Yesterday a friend told me about an online video series I had never heard of, and it has become an instant classic in my household. It’s called “Justice by Michael Sandel.”
It’s a high-quality recording of an ethics class at Harvard. Professor Sandel is extremely articulate and engaging, and there’s a fair amount of class participation. Also, the setting is gorgeous–the amphitheater looks like something out of Hogwarts. Is that really where Harvard students go to learn?
What really makes it interesting to me are the hard questions Sandel asks of the class. In the first video he presents a situation where you’re a trolley car operator and the brakes on the trolley have failed. You’re hurtling towards a cluster of 5 men working on the track ahead. If you collide with them at full speed, they will die. It’s inevitable.
But then you notice that the track splits right before you get to the 5 men. On the secondary track, which you barely have time to switch over to, there’s a solitary worker.
The choice is yours: Kill the 5 men, or change course and kill the 1. What do you do? Which is the ethically correct thing to do?
I love hypothetical questions like these, and Sandel does a great job of leading to discussion that follows. I’ll let you watch the video to see how it evolves.
I did have one fleeting thought as I conclude the first video while flossing last night (yes, that’s a plug for flossing. It’s good for your gums. Do it). It has to do with collegiate education. You see, I have absolutely no interest in ever going back to school. Not because I don’t like to learn. I love to learn. But because the wealth of information at my fingertips is so vast and varied at this point that I can essentially create my own curriculum on a daily basis. I don’t need to suffer through quantitative business analysis classes that I’ll never use.
And yet last night after watching the first video of this Justice series I thought, I’d love to go back to school if it were like this. This is the type of content you can’t get online.
I actually thought that. Just for one second. Really.
Then, of course, I realized I was watching the series online. Whew. Close call. Thank you, Harvard, for helping me continue my education for free for the rest of my life.
Let me know if you end up watching the series. I think it’s fascinating.
So much for going to bed early…..
Another great resource for continuing your education online (and for free) is https://www.coursera.org/. One of my friends has taken (audited?) a few classes on there and recommended it to me as a way to continue learning, even though I will soon be going back to school for a second degree.
I strongly second Coursera though I have to note that the quality of courses varies greatly. The two classes that kicked it off are from Stanford’s graduate school of computer science – they are identical to the class at Stanford. Probabilistic Graphical Models and Machine Learning. Both very difficult, both taking probably 20 hours per week plus time to learn the programming languages for homework, both very much worth it. I’m taking one in October (which is stupid given how busy my October is).
What’s neat is how a “track” sort of evolves. For example, U Michigan has offered courses in model thinking (mathematical models, not runway models), social network analysis, game theory, and algorithms. I’ve taken two of the three or four classes in biostats offered by the Johns Hopkins school of public health.
Whether these count for anything in the future is another question. UW-Milwaukee is talking about letting Coursera classes count for specific credits towards a degree. One of my coworkers left for another company after he finished Probabilistic Graphical Models – I think partly because of the course.
Thank you for the flossing plug, Jamey! 🙂
I’ve been expounding on the topic of Quality vs. Accessibility of information for the last year or so. With more and more information at our fingertips on a daily basis, and “bad information” just as publishable as “quality information”. Before Gutenberg, it took a lot of effort to get multiple hand-written copies of a publication. Then it got easier with the press. Then it got even easier with effective mail systems, and effective cataloging systems. Skip way ahead, and you get word processors, home printers and interwebs. Anyone with a computer can say anything, and it is accessible. If I do a whole report on pig flight, it’s available. But that doesn’t make it valid. And now, popularity of information and of sources is overriding the correctness of the information being published. Encyclopedia Britannica halts its presses because Wikipedia has made their volumes ineffective to access. But I can create a whole fictional Wikipedia page, and no one would know the difference. The validity and correctness of information accepted as true is losing stock.
Validity is a good point, though with a sheltering institution’s reputation at stake, there’s better quality control for something organized than just for looking up Kevin’s Health Textbook. I say that because Kevin, a fraternity brother in college, decided one night to write his own textbook on health. It included such apt advice as “Alcohol is good for you, it slows down your heart so it doesn’t run out of beats as quickly” and “STDs are a myth. There is no such thing as a sexually-transmitted disease. Every time you have sex your life span increases by one week.”
What I think is really interesting is the flip side of Red’s thought – rather than democracy of dissemination, consider democracy of reception. Anyone with sufficient access can learn anything. MOOCs give structure, a defined path, and a recordable accomplishment to that learning. In my class on Biostats I saw that only 15% of the 30,000 students were from the U.S. There’s definitely a hunger to learn out there, and U.S. students likely will need to increase our efforts to remain competitive as we see more highly-educated work forces overseas. It was a bit of shock to me a few years ago when one pharma giant moved most of its R&D overseas where they can pay Chinese PhDs in Molecular Bio 1/6th what they pay Americans. That’s not the final word in the trend by any means.