John Papola on Teaching Economics

So X + 100 minutes is better than X + 75 minutes?

Where’s the downside?

I think you’re seriously overestimating how long your lecture tapes would need to be. I have generally found that about 1/4 to 1/3 of most lectures is devoted to covering the core material, and the remaining 3/4 to 2/3 is related to answering questions, having students work out examples, the slower pace you need to keep to allow note taking, and general logistics. For an example of the pace that can be kept in a video, look at some Khan Academy videos, and compare them to how much time a university lecture or lectures on the same topic would take.

Some lecturers do take a Ben Stein* approach and perhaps use 75+% of a lecture towards one sided communication, but these tend to be bad lecturers.

*Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

I’ve listened to hundreds of podcasts from Russ, and I prefer it to reading any day. The reason: that time isn’t actually lost. I’ve found that I can do mindless enjoyable tasks while listening to the podcast and still soak up all of the information.

Favorite thing to do is play minecraft, but it works for driving, getting ready in the morning, or exercising.

Time in class: testing their knowledge. I feel much more comfortable about my grades taking a daily short quiz, and seeing the results. It also teaches me how to study for the finals in the class.

The obvious implication is that it’s time to get rid of 99% of classes altogether. At least from a learning point of view. Why bother with a live performance from an 80th percentile teacher when you can have a recording of a 99.99th percentile teacher?

Of course, if that was going to happen it would probably already have happened. Like with recordings mostly replacing inferior live music. Personally I suspect signalling and the economic/status interest of professors. That is, student wants impressive professors and professors want the comparatively easy work of doing lectures as well as being the center of attention from a bunch of students.

I’ve been using the MIT open courseware lectures on mathematics to brush up on a few courses, before entering a Ph.D. program in finance, so I am open to the idea that digital media can be very powerful.

But there’s a great line in Good Will Hunting about getting a world class education for $20 in library fines. In theory I could get all the same info from textbooks in the library.

I guess in the end I am more persuaded by the idea that college is about something different than learning things.

As Khan (of Khan Academy) says, I think the idea is to listen to lectures at home and do problem sets in class. Large class sizes obviously aren’t going to come in to work on problems, but a large class just devoted to listening to lectures shouldn’t really exist.

I fourth commenter Joshua’s Khan TED Lecture link.

Every heard the “medium is the message”? Our brains reacts to the same information being conveyed across different mediums differently. Although I think Marshall McLuhan overstated the case that the medium is everything. I think his research shows that the medium is extremely important in communication. There is something about human interaction in person that video/telephone cannot replace. The problem is how does one quantify them to analyze for cost/benefit.

In regards to Khan, I thought what a great idea with the TED lecture. I actual tried it out and it is not that great. The videos are nothing special. I mean the videos are about as good as an average textbook. I find a good math textbook is lot easier to learn from than these videos.

I was homeschooled and 70%+ of my education time past 4th or 5th was reading/problems. Only when I got into high school did I need any real human lecture time and that was mostly with English and Science.

I was a little shocked when I went to college and the professors would just teach what was in the book. It was such a waste of time and I just thought most students were lazy. Granted after about two years I stopped reading textbooks for most classes till test time, it just made the lecture boring most of the time. If one is a decent writer, reads the textbook twice, and does most of the problems then an average student can get an A in 80% of the classes (assuming adequate time is spent on research papers).

So I really don’t know the advantage of a video over reading other than learning styles.

In my mind two thirds to three forths of the value of teachers is accoutablity. This is the reason why I think most professional classes are worthless.

There is the rare teacher who add a lot of value. These are the teachers who should be doing the video intructions.

I have to go along with the majority here.

I had one class where the professor did this, taped his lecture and then posted it, and we could watch it online or go to class and get the same lecture. I found the online video to be much more helpful.

There’s no pauses for other people’s dumb questions, but you can replay anything that you didn’t quite catch. You can email about any questions and so you can ask exactly what you want to know and you’re not wasting anyone else’s time with them.

And the monetary incentives are fairly significant, at least for me. Each drive into class with gas and parking is $20. By only going in on test days, I spent $60 versus $280. In addition, I could watch the video during my free time and not have to pay for babysitting.

I believe Kahn invented his videos to help his foreign family members, who desperately want to learn and convert that knowledge into earning power. Most people are not so motivated to learn, even good, promising college students. This blog’s readership is probably over-represented by highly motivated autodidacts. I think the accountability point that another commenter raised is important. Myopia might cause one to blow off the video lectures, but many (not all) feel some duty to attend live lectures out of respect for the professor.

Also, the idea of everyone learning from the 99.9th percentile lecturers is absurd and dangerous. Different professors have different approaches, points of view, and ideologies. Sure, good professors don’t overtly indoctrinate their students. But indoctrination by omission is a real phenomenon. If the best economics lecturer in the world is a Progressive Keynesian, are you comfortable that libertarian views will get a fair shake, if aired at all? Sure, some professors are so bad that they do more harm than good, but I think we’re better off learning from at least the top 30% of lecturers in a field. Diverse approaches to problems (Hayek anyone?) instead of one overarching top-down solution shouldn’t be too hard a sell to the readers of this blog.

I think the taped lecture is a great idea. Giving kids access to re-watch the lectures is important, since isn’t that where the value of the professor comes in?

I wonder why all our technological progress has not revolutionized the way we educate from the ground up. Why do we bunch all kids born in the same year together for years and years while maybe offering remedial or gifted classes to some?

