Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds
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I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually.
That being said, the college experience has gone through events like wars, plague, disruption, etc, and has come back before. (Although not at a time when there was such a ready alternative technology at hand.) I'm not yet so worried as some say (wholesale change to the higher education model), unless this goes on for 2-3 years.
You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it.
Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration with other students. You have access to internship opportunities or to your professor networks.
I once worked through a distributed systems project from MIT. I worked almost full time on it for a couple of weeks. Most of the material was available, but not everything. You certainly don't have the same resources students have. And you don't have the same pressure students have. Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well.
Exactly. Even as a self-taught developer, one of my biggest regrets is how little I appreciated the incredible resources I had available at university and didn't really take advantage of or appreciate.
1. For classes requiring user testing or behavioral experiments, assignments are being processed through mechanical turk.
2. The experimental physics lab is changing from a 'choose-your-own-adventure' model of choosing a final project to a satellite/telemetry/astronomy project.
3. Some classes are providing synthetic datasets or data from previous semesters for lab classes.
4. Some classes are basically finished. It is actually impossible to continue teaching them, so they're purely instructional or seminars, at this point.
A lot of these lab classes are required to graduate, too. They also require so many resources that they can only be taught once a year. It's seriously demotivating, especially for passionate hands-on learners. And paying sticker price doesn't help the sting for many students.
For example, I had an undergraduate thesis in my major, which required being physically in a lab and having access to a machine shop. In any case, there are lab/project classes throughout a lot of STEM majors that students aren't going to be able to reasonably finish this semester. I don't know how this is being typically handled with everyone having to drop things ~ 1 month into the semester.
Except for the occasional "gotchas" where professors say something random in class that shows up on the exam, it didn't adversely impact my GPA, and it saved a ton of time. I think I learned more efficiently on my own, which led to saving a ton of time shuffling from physical location to physical location. It freed up more time for working, exercising, and sleeping.
Given this experience, in retrospect, I think the most valuable parts of my education were not necessarily the classroom, but rather:
50%: The (well-written) syllabi. They point out which resources (books, blogs, websites, etc) are worth your time, if you have an interest in the subject. The best ones are filled with opinions, and "optional resources if you want to dive deeper into X". Even the lazily-constructed ones are a great foundation if you have no idea about how to begin learning X.
25%: The classmates and TAs. Oral/written feedback, delivered efficiently and with empathy is not essential, but a great catalyst to development. This one's a bit personality-dependent, for other's it might be higher or lower.
25%: The assignments, projects, and deadline pressure. To learn things, you really need time-spaced practice. Reading is not sufficient. The deadline and grade pressures erode as you get better, but they're invaluable early on.
I think that you can get 90% of each of these online, just fine. But that's me! It might require personal conversation for others, but in my experience a good collection of reading and tasks, some form of IRC, and rudimentary deadline pressure are more than sufficient to replace the classroom for self-starting individuals. I think Coursera's relative success proven that case.
Do you have any pointers to online examples of syllabi you found useful? My syllabi are always to the point and focussed on the structure of the class; it's never occurred to me that someone might want to use them as a roadmap for independent learning, and I'd be interested in facilitating that.
BTW via Coursera (perhaps only through white label?) you can enroll at some universities and get an ordinary degree (no qualifying language like “online”, join the alumni association etc). So you can get that benefit from some online programs, though perhaps not the top echelon.
Despite that, I agree with you that the realtime meatspace stuff is at least 50% of the value for the higher end schools (say “top” 100, however you define “top”).
This is hugely important not just on the CV. The feedback you get from grading helps you understand what mistakes you made, and the prospect of receiving an official pass or failure grade is a big incentive to work hard.
I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here.
People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information.
But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions.
It’s chances to interact in larger groups.
It’s resources which can’t be shared online at all (libraries, information terminals, printers.)
There are also people who depend on interacting with people to process ideas.
All of this modulated by the degree.
If you are doing some courses, you very much depend on interacting with people - doing a negotiations module online is very different from an in person class to pick an example.
And fundamentally- human brains on average are designed to work with people.
Mine isn’t, and being at home and studying isn’t a bad deal- but i would cease being objective if I didn’t recognize that there are many ancillary and direct benefits to studying in college, and for some people in person studying is the only way they can achieve it.
Finally I present to the people here Blooms 2 Sigma problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem
People sorely sorely underestimate what “education” is actually about.
I got my undergrad in Nuclear Engineering, and I learned to use Gamma Ray Spectrometers costing easily 30,000 dollars and did Plasma Physics experiments in a Vacuum Chamber setup of similar cost, all the while supervised by people who knew how to safely perform experiments with radioactive material and comply with relevant government regulations. And I was mainly about Computational Neutron Transport - I got what was considered a bare-minimum grounding in Experimental Nuclear Science. This is to say nothing of programs with research reactors students can use for experiments (whose ranks my alma mater sadly left just as I arrived).
