Hoping to Fix College Teaching, Carnegie Mellon U Open-Sources Trove of Software

jyosim writes: CMU announced today that it will make an adaptive-learning software platform and dozens of related tools to improve college teaching free and open source. It will also make a national push to get other colleges to adopt them and try to bring a more "engineering" approach to college teaching.

The biggest challenge will be changing the culture. While professors care about teaching, they think they're better at it than they are, according to many studies. The work is inspired by a former CMU professor who won a Nobel Prize, Herbert Simon, who championed the idea of learning engineering in the '60s.

As he wrote way back in 1967:
"We take the traditional organization of colleges so much for granted that we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is,” he wrote. “If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building, and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall. ... What do we find in a university? Physicists well educated in physics, and trained for research in that discipline; English professors learned in their language and its literature (or at least some tiny corner of it); and so on down the list of the disciplines. But we find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them.”