A Unique Caltech Opportunity: Apprentice-Based Learning

Caltech has two characteristics that allow us to offer a different kind of education to undergraduates:

1. Caltech has perhaps the highest ratio of PhDs (faculty members and postdoctoral fellows) to undergraduates among the top 20 universities. The ratio of faculty + postdocs + graduate students to undergraduates is over 1.5.
2. Caltech has among the brightest and motivated undergraduates in the country.

These characteristics allow us to offer a learning experience in which undergraduates learn by doing. They can learn by solving problems and doing reseach with a community of faculty members, postdocs, graduate students and fellow undergraduates. The Caltech culture today is already a learning-by-doing culture. Students live from problem set to problem set. We have an opportunity to make the student experience more valuable.

Though our culture is one of learning-by-doing, students complain of limited faculty interaction. Some undergraduates complain of limited interaction with everybody in the community except fellow undergraduates and TAs. We can change that. We can offer students a community-based learning experience in which undergraduates work closely with a community including faculty members, postdocs and grad students.

Let's explore the possibility of turning lectures into joint problem-solving sessions and research discussion sessions. We could provide all the material - notes, presentations, video, homework sets, research ideas - on the Web (e.g., Moodle). Students would be expected to read the material before coming to an interactive problem-solving session.

We could also set up research groups of faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates who interact synchronously in research sessions and asynchronously through chat rooms and blogs.

We should start exploring apprentice-based learning by first running an experiment with moderate sized (say 20 - 30) students. The experiment is to convert one or two courses into problem-solving or research sessions which may only meet formally for an hour a week and in which there are continuing asynchronous interactions through chat rooms. Let's try this out in 2009 and then report the results of the experiments to the faculty.

We could use Moodle as is, or ideally use the New Media Classroom to develop courses for the experiment.

  -- Mani Chandy