This was basically true of all the non-CS engineering disciplines. Perhaps one could cobble together an equivalent to a Mechanical Engineering or Civil Engineering degree from my alma mater with CnC Routers at Hackerspaces and the like. But I really can't imagine that working for Nuclear, Aerospace, Biomedical, the Semiconductor side of EE...
Or rather, I can, but it would require an enormous investment into high-fidelity simulation of the relevant equipment. And that is a dangerous road. At the moment, we verify Engineers' ability to use equipment in a very robust way - having them actually use the equipment to perform engineering tasks and measurements. If you rely instead on training simulators you need to be extremely vigilant about their fidelity (and you will almost certainly fall back on minimum duration of instructor-monitored usage of real equipment, like the nuclear and aerospace industries require).
Are the civil engineers running the local water treatment plant -- which can't seem to get enough qualified people -- going to hire people who don't meet the requirements to be called an "engineer" (unlike the US, these reqs are like doctors and lawyers).
If anything, the two-sigma problem argues against in-person teaching. Mastery based learning requires that a student prove that they have mastered the current concept before they are allowed to move on to the next concept. That is much easier to do in an online setting, where each student can be presented with customized material, than it is to do in a class of 30-or-so bored undergraduates.
For certain gen ed classes, maybe have the whole cohort in a single class, not for lectures or exams, but for discussion and collaboration. Make those courses fully project based and assign them uniformly across degree boundaries.
Right now, graduate level courses and prestigious institutions are the only ones even trying to offer a higher education. The majority of universities at this point are paper mills, rushing hundreds or thousands of students through programs without most of the benefits you described. It’s a system optimized for making money or university survival, rather than student achievement or societal benefit.
That immediately makes it clear to people that we dont have the money or people to afford that outcome, and after a few traversals on that ladder, the issue of education being a huge method to minimize the cost to educate people without overloading on number of teachers and cost of HR becomes apparent.
Mentorship is my new educational holy grail today frankly. Gone is the hope of the MOOC, now we need the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a mentor that customizes information that matches a student.
Fundamentally though people learn through play, thats how humans are designed.
Kids pick up 5000 combinations from playing league of legends, and do stupid number crunching on the fly.
However play is to hard to create, because we don't associate fun with a lot of work.
If we ever solve education, it will be solved by using play, even Mentors must understand fun.
In case you didn't get the reference: https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-young-...
> Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.
If the value of education was the information taught in the classes or the network, you should see a somewhat linear increase of value as you progress. For instance, after completing your second year out of four, you should receive ~50% of the college premium.
> Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...
Well, or employers think people drop out due to poor grades.
Three years of 4.0 GPA then dropping out due to pregnancy and three years of 1.0 GPA then dropping out before your expulsion hearing for cheating both put "3 years of college" on your resume.
I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more.
Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.
... perhaps put another way, the 'professionalization' of HR?
For various reasons, on both the employer and employee side, this has changed a lot especially when you're talking startups--but also companies like Amazon from what I understand. In any case, if the expected tenure of an employee is only a couple of years, it's probably unreasonable in most cases to have a 6-12 month training period during which the employee isn't especially productive.
That’s close to actual job requirements in a lot of places.
It’s similar to closing a house sale. The money earned by brokers who get the buyer to sign the contract is exponentially more than the money earned by the brokers who only get 90% of the way there.
That doesn’t mean that the value of the initial 90% of the work is 0.
Of course, this is an extreme example for illustration purposes, because real estate is a step function where the returns go from 0 to 100 at a single point.
The exponentially higher earnings of grads can similarly be explained as a step function where earnings go from 50 to 100 after a certain event. And it’s not even that surprising, because the event in question is completing the thing that you actually stepped out to do.
I think that ties in to the proliferation of higher degrees, where college is not a strong enough signal so students go on to receive higher degrees that signal more time, money and investment has been spent
As a restrospective thought experiment, if you offered me that piece of paper in exchange for a student loan the size of my college education, I would turn it down. But if you offered me the 4-year experience I actually got for that same loan, without the brand name, I would take it in a heartbeat. (You can't actually separate the two since the brand name in part enables the college to implement the product.)
Aside from actual academic knowledge like practice with low level OS and network concepts, here's what I got from those four years that I think made a concrete difference in my life and career:
1. The personal mentorship I got from a professor, who I met during a summer internship, but he was from my comp sci department. It was serendipitous that the two circles collided, but it was crucial, and, to the point, it was enabled by the college network.
