Just to point out -- whether it's relevant or not -- I remember reading recently that confusion is often a good sign, i.e. confusion often means that one mental model is being replaced by another, which can be an indicator of learning. For example, in the process of replacing a common-sense model of physics with a Newtonian one, there has to be a "confusion" stage somewhere in-between, and an absence of such stage could indicate a failure to acquire the Newtonian model.
How do you reconcile this with the observation that the most confused people are the ones who understand the most? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2931518" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2931518</a>
That's actually my lecture that ClassMetric broke down in the blog post. From a (first time) instructor's perspective, I don't see the tool as a distraction to students. I'm not punishing students for using it, and students have another way to communicate to me that they don't understand something in lecture. I only lectured for one hour a week, the TAs spent the majority of the time with the students. In my case, Class Metric allowed me to touch on the big ideas of the week during my lecture, measure confusion on topics, and figure out how TAs should structure their discussions and labs to be the most useful to the most students. The message posting system also allowed TAs to participate directly during lecture as well, answering questions and addressing confusion as it appeared so students could better keep up with the lecture material. Yes, it may be distracting to have knowledge coming from two channels, but students can still refer back to that channel later when they are reviewing the whole lecture material.
If you think about it, the way we teach now is really primitive. So much feedback could be gathered and incorporated so easily, and greatly increase the effectiveness of the whole process. Imagine something like this incorporated with the Kahn Academy. Also, imagine the feedback being used <i>not only</i> to help the teacher improve the lecture, but also in a "stack overflow" sense to cause the best lecture videos to "rise to the top". I am very excited about what is going to happen in the field of education.
This looks pretty interesting. I actually would be more interested in using it for curriculum design, not really for real-time classes. I think I'd get a group of students and a BETA version of one of my books, teach a class with it, then use this to review which exercises are working and which need to be redone.<p>If it also included metrics on improvement in understanding over time and across instructors it'd be even more powerful.
I think this is ok, but not nearly as good as: < <a href="https://learningcatalytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://learningcatalytics.com/</a> >.
As a university instructor, I want to find out more about it, but your page makes it harder than it should be. The "home" icon links to the blog, the one on the right does too. No links for more information, status of the project, or cost involved.
As someone who've taught before (I was a TA at Berkeley during grad school). It's awesome to monitor the classroom and see if what you are saying even makes sense to the class or not. Kudos!