Highlight
Quantum Information Science Online
Achievement/Results
The NSF-funded Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science and Engineering IGERT program at MIT has developed an interactive online teaching system for quantum information science. Quantum Information Science is an advanced integrative subject, which is topical and interesting to many around the world, but currently only accessible to students at a few select educational institutions. The new QIS Tutor addresses this problem by providing interactive questions which students can explore and answer using a web browser, from anywhere connected to the Internet.
Topics taught include quantum error correction, entanglement, quantum measurement, quantum circuits, and aspects of quantum algorithms. Beyond simple answer equality checking, the tutor also understands sophisticated symbolic mathematical objects such as matrices, groups, graphs, and circuits, and tests answers for satisfying properties such as code distances and completeness of measurement operator sets. Students may “check” their answers a few times before submitting answers and viewing problem solutions. Responses from the tutor include answer correctness as well as graphical renditions of circuits, plots of graph states, and quantum algorithm simulation traces.
Thirty students, including six iQuiSE IGERT trainees, participated in an experimental version of the MIT QIS-II course using the QIS Tutor, during the Spring 2012, semester. Ten weekly “problem sets” were delivered, with a total of 101 problems offered, and involving 330 response items from each student. Regular feedback from students on these problems, given during biweekly class meetings, played an integral role in the development of the QIS Tutor.
The impact of the QIS Tutor was evaluated statistically and also in a course survey, which reports a substantial preference for the QIS Tutor over traditional paper. An overwhelming number of students strongly liked the fast feedback of the instant grading provided; comments included “Getting immediate feedback was very very helpful. (I find with psets, often by the time you get the pset back you don’t even remember the question or what went into it.)” and “Instant feedback, thorough explanations of problems, ability to instantly create quantum circuits and have them evaluated — this was really amazing.” The challenge moving forward is to improve robustness of the assessment mechanism against syntactical errors, and to develop a plan for sustainable deployment.
It was exhilarating to discover how new online tutoring tools can successfully bring new modes of learning to students in advanced graduate courses such as QIS-II. It was fascinating to observe how students are thrilled by the instant feedback they get when working on the problems, and how they jump on problems immediately when released, as if the QIS Tutor system were a large game. It was exhausting to implement everything, and to get all the details correct, because of how unforgiving computers can be when checking human answers. It is inspiring to dream that this might help the future of teaching at MIT, and around the world.
Address Goals
The QIS Tutor experiment addressed three specific issues with teaching of the advanced QIS-II subject: (1) attrition of students during progress of the course, specifically with regard to students who came in feeling they lacked suitable understanding of the background material necessary for the course; (2) diminishing participation of students as the semester progresses, which is often due to long delays between problem set submissions and return of graded problem sets, leading to suppression of student motivation; (3) inconsistent grading, often due to lack of qualified teaching assistants for such an advanced graduate course; and (4) inconsistent teaching, often due to changes in instructors.
The hypothesis for this experiment was that for an advanced graduate course, such as QIS-II, issues with attrition, diminishing participation, inconsistent grading, and inconsistent teaching of can be substantially alleviated by providing an interactive, online tutor system as a replacement for traditional problem sets.
Data from the course statistics and course survey strongly support improvement in many areas with regard to the four target issues. Specifically, (1) this semester had a 64% retention rate, which is much higher than the below 50% retention rate from previous semesters; (2) nearly half of the class routinely asked questions during lectures, compared with the traditional case of just one or two involved students; (3) fast feedback was enormously appreciated by the students, one of whom reported on the survey that “Getting immediate feedback was very very helpful. (I find with psets, often by the time you get the pset back you don’t even remember the question or what went into it.) Moreover, getting multiple attempts (with the ‘checks’) also made the endeavor more of a learning exercise – if you were wrong, you got to find out immediately, and therefore think about it more and correct it. Wrong answers didn’t need to trickle down into later questions, causing the whole question to be wrong; if there was a misunderstanding, you could detect it before moving on, thus getting a chance to consider later questions free of previous misunderstandings”; and (4) the QIS Tutor will be available for future instructors of QIS-II – at MIT, and also beyond – and this will hopefully improve consistency of teaching and availability of knowledgeable instructors for this course, bringing quantum information science to more students around the world.
