There are no professors in Virginia Tech’s largest classroom, the Math Emporium, writes Daniel De Vise with the Washington Post, only “a sea of computers” and a staff of instructors who roam the lab and dispense assistance as needed.

Welcome to the brave new world of higher education, in which 8,000 Tech students a year take 11 different math courses (see the curriculum) on computers.  There are no fixed classroom hours, and students learn at their own pace. Instead of spending their time sitting and listening to lectures, they spend their time actually doing math. Instead of requiring 100 instructors leading the classes, Tech staffs the Emporium with 12 instructors.

Writes De Vise:

The teaching method pioneered at the Emporium solves two problems that have long vexed general math instruction. One is that lecture classes give students little chance to do math. The other is that students in basic math classes often span a wide range of ability and experience. Some have forgotten the material, while others never knew it. The lock-step pace left some students behind and held others back.

Tech introduced the Math Emporium in the mid 1990s in response to budget pressures. The idea has proven so successful that it has spread to universities in Alabama, Idaho and Louisiana.

My only question is this: What’s taking so long for the idea to spread? And why aren’t other Virginia universities doing the same thing? If it can be demonstrated that students learn just as effectively from computers — with back-up assistance from live instructors as needed — why is anyone teaching basic, college-level math courses any other way?

The problem isn’t that traditional institutions of higher education aren’t capable of innovating — Virginia Tech has proven otherwise. The problem is that innovation diffuses so slowly. As long as colleges and universities can continue to jack up their tuition and fees faster than the general inflation rate without encountering serious push back from their students and their parents — thanks to ever-increasing federal loans, among other reasons — administrations will feel little pressure to move outside their comfort zone.

It will be interesting to see if career colleges embrace the Math Emporium idea to teach their students more cost effectively (although it may not work as well in a computer-campus environment as in a residential campus setting) or apply same concept to other basic-level courses. The cost of education cannot continue to increase like it has been doing — indeed, costs must be brought down. Kudos to Virginia Tech for implementing this innovation. But we need to see a whole lot more where that came from, and if traditional institutions can’t pull it off, we need to encourage new enterprises, not wedded to the status quo, that can.

— JAB