Creative ways motivate students of all ages to learn
Print Edition
SPORTING long, curly hair and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, Yeh Ping-Cheng exudes the aura of a classic troudadour or Bohemian artist.
But he may just be the most popular science-teacher in the Chinese-speaking world, at least judging by the number of students who take his courses.
In addition to his teaching post as a professor of electrical engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU), Yeh is also actively engaged in online teaching. He teaches a course on probability to about 60,000 registered students on Coursera, a leading global distance education platform offering MOOCs (massive online open courses).
Founded by two Stanford professors, Coursera enables students from around the world to take free online classes provided by 120 plus top universities and educational institutions, including Stanford, Yale, Princeton and others. Students with sufficient attendance and qualifying test scores can receive certificates issued by the course operators.
Universities like Peking and Fudan Universities partnered with Coursera in their MOOC experiments in 2013. They were joined that same year by NTU.
Yeh explained that besides his probability course, a colleague at NTU teaching history also presided over a regular MOOC course named “Qin Shi Huang,” about the first emperor of China. The course was so sought after that it was re-opened three times, attracting so far a total of 190,000 students.
Speaking recently at a forum held at Fudan University’s School of Management, which runs a dual-degree EMBA program with NTU, Yeh said Coursera now boasts a registered membership of more than 1.8 million. The majority of its members are full-time students, but the enthusiasm about acquiring knowledge is also evident in some unlikely people.
Yeh recalled a conversation a NTU colleague once had with a 60-something Beijing taxi driver, who was thrilled at hearing that his passenger was from NTU. The driver then proceeded to hold forth about his avid interest in its course on the first emperor. In fact, according to Yeh, in the United States, 60 to 70 percent of MOOC learners are employees and pensioners, who view MOOCs as part of their own lifelong learning projects.
Although the educational revolution started by MOOC has lost some momentum over recent years, informed educators like Yeh remain strong believers in the merits of continued studies. “In the next 20 years, only those adept at self-expression, creative thinking and self-learning can adapt to a dramatically different world,” he told the forum.
He cited a survey conducted by Taiwan media years ago indicating that 30 percent of the respondents — he didn’t specify how many were polled — replied that attending school is “a sheer waste of time,” because the curriculum is “impenetrable.”
For Yeh, student disillusionment has led him and like-minded teachers to increasingly agree on an “imperative” to reform Taiwan’s didactic teacher-centered education system. What they would prefer instead would be something along the lines of the vaunted “flipped classroom” of the West, where students can watch online video lectures and teach themselves.
Having fun
Instead of forcing or even coercing students to learn, educators are increasingly given to pondering the question of how to stimulate their desire for knowledge.
Together with a team of students under his coaching, Yeh invented a software program named PaGamo. This is a game akin to the once popular strategy war game “Ages of Empires,” in which each player is assigned a plot to guard.
One can choose to expand his territory by acquiring a neighbor’s land. This is done in turn by answering questions — in fact, homework exercises — posed by the land-owners. Besides, possession of more land translates into the wherewithal to raise a “standing army” of monsters, who would pepper land-grabbing conquerors with extra questions, thereby adding to the difficulty — and fun — of conquest. More than 200,000 Taiwan students are now using this software.
Innovation is a buzzword, and there are myriad ingredients for successful innovation — a fair environment, top talent, attractive incentives, a culture that tolerates failures, ect — but as Yeh sees it, on the back of his experience as a game developer, fun is also an important factor catalyzing innovation.
Encouraged by the initial success with PaGamo, he and his team founded a company. The company has since received US$6 million in investment from Hon Hai Group, parent of contract-manufacturer Foxconn, on top of the US$300,000 in start-up funding provided by NTU, the first time the university sponsored such an on-campus entrepreneurial enterprise.
“Global competition essentially boils down to the competition for talent. First-rate talent has to have vision and ability, to be sure, but at the same time they must also be able to see the fun in what they do,” said Yeh.
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