What if schools and universities became more like certification centers?

I agree, David. You need to think about the opportunity cost. If you really want students to spend another thirty minutes outside the classroom, would you have them read the book more or watch a video?

The place that taped lectures are taking off is in online education. There, people pay less, and they don’t travel to the university, and they will just take what they can get within those constraints. I don’t think it’s competitive to a traditional classroom if you lift the constraints, though. You would never attend a university but then be better off staying home watching videos. Think of it as mass market education.

All this said, I think we are making a poor analogy. Fight of the Century isn’t a lecture, but a short film that is used to express an important idea: more top down, or more bottom up? A similar video that was influential to me is one called Powers of Ten. Sometimes an idea is expressed so well, you want to record it and reproduce it and have everyone see it. Fight of the Century, Round Two, is just such a gem.

Well all you are doing is reversing the venue for lectures vs. homework. The students now watch the lectures at home and do the homework in class. In reality, you may mix and match some of this. Do some lectures live in class, etc. You may also have some of the video not of you, but of world class (or I should say equally world class as you) profs.

I always remember watching interviews with Richard Feynman when I was a kid. What a brilliant guy! You’d want to mix in some video from guys like him, Friedman, etc. Even if the kids didn’t understand everything, they would be inspired and not bored off their rocker.

Prof. Henderson,

I saw John’s WAKE-UP talk in SF also.

First off, I think the teaching services in America are as ill-ordered as its medical care services, and students receive service similar in quality as patrons of hospitals.

As far as the Khan model goes, it’s a good starting place for a teacher wanting to innovate his services, but since Khan mostly teaches math I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it as a model for teaching economics. Math is a fairly unique subject in my opinion.

Here’s where I think you should focus your thinking on this matter.

Start off with something like the Khan model and then modify it by trying to imagine what it would look like with no government interference in education and taking into account innovations made possible by the internet like Econtalk and “Fight of the Century.”

This is not easy to imagine, but my guess is that the fraction of full-time students will decrease relative the the fraction of part-time students (because I see government shrinking in the future and the internet making it less costly to be a part-time student).

Econtalk is already providing a great economics education to thousands of part-time economics students.

Also, try not to imagine part-time students like they were before 2005. Think about a part-time student working for a company called Emergent Order Studios, the CEO of which is a guy named John Papola who hires young individuals who are eager to create educational products which teach economics. These young folks will work on different aspects of John’s films, such as writing song lyrics, developing plots, working out new free market rhetoric, imagining and bringing to life voluntarist worlds, conducting background research, and determining what audiences want. Some of John’s employees will setup contracts with expert economists like David Henderson, Don Boudreaux or Russ Roberts and work with them to improve the quality of the film.

My guess is that economists will be more like engineers after this innovation takes place. They will help create products and services that people want and are willing to pay for.

My suggestion is that if GMU wants to be a player in teaching economics in the future, it should create an economics class which teaches students how to create Fight of the Century-like videos. I’m suggesting at least one class on film (cinematography, writing for film, video editing etc.) and one or more classes in which students create videos that teach economics.

Rather than grade homework, one of my professors in graduate school posted it on the internet as a way of motivating us to do a good job on it. One of my larger reports is even used by practicing engineers wanting to learn the about the material properties of Invar (low thermal expansion nickel steel commonly used in optics). I actually visit his class website occasionally to learn about topics I didn’t have time to learn in school. This professor is doing with student homework what Salmon Kahn is doing with video lectures.

The wave of the future is to post both finished homework and teacher’s lectures to the internet.

By having the students both create videos and post them to the internet, many, many more videos could be created that would educate Bryan Caplan’s well known voters. These videos could also be helpful to students applying for jobs. For example, part of their portfolio.

Professors like yourself would spend more time helping young economists/employees do economics research at companies like Emergent Order Studios.

[re-posted from Scott’s blog –Econlib Ed.]

Hey David,

I haven’t read any of the comments, so excuse that.

The answer is simple: have them watch the video IN CLASS. Make it short enough to do a Q&A in that period then have full blown discussion the next class. I’ve had more than a few classes while at Penn State where I simply stopped going to the lectures because they were boring and worthless. Usually they were taught by guys who clearly were there for the research and had no interest in teaching.

Anyway, this could be a real teacher productivity booster. Also, the videos wouldn’t be that long. I think shorter films in the 10 to 20 minute range that cover one subject and do it really well are probably best.

Of course, the other reality is that the really cool kids will teach themselves, so I intend to empower them with the teachers have an interest or not. Considering the current state of macro pedagogy, NOT going to class is probably the best advice I can give. 😉 ZING!

Dr. Henderson,

Many of the previous commenters have made myriad great points, but it comes down to each student being very different in their learning styles and studing habits.

Those of us, like myself, who prefer to hear the lecture in person and then work problem sets could benefit from this by using it as tool to use either ahead of lecture, or as a refresher in case something during lecture wasn’t crystal clear.

Others who dare not go to class without having read the assigned readings and worked at least 75% of the assigned (and unassigned) homework problems can certainly benefit from this by using it as another means of preparing themselves for lecture and discussion.

Bottom line: Use only as a mild supplement to your discussion-based lectures and not as a substitute. It is only a short hop from here to replacing all lectures with videos, discussions held on e-boards, and exams administered by privatized testing centers…just too Phoenix-esque in my opinion and cheapens the MBA experience.