I’m not sure about that.

I’m not sure about that.

I think you’re right about what makes for effective teaching, but I don’t think there’s a real difference between effective teaching and efficient teaching.

I’ll loosely define education efficiency as something like this:

education efficiency = amount of information retained * relevance factor / total resource cost

I’m not sure if “information retained” is the best measure here, but I’ll use it anyway to illustrate my point.

Total resource cost here includes time, money, mental energy, thermodynamic energy, and other scarce resources spent by the teacher, all the students, the institution, etc.

Note that both the “information retained” and “resource cost” factors are aggregates, not averages, so if one professor wastes an hour of 20 students’s time, then he’s really wasted 21 hours, plus the money those 20 students could have made working at McDonald’s, plus the money the institution could have spent toward a better professor.

Defining efficiency this way leads to some interesting consequences:

- Efficiency goes up when students retain more information, but only to the extent that the information is relevant.

- Because there are many students per teacher, a teacher who spends an extra hour preparing a lecture that saves each student 1 hour is more efficient than one tho does not.

- When resources are spent on making students retain irrelevant information, efficiency goes down. If the students don’t even retain the irrelevant information, efficiency goes down even more.

- Work that does not appreciably increase retention of relevant information lowers efficiency.

- Lectures that are boring, which result in low relevant information retention, have a fairly high resource cost (since you have to count the time spent by the instructor *and* each student attending the lecture).

- Choosing a better textbook saves students time, thus increasing efficiency. Choosing a worse textbook that is also expensive wastes students’ time *and* money, decreasing efficiency. Requiring that students purchase a textbook that they subsequently never use decreases efficiency.

- The larger the classes, the more important it is that the students’ time, money, and other resources not be wasted.

I could go on, but that’s the idea, anyway.

I think you’re right about what makes for effective teaching, but I don’t think there’s a real difference between effective teaching and efficient teaching.

I’ll loosely define education efficiency as something like this:

education efficiency = amount of information retained * relevance factor / total resource cost

I’m not sure if “information retained” is the best measure here, but I’ll use it anyway to illustrate my point.

Total resource cost here includes time, money, mental energy, thermodynamic energy, and other scarce resources spent by the teacher, all the students, the institution, etc.

Note that both the “information retained” and “resource cost” factors are aggregates, not averages, so if one professor wastes an hour of 20 students’s time, then he’s really wasted 21 hours, plus the money those 20 students could have made working at McDonald’s, plus the money the institution could have spent toward a better professor.

Defining efficiency this way leads to some interesting consequences:

- Efficiency goes up when students retain more information, but only to the extent that the information is relevant.

- Because there are many students per teacher, a teacher who spends an extra hour preparing a lecture that saves each student 1 hour is more efficient than one tho does not.

- When resources are spent on making students retain irrelevant information, efficiency goes down. If the students don’t even retain the irrelevant information, efficiency goes down even more.

- Work that does not appreciably increase retention of relevant information lowers efficiency.

- Lectures that are boring, which result in low relevant information retention, have a fairly high resource cost (since you have to count the time spent by the instructor *and* each student attending the lecture).

- Choosing a better textbook saves students time, thus increasing efficiency. Choosing a worse textbook that is also expensive wastes students’ time *and* money, decreasing efficiency. Requiring that students purchase a textbook that they subsequently never use decreases efficiency.

- The larger the classes, the more important it is that the students’ time, money, and other resources not be wasted.

I could go on, but that’s the idea, anyway.