building ‘on-screen' demonstrations using downloaded apps. The students will then be assigned the challenge of building experiments and systems on their own screens in their study time.

Their job will be to analyse, predict and demonstrate the outcome using the new tools of their future profession.

And I can guarantee that they will learn so very much more!

But best of all, I expect the brightest and the best to feedback their expertise and experiences into the course material for future generations.

After all, that is what I did as an under and post grad decades ago.