Need for Speed

This morning I watched two pre-recorded webinars (on A.I. tools) at 1.5x speed. I did slow down to 1.25x speed at certain portions where I anticipated something I wanted to learn. Why did I speed up the videos? Often there’s dross and filler I am less interested in, so it feels efficient to let those pass by at a higher speed where presumably I don’t do as much cognitive work. I did pause the videos on a couple of occasions to write a note on something I should try out.

 

Post-pandemic, students sometimes ask if my lectures can be recorded (not by them, but by the “system” setup in the classroom). The purported reason for asking is so they can review the lecture again later. The answer thus far has been No. I strongly suspect that if I provided recorded lectures, attendance would drop. While attendance in my G-Chem classes is overall quite good (over 90% most days), the small number of students who consistently miss class on a regular basis do poorly in the course. (Attendance in P-Chem is usually close to 100%, and students fret if they miss class, because when it happens they very quickly realize they have fallen behind.)

 

And in the age of A.I., if I provide recorded lectures, I’m certain the students would watch it at accelerated speeds, and then ask A.I. to provide a written summary. This is unlikely to help their learning although it might give them the illusion of learning. But this isn’t to say that you cannot learn from videos. There are many examples where video is excellent at helping you learn how to do something that physically requires motor skills – if I need to make a minor repair or if I wanted to learn a new cooking technique. But does that extend to learning scientific concepts?

 

With a brief but lazy search, I came across “The effects of lecture speed and note-taking on memory and educational material” (Chen et al, Applied Cognitive Psychology 2024, DOI: 10.1002/acp.4166). Here’s the abstract which also summarizes the work, but the paper is worth reading in full. It’s a small study and thus its extensibility is less clear at the moment, but the results are interesting, and I hope there is further study in these areas. The pre-recorded video materials were on the Paleozoic Era and Microeconomics, and there was a post-test. Interestingly, watching at 2x speed results in a small drop in test results. Taking notes helped.

 

I’m not going to discuss the article details as I’m unlikely to implement video recordings of my classes, but it made me think about the speed of my lectures. My course teaching evaluations have students regularly saying that I go fast. This is true and there are reasons behind it. I won’t hash those out here, but I will say that I tell students how to approach my classes and that pre-reading before class is important to getting the most out of class in-person. While I do pause my speech when I observe the majority of the students writing furiously what I have written on the board, it’s possible I need to provide longer pauses so they can digest the material. The natural punctuating rhythm of in-class student questions helps in this regard. What I don’t know is the quality of the student notes, whether they are taking notes while cognitively engaging the material or just passively copying stuff down. I can’t peer into their minds. For the students who come to drop-in (office) hours, I do get to see the quality of their notes, however this is a small subset and it’s usually the stronger students who stop by. I have had limited success getting the students who need the most help to visit my office and ask me questions.

 

One positive aspect of the speed in my classes is that practically no students are on their phone or surfing the web if they use a tablet to take notes (hardly anyone uses a laptop to take notes during class). The pace means there is less time and opportunity to be distracted, at least visibly so. I can’t peer into their minds so there might be passive, mechanical, note-taking with the mind wandering elsewhere. Students look like they are paying attention, and the lecture classes are interactive. When I break students into groups to work on something and walk around, students do work on my assigned questions, (because they might randomly be called to answer to the whole class) and the time is tightly controlled – they have to work relatively quickly and productively.

 

Actually, knowing the material and learning it well results in a fluency when it comes to taking exams. Thus, my exams are written with time being relatively tight. The strongest students will finish with time to spare; the weakest students will also finish early because they simply didn’t know how to do a problem; but the majority of students might finish with barely time to spare. I’ve read the literature about the supposed “harm” of timed tests, and I’m overall not convinced by the arguments (although I have made modifications to my pedagogical approach after reading some reasonably raised points).

 

I suspect that short-form incessant video watching has changed the way the student today “consumes” information in my classes, certainly differently from the students I had in the previous generation when I started teaching at the university two dozen years ago. Extensive gen-A.I. use among students in the last couple of years has further changed things, possibly drastically. All this keeps my life as an educator interesting as I learn to adapt with the evolving technology that students use and consume. Acceleration, the need for speed, seems to be the new name of the ongoing game.

LMS Liabilities

Many digital pixels have gone into dissecting the Canvas shutdown debacle ten days ago. What certainly emerges is that Canvas did a poor job communicating with its constituents. Whether or not they paid a ransom, or whether the hacked data is contained, or whether they have fixed their vulnerabilities, is unclear. I don’t think my campus was directly targeted; my students and I did not see a ransomware notice, only that the system was down. It was accessible again the same evening, so it was down for maybe six to eight hours. I had a P-Chem problem set due the following morning. The majority of students uploaded it to Canvas, a handful sent me a pdf directly via email, and one additional student turned in a hard copy.

