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Paul Mainwood
Jack Fraser is a little brutal but he’s right. In theory it is possible to find all the materials online, but it is near as dammit impossible to achieve a PhD level of understanding by watching online videos. Even if you watch a series of elementary, then intermediate, then advanced courses of quantum physics delivered by the best lecturers out there. And even if you watched them again, and again, until you knew them by heart, and did so in combination with a cover-to-cover reading of the best text-books money could buy.
It’s worth thinking about why. The issue is that lectures are only a tiny part of the training you need. Lectures are certainly useful. They cover the broad principles, and they work out some of the elementary problems in real time. You shouldn’t miss out on lectures.
But physics is a lot more like a craft than a body of knowledge. And learning it is more like learning piano playing or expert carpentry than like learning a list of capital cities.
So, let’s compare this to an imagined Quora question: Which online video courses should I take to be able to play piano at a concert level?
I think the responses would come in fast: mixed with amusement, they’d point out that just watching videos missed out the most important parts, especially the element of practice. And further, that lone unguided, practice only took you up to a point. What you really needed was an expert tutor giving you regular feedback and guiding you to practice in the right areas. That’s why good pianists seek out expert tutors, and the best pianists study with masters of the art.
In physics education, the closest analogy to piano practice is problem sets. They are the scales, the short study pieces and the finger exercises for the physicist. You do these partially alone, but you wander along to compare notes with your contemporaries when you get stuck, so you can learn from one another. The sets are marked by experts, and your mistakes are shown, so you can learn from them. Then you can discuss the results and where you got stuck with these tutors (usually with graduate teaching assistants, and with professors if you are lucky). When you do this (a lot) you gain an understanding of the principles and how they are applied, as well as a lot of mathematical tools and tricks that you use over and over again.
People without an understanding of physics usually can’t see why this is important. Surely you can just grasp the principles and not need to spend time worrying about specific artificial situations, like particles stuck in infinite wells? And why does the detailed mathematical treatment matter, especially if you need to spend a load of time working through a toolbox of tricks to employ to make these problems tractable.
Well, it’s an empirical question. It’s not a priori impossible that physics could not be learned from its broad principles alone. But the empirical answer is that — sorry — no one has found a way to even get a grasp of the principles without the practice, and this practice should be guided by experts. At the moment, the most effective way we know of doing this is called a University.
The question of whether this full-contact (and expensive, and time-consuming) process is possible to replicate online (say, with some combination of online video lectures, solving problem sets, plus the guidance of remote expert tutoring) is — well — a difficult one. It is something we will find out as online education evolves. At the moment, even the most comprehensive online courses are proving distinctly less effective than their full-contact alternatives.
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Jack Fraser is a little brutal but he’s right. In theory it is possible to find all the materials online, but it is near as dammit impossible to achieve a PhD level of understanding by watching online videos. Even if you watch a series of elementary, then intermediate, then advanced courses of quantum physics delivered by the best lecturers out there. And even if you watched them again, and again, until you knew them by heart, and did so in combination with a cover-to-cover reading of the best text-books money could buy.
It’s worth thinking about why. The issue is that lectures are only a tiny part of the training you need. Lectures are certainly useful. They cover the broad principles, and they work out some of the elementary problems in real time. You shouldn’t miss out on lectures.
But physics is a lot more like a craft than a body of knowledge. And learning it is more like learning piano playing or expert carpentry than like learning a list of capital cities.
So, let’s compare this to an imagined Quora question: Which online video courses should I take to be able to play piano at a concert level?
I think the responses would come in fast: mixed with amusement, they’d point out that just watching videos missed out the most important parts, especially the element of practice. And further, that lone unguided, practice only took you up to a point. What you really needed was an expert tutor giving you regular feedback and guiding you to practice in the right areas. That’s why good pianists seek out expert tutors, and the best pianists study with masters of the art.
In physics education, the closest analogy to piano practice is problem sets. They are the scales, the short study pieces and the finger exercises for the physicist. You do these partially alone, but you wander along to compare notes with your contemporaries when you get stuck, so you can learn from one another. The sets are marked by experts, and your mistakes are shown, so you can learn from them. Then you can discuss the results and where you got stuck with these tutors (usually with graduate teaching assistants, and with professors if you are lucky). When you do this (a lot) you gain an understanding of the principles and how they are applied, as well as a lot of mathematical tools and tricks that you use over and over again.
People without an understanding of physics usually can’t see why this is important. Surely you can just grasp the principles and not need to spend time worrying about specific artificial situations, like particles stuck in infinite wells? And why does the detailed mathematical treatment matter, especially if you need to spend a load of time working through a toolbox of tricks to employ to make these problems tractable.
Well, it’s an empirical question. It’s not a priori impossible that physics could not be learned from its broad principles alone. But the empirical answer is that — sorry — no one has found a way to even get a grasp of the principles without the practice, and this practice should be guided by experts. At the moment, the most effective way we know of doing this is called a University.
The question of whether this full-contact (and expensive, and time-consuming) process is possible to replicate online (say, with some combination of online video lectures, solving problem sets, plus the guidance of remote expert tutoring) is — well — a difficult one. It is something we will find out as online education evolves. At the moment, even the most comprehensive online courses are proving distinctly less effective than their full-contact alternatives.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
