For the last four years in a row, U.S. News and World Report has ranked Dartmouth as number one in the country for "Best Undergraduate Teaching." The College must certainly be doing something right. But even the very best can still improve and, given the changes likely to buffet higher education over the coming decades, may be forced to improve.
Last spring, someone asked my opinion of the following proposal: Rather than capping enrollment in introductory economics classes and then offering multiple sections of each class every term, perhaps the economics department could offer only one or two sections of each class each year and scrap the enrollment caps. This would free professors to teach classes more directly related to their particular areas of expertise, allowing the department to increase the selection of upper-level classes available and reduce the class sizes of these upper-level classes. Perhaps due to stubbornness, my initial reaction was to shoot down this proposal after all, small class sizes are one of Dartmouth's main selling points. But, in hindsight, I think my initial opposition to this proposal was misplaced.
This term, I am studying abroad through the Rockefeller Center's exchange program with Keble College. Here, my courses are based on a system of "tutorials." In practice, a tutorial is a meeting between a tutor usually a professor, but sometimes a graduate student and two or three students that occurs once per week for an hour or an hour and a half. These tutorials are supplemented by lectures once or twice a week. The benefits of the tutorial system are obvious the professor is able to tailor his or her teaching to individual needs, probe students' knowledge and quickly correct mistakes in a way that is simply not possible in even a relatively small lecture.
However, both of the tutorials in which I am enrolled are third-year courses. For many subjects, first-year courses rely more heavily on lectures and less on tutorials. These lectures can often be quite large sometimes with over 100 students. After all, not all learning is best done through discussion sometimes lectures really do make sense, especially when students simply need to learn something as foundational as elementary calculus before proceeding to more advanced material. And once it has been decided that a particular class will be lecture-based, I don't think it really matters whether the class has 30 or 130 students.
If this is true, perhaps it would be a good idea to accept larger introductory lectures at the price of smaller and more numerous upper-level classes. But why stop there? Do introductory, lecture-based courses really need to be taught by professors?
This past summer, I took an algebra class that was taught by a graduate student. Even though he wasn't a professor, this particular graduate student was a very good teacher one of the better instructors under which I have studied.
But, once you accept that introductory, lecture-based courses need not necessarily be taught by world-renowned experts, it is easy to wonder whether these lectures need even be given live in a lecture hall. In my Chem 5 class, the professor recorded audio files, posted them on Blackboard and then had us students listen to them and answer a few questions before each lecture. Based on the responses to these questions, the professor was able to tailor his lecture to clarify points of confusion.
Moreover, there is good reason to believe that this kind of online learning will become more common in the future, as other universities have been increasingly posting course materials online. But the changes will likely be far more radical than just this. For instance, George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have recently launched a free, online learning website called "Marginal Revolution University" that will offer the equivalent of 45-hour courses in a series of narrated videos.
If the likes of Marginal Revolution University see significant success in the future, what will Dartmouth be able to offer its undergraduates? One important answer is access to world-class experts in various areas of study. The benefits of this access are better realized through small, upper-level classes taught by these experts, not through introductory lectures that will have to compete with online videos.
Dartmouth may currently be the best in the country for the quality of undergraduate instruction, but it can still learn from other universities overseas. And, given the changes likely to rock higher education over the coming decades, it will likely have to do so.
