The Orient Express

 

Since 1998, I have been traveling to Asia to teach Statistics and International Economics to Asian students enrolled in a bachelor’s program in business sponsored by Ottawa International University in the United States. Courses are taught in Hong Kong and Singapore and in various larger cities in Malaysia, such as Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya, Penang, Johor Bahru, Ipoh, or Melaka. Students cover two subjects during an intensive period of nightly classes for two weeks. Approximately one month prior to classstart the students are given a lengthy pre-course assignment and they have approximately one month after the last classnight to complete post course assignments Each class consists of three to four hours a night, seven nights in a row for a total of fourteen nights. Given the nature of the program and the added cost of flying professors to Asia and maintaining them in a good hotel in Singapore or Hong Kong or KL or PJ, the classes, by traditional standards, tend to be rather short.

 

I jokingly refer to this compact schedule as “The Orient Express”.  However, over the four years that I have been teaching in Asia, I have become convinced that this compressed format works extremely well and that it may well be the harbinger of the future of education. Everything in our society has increased its pace. We have moved from “Fast Food” restaurants to “Fast” everything. We email documents around the world in seconds, we ship packages anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. Products are designed and brought to market in a matter of months or weeks. The speed of our world has increased phenomenally and the quality of our products whether “fast food”, “laptop computers”, “cell phones”, or “palm pilots” has improved with the speed of production. Learning how to live in this “Brave New World” and how do business in it has become a lifelong learning process and educational institutions must keep pace with it.  

 

I’m sure many educators and other individuals would insist that one cannot possibly teach or learn statistics or economics (or any other course, for that matter) in such a short time span. Most traditional students in the U.S. learn these subjects in courses which run about fifty minutes, three days a week for fifteen weeks. Traditional fifteen-week courses constitute a total of 37.5 student/teacher contact hours compared to 28 contact hours for these (seven night) accelerated classes.

(Since about ten minutes of time is generally lost in each traditional class with students shuffling books to get ready or closing books and packing up backpacks we should probably assume that each traditional class actually lasts forty minutes so total class time is more like 30 hours.) Assuming that the same amount of time is lost in the accelerated classes, and that there is usually a ten minute break halfway thru the four hour class these classes amount to about 26 hours total inclass time plus prep time before and after the formal classtime.

 

That is a considerable amount of time to lose, but one must realize that there are some distinct differences between these traditional and non-traditional courses. Adult students tend to be dedicated and eager to get their money’s worth since they usually have to work to pay for these classes. They have a level of maturity not usually found in traditional courses. They also typically work at a fulltime job and have developed a sense of discipline. 

 

As one who has been trained in and done research on human learning, (I have a doctorate in Experimental Psychology – Human Learning and Memory), I have found that human learning is not a simple matter of the total time spent in a classroom. It is rather a function of the way the learning experience is arranged and how the time is managed. We need to take a number of important issues into account.

 

Traditional college classes are not set up to maximize learning between class sessions, but rather to accommodate the schedules of professors and maximize classroom usage and to allow students to take a variety of different courses deemed necessary for a well-rounded, well-educated student. Frankly we have been using fifty-minute college classes interspersed throughout the day for so long, that I doubt anyone would actually remember what the real rationale was or if there was any (except perhaps that young people have a limited attention span and grade school and high school classes also run about fifty minutes).

 

In a traditional program, many students go immediately from one class to another. This may result in a distinct disruption of learning. Most memory experts agree that memory consolidation  (movement of material from short term to long term memory) must occur if individuals are to retain what they have learned. When new information from a new class is added to information that has just been learned in the previous class, there is a sort of “acid bath” effect and the new information immediately interferes with and corrodes the previous learning. This is, of course, true whether the student goes immediately to another class or to the student union for a “gab session” with friends. There is also an adjustment period when a class starts where previous thoughts about friends, family, or other personal concerns need to be put aside so that one can concentrate on the topic of the class.

 

For my Asian students, the four hours of class time each night for one week allows the student to get focused on the material at hand and work with it thoroughly so that a full development of concepts can occur. It allows time to discuss and clarify ideas. The instructor can actually cover a topic completely without worrying that the bell will ring before he or she is done. In seven nights the student will have absorbed the entire course material in meaningful chunks rather than brief snippets of information.