 

I had not experienced using a Learning Management System (LMS) as a student. In my first couple of years teaching, everything was done hard copy just like when I was a student. I don’t recall when my campus started using WebCT, but I do remember teaching myself HTML and building a simple rudimentary website that provided my syllabus, basic information, and downloadable materials. It had a simple password protection scheme. It lived on one of the university servers that hosted faculty home pages. Few faculty had or used them. I still maintain my text-only webpages making minor updates every semester. Very low maintenance. I never bothered to learn Wordpress or other fancier tools as they showed up over the years.

 

WebCT looked clunky and I resisted using it, preferring my low-maintenance website. Blackboard bought WebCT. I used it a couple of times when I was team-teaching with colleagues who used it. The university continued to push (or “encourage”) more faculty to utilize Blackboard so that students would have a more “uniform” experience. I was one of the rogue faculty members who did not for a variety of reasons. At one point I vaguely recall being told that the university was shutting down the faculty webpage host server, but that did not come to pass. I think there were enough rogue users like me who hacked together their own sites that made sufficiently reasonable arguments. I did lose the battle over using Pine for my email and was forced to switch to my university’s Gmail.

 

Then Covid-19 came. I was on sabbatical in Spring 2020 so I did not have to make the hard pivot that my colleagues scrambled to do. I had time to think about how I was going to teach the next academic year online. My clunky website did not support video but the Zoom integration in Blackboard did. I spent part of Summer 2020 setting up all my classes in Blackboard, not just material delivery, but a Discussion Board, a wiki, online quizzes, and assignments for uploaded exams and other materials. Blackboard wasn’t too bad, and after we went back to in-person classes, I retained using Blackboard instead of my simple HTML website for managing class materials. P-Chem homework could be submitted online which worked well for students retaining their original problem set for annotations. Quizzes and exams reverted to in-person. I stopped using the Discussion Board when ChatGPT arrived.

 

Two and a half years ago, our campus made a hard switch to campus. I had winter break to make the adjustments. It was annoying because the Blackboard import did not work well for setting up my Canvas shells so I put up everything again from scratch. I don’t use the majority of the LMS features, and certainly not the gradebook, so the Canvas outage ten days ago did not affect my classes significantly. The way I set up the G-Chem online homework system and eTextbook as single embedded links to access, rather than a full Canvas integration, meant that there was an alternative way the students could access both directly from the publisher website. In a more extended outage, I could have revived the use of my HTML website and everything would have still worked.

 

Covid-19 made me think about how to set up my courses to pivot quickly without too much hassle. Although I hope it doesn’t happen before I retire, I expect a reasonable probability of another pandemic forcing us to move online. The possibility of zoonotic virus spread is very likely given how we humans live today and how biology works. But with the latest Canvas debacle, it now makes me think about how I might pivot quickly should another hack occur. I think there is an even higher probability that LMS vendors will be breached by hackers; not a question of if but when. Something will go down at a crucial time. I hope the education industry has learned something from all of this, but I’m honestly not sure if anything is going to change. In the meantime, I’ve downloaded all my Canvas materials and will rework how they are organized in case a quick pivot is needed in a future year. I just finished giving my last final exam and I go on sabbatical next academic year so I have time to think about the reorganization.

All About Maxwell

I am halfway through The Man Who Changed Everything, a biography of James Clerk Maxwell, written by Basil Mahon. As a physical chemist, I know something about Maxwell’s scientific achievements. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution shows up in multiple places because chemistry is about the movement of zillions of tiny particles, meaning you have to apply statistical methods to bridge the microscopic world to macroscopic phenomena that we large lumbering humans observe. Maxwell’s 1873 paper titled “Molecules” is marvelous, showcasing his lucid writing and insightful though; I have on occasion assigned it to first-year undergraduates along with light annotations to help them read along. I mentioned this in my very first blog post!

 

What I didn’t know much about, and am delighted to learn from Mahon’s book, is who James Clerk Maxwell was as a person. I learned about his rural upbringing that made him initially stick out as a weirdo in a more urban school, and how his geniality, generosity and genius eventually won over his classmates. While his mother had passed away in his early life, he had a loving extended family, and in his early twenties, he devoted much of his time to caring for his ailing father. He was beloved by his friends, an occasional prankster, liked to exercise, and wrote poetry. Given his fame for conjuring mathematical relationships of physical phenomena, I was surprised to learn that he frequently made lots of math mistakes in his derivations, but his scientific intuition was brilliant and almost always on the mark. A famous contemporary scientist said: “He is a genius, but one has to check his calculations.”

