NBC Offers Statistics Course for Credit

The following advertisement appeared in a recent CRIMSON: "Your school now offers full academic credit for Probability and Statistics, a television course given weekday mornings on Continental Classroom."

University students are among nearly 10,000 in 320 colleges across the nation that are taking Harvard professor Charles F. Mosteller's TV course for college credit.

Sponsored by the Learning Resources Institute and the Conference Board of American Mathematical Societies, the math course has been telecast by NBC on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 6:30 a.m. since January 30 and will continue until May 26. The program appears on Channel 5 in the Boston area.

Mosteller's course is the second half of NBC's Contemporary Mathematics series which began last fall. The series follows Physics and Chemistry as the third course ever to be taught for college credit on TV. Telecast in color on 171 stations of the NBC network, it is the first national TV credit-course at the University level.

Students enrolled for credit are required to watch the TV classes and attend "section meetings" provided by the college. At Harvard, Gottfried E. Noether, professor of mathematical statistics at B.U., is conducting a bi-weekly class. Its first meeting will be on Saturday.

Probability and Statistics also provides interesting listening for students not seeking credits. Early morning viewers are greeted by tin soldiers, stuffed toys, building blocks, electric trains, ping pong balls and pizza pies, which Mosteller uses to illustrate the principles of probability.

Comments on the program have been "favorable and pleasant," especially with regard to the visual devices, reported Mosteller. The devices, he explained, are deliberately those "which a secondary school teacher can use inexpensively or build herself with scotch tape." One of the main purposes of the course is "to provide potential and actual high school teachers with adequate training to teach modern mathematics to seniors," he said.

About the advantages of education by television, Mosteller said, "It is a very substantial and largely unexplored area." "Television obviously cannot carry the ball alone," he stated, but it can relieve teachers of some of the burdens which make "face to face contact" with students difficult at present.

Next year's Continental Classroom on NBC will probably be devoted either to economics or biology, according to Mosteller. He had no idea who the lecturers might be, however.