 

Having a month to work on preclass assignments prior to the two weeks of intensive learning gives the students a chance to familiarize themselves with the course material. Having a month or so of free time to work on long-term projects assigned at the end of the class gives the students an opportunity to use material that they have just learned. The key here is that there is time to get into a subject in detail.

 

The matter of being tired after a long day at work is certainly a matter of concern for working adult students. It clearly does occasionally interfere with learning. However, as soon as class is over, most adult students go home and go to bed. Learning research clearly shows that memory consolidation occurs more readily when there is no intervening activity, and clearly sleep is the least amount of activity that one can have.

 

In addition, there is evidence that rem sleep or dreaming is a time when individuals may be sorting out the experiences of the day and arranging, organizing, and consolidating them so that they may be retained. It has been demonstrated that neonates (newborns) in fact, experience rem sleep almost constantly while they are asleep and we know that as children grow into adulthood, the amount of time that they spend in rem sleep steadily decreases until they reach old age. Most adults enter REM sleep roughly every ninety minutes.  So, for adults, “night school” might just be the most propitious way to learn.

 

A second advantage of the four-hour “night school” class is that difficult material can be explained more thoroughly. Concepts which students find more difficult can be explained or demonstrated in several different ways. There is time for discussion and for students to get hands-on experience. The more information one can give to students and the more ways that they can approach the new knowledge, the easier it is to incorporate it into their knowledge base as a whole concept rather than as unrelated facts learned days apart.

 

In the two week accelerated format, there are additional benefits. Students come back to the subject matter after only half a day away from it rather than two or three days, so that it is still fresh in their minds. There are those who would suggest that having the free time between classes allows students to go over and review material. This is something which students cannot do very well when classes are pushed so closely together. My response is that the critics have been out of college way too long. Granted, two or three people in a college class may actually spend time studying each night outside of class, but most college students probably do not, at least on a consistent basis.  I certainly didn’t and I was an “A” student.  In fact, many students probably do not even pick up the textbook until the night before the midterm or final exam. While such behavior is not very praiseworthy, it is probably more of a reality than most of us would care to acknowledge.

 

The compressed “Express” course may be likened to the “Total Immersion” technique used by some teachers of languages. Students have the opportunity to focus on only one subject for an extended period of time. They come back to it each evening with the material still reasonably fresh in their minds. They haven’t had several days or a whole week to forget what they learned in the previous session and a brief review brings them right back up to speed. Conceptually, they get the whole package and can see how it all fits together before they have time to forget much of it.

 

When I teach statistics for a week, I find that students come away with a sound working knowledge of the basics. I let students work on problems together and encourage them to use laptop computers and a computerized statistics program, which I have time to explain to them with the longer class format. Nobody in their right mind does statistics by hand anymore (except some students in traditional statistics courses). I overlook some of the trivia and minutia that has been included in statistics textbooks since the stone age.  (People had more time then to chisel their results into rock slabs). Statistics textbooks, it seems, have always been written to bog down the reader with arcane information of interest only to those who are going to become statisticians and which could more appropriately be learned in more advanced classes. Since all introductory statistics textbooks look almost exactly alike, I believe that textbook authors are perhaps hesitant to break out of the mold for fear of looking unprofessional to their colleagues. The result is that most college graduates have had a statistics course, but virtually none of them can remember any of it.  I try to explain statistics as a tool to investigate what is going on in the world and the four-hour time frame allows me to give real world examples, which can be discussed in detail. I focus on data and practical ways to analyze it.

 

When I move on to international economics during the second week, I encourage my students to see economics data as an extension of statistics. I encourage them to use techniques like trend or time series analysis to examine economic data (which is, of course, gathered over time and lends itself to such analyses) and I require that they do a final paper which incorporates a statistical analysis of economic data as well as economic theory. Explaining the results of their analysis of a real world problem in layperson’s terms forces them to apply what they have learned. Their paper is due one month after the completion of the last night of class. During that time the student can contact me via email if he or she has concerns or questions about the assignment.

 

The world is moving faster and modern education must develop techniques that allow educators to move with it. We must either get on the train or be left at the station. For my money, I prefer to buy a ticket on the Orient Express.