 

Maxwell was also a devout Christian but did not get sucked in to the many debates pitting science against religion. In declining to join an eminent society discussing such matters, he replied: “I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonise his science with this Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society. For it is in the nature of science, especially those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions, to be completely changing.” Maxwell’s views on the relationship between theory and experiment in science are also immensely quotable, for example: “I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labour. Whenever the attempt has been made it has resulted in an unnatural and self-contradictory mass of rubbish.”

 

I confess that I never took a physics course in college or beyond. How I became a professor who teaches physical chemistry still amazes me. My weak physics background, and perhaps lack of effort to improve my mediocre mathematical ability, means that I don’t really understand Maxwell’s famous equations although I do have the gist of its broader impact. I was heartened to read that Maxwell made great effort to find physical analogies to explain seemingly mysterious phenomena such as lines of force. Even now, I find it challenging to think through the lens of a field approach, and I use Maxwell’s ideas of fluid flow as a crutch to think about flux. Maxwell’s analogy of potential difference and hydrostatic pressure is also helpful; I use it when I teach electrochemistry in General Chemistry. (In fact, I will use it in my class tomorrow morning!)

 

What jumped out at me in reading the account of Maxwell’s struggle to derive a mathematical framework for Faraday’s lines of force was the ability to bring together insights from one area of physics to solve another. The jumping off point was a discovery by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) who found that the equations for the strength of electrostatic force looked similar to those describing the rate of steady heat flow. This seems odd: why would static equations resemble dynamic ones? But Maxwell made it work by imagining the flow of an “ideal” weightless incompressible fluid through pipes. I’m presently covering kinetics in my Physical Chemistry, and was looking ahead at my lecture on molecular collision theory. With Maxwell in my mind, one of the equations looked suspiciously familiar. I flipped back to a lecture I had given in the second week of the semester on the Lennard-Jones potential energy curve (for two-body molecular interactions), and sure enough, the mathematical expression for the static temporary dipole attraction looked analogous to the rate equation in collision theory. Wow!

 

I was impressed to read about the breadth of problems Maxwell tackled. His work on optics and colour vision culminating in his famous colour triangle is brilliant. He even devised spectacles for those with red-green colour-blindness. I did not know that Maxwell won a prestigious award for deriving mathematical equations to describe the conditions of stability of Saturn’s rings. When tackling the possibility that the rings are a fluid rather than a solid, he showed they would break up into smaller entities. But how would a hodgepodge of particles maintain an orbit? Maxwell showed that such rings vibrate in different ways and could be stable at low enough average densities. When he considered multiple rings, “he found that some arrangements were stable but others were not: for certain ratios of the radii the vibrations would build up and destroy the rings.” This sounds like the remarkable Bohr orbits of quantum mechanics where the electron orbiting the nucleus is treated as a standing wave to be stable.

 

Another surprising thing I learned was that despite his lucid and clear writing, Maxwell’s success in classroom teaching was mixed. Mahon writes: “For all his talents, he never mastered the technical part of teaching. He would prepare a lesson beautifully, do fine for a time while he stuck to his script, and then fly into analogies and metaphors which were intended to help the students but more often than not mystified them. He was not expert on the blackboard, where he made algebraic slips which took time to find and correct. And yet the students liked him and some found him truly inspiring… It seems paradoxical [for] such a fine scientific writer… as he believed fervently in the value of good education… Appreciating that people learn in different ways, he may have tried too hard to bring in helpful illustrations and analogies, confusing his audience with a welter of rapidly changing images… And perhaps he was too much of an idealist. All good teachers aim, as he did, to teach people to think for themselves, but most also recognize that all some students want is to gain a second-hand smattering of the subject so they can pass exams, and make a specific effort to help them succeed in this limited ambition. Maxwell never did.”

 

Those are sobering words for me as an educator who is also very excited about imparting chemistry to my students. I certainly try to give metaphors and analogies which I hope are helpful. Given my theoretical bent (a product of both my training and my interests), I have noticed that I now spend more time trying to impress upon my students the key frameworks on which my discipline builds its foundations. And I do this unprompted; it’s not in my lecture notes. It’s almost as if, like Maxwell, I can’t help myself. I feel compelled to make those connections to the broader edifice of how chemists think about the world. One progresses from novice to expert by first glimpsing and then progressively seeing more clearly the abstract categories that undergird chemical knowledge. I pontificate more than I used to. When I first started teaching, I couldn’t see some of the hidden frameworks; my focus was getting the students through the material in a systematic way that allowed them to (hopefully) provide them the basics to solve chemical problems on an exam to prove they understood what I was trying to teach. I am still aware that the majority of students in my classes are interested in the “second-hand smattering of the subject so they can pass exams”, and make efforts to help them along, but I also want to truly inspire the minority to see the beauty and depth of chemistry. Maxwell cannot help me resolve this tension, but I am inspired by his efforts. I look forward to sinking my teeth into the second half of his biography!