2. Meeting people through friends in college who would become co-founders or connections into other jobs.
3. Taking very specific classes on soft skills, such as writing workshops. One in particular, which I took early in college, was like getting two in depth code reviews a week for twelve weeks, except it was for my writing. That course made me fluid and precise at writing. I still suck in comparison to many of my former classmates who write professionally, but it made me a stand-out effective communicator in engineering. In retrospect I would have paid 1/4th of a semester's tuition in a heartbeat for that course (took 4 courses that semester).
4. Being surrounded by people who weren't engineers, who were formidable doers and thinkers, about other fields, such as global health policy and politics. I still remember getting my ass handed to me in a dinnertime debate by someone who was obviously more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about public policy than I was. Getting intellectually smacked down by friends regularly taught me humility and appreciation for the value of expertise in other fields.
5. Spending four years in the company of driven people with high standards. For the people who embrace it, it rubs off on you the same way working on a strong team does. It demystifies high performers and teaches you that you can turn yourself into one.
6. Due to spending time around people who had money/power, you learn to not be (as) intimidated by those people. It's a crash course in walking and talking like an "elite" whether or not you are one.
And, well, the fact that it is isn't ranked well on any of those international rankings has not been a problem for my carrier at all. I have rarely been asked where I went to university and I don't think that it's affected my carrier at all.
However the fact that I have no student debt because tuition was pretty much free has been a boon for my professional life.
But I agree with you; I've worked in a lot of places, and in all of those except France, once you have real work experience, your university degree doesn't mean a whole lot for normal engineering jobs.
In the end, I do think that degrees matter less than what people think and that it's completely possible to have a good career without the school name or university name having much of an influence (obviously it's anecdotical and probably depends on the field). I do strongly believe that being saddled with lifelong student loans is probably more detrimental than the positive aspects of a degree in most cases (maybe with the exception of lawyers but the only those who can cope with the lifestyle)
As an example, in a previous job, I noted that the new French software engineer had come from INRIA and was a graduate of a Grand ecole. The fact that this resource went on to demonstrate well above average work and domain abilities was not a surprise to me.
So note that some of us do pay attention even if it is not mentioned during recruitment.
But if you're not going for that threshold, you'll likely not run into issues. And if you're in niche-careers, it's probably true as well.
We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?
There’s a wide variety of viewpoints on HN, so I think it’s unnecessary to speculate on what other people think, but personally the thing that doesn’t sit that well for me is that you’ve stated an opinion with nothing at all to back it up.
FWIW, having gone to both a not super reputable college (state school), and also a very reputable one, I can’t say that reputation is the “main” value, I might have benefitted from it but I wouldn’t even know. The math classes at the reputable school had much higher standards, they were harder and I learned more. I have some lifelong friends from both schools, but the group from the reputable school is generally much higher profile and further reach. I sold a business to someone I met through the reputable school. I also now work for someone I met through the state school.
That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program.
It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.
I guess maybe i needed to do my studies under one set of assumptions to have the motivation. Whilst only finding out on the otherside that those years were really only spent to get me my first job. And now my degree doesn't matter.
True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.
After 15 years, most people do not care anymore about your education; but when getting that first job, unless you have an impressive portfolio (and even then...), that piece of paper is huge.
With a recognised piece of paper, you can get much more easily get into a recognised company, which has a trickle down effect for the rest of your career.
There are some areas like doctor or experimental physics where physical presence makes a lot of sense. But most education can be found and consumed much better by thinking of the internet as your entire college and then work much more on self-motivation and curiosity which are the real secrets to educating yourself.
At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university?
Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. Many positions probably don't demand skills beyond the ability to write mostly CRUD apps. The pedigree doesn't really matter in that case.
All companies have these roles. Somebody needs to do the mundane work.
Never.
> Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates.
But that doesn't mean you rank those people lower. It means you offer them the job at the budgeted salary. If they don't accept the job offer at the salary range you've budgeted for the position, then you move on to the next candidate.
This might make less sense if there's a strong opportunity cost (i.e., missing a candidate because they already accepted a job), but that's not typically the case for new grads.
There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.
Administrators for the sake of administrators everywhere.
All the while these organisations are grading their own students we will continue to get a somewhat mediocre system.
When I started university I was a returning student with a budding tech career. I promised myself I would get a degree, but I wasn't totally sure what benefit it would be. I thought I already had the tech skills needed to do what I wanted to do.
While taking some required political science classes I discovered the world of development cooperation. I did a bit of traveling. I decided to use my time at a 4-year to explore the world of NGOs and other large-scale initiatives. I did a study-abroad project to do some free tech work for a global nonprofit. I fell in love with a new city. I did a short masters to further my knowledge, and also see if it would be possible to combine my tech background and this new world. It was, so I did.
It's hard to know if something similar would have happened without that experience. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, since I a) paid for my own education and b) probably earn less now that I've changed directions than I would if I hadn't. But I'm so incredibly glad I did. I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.
I have a friend going through this scenario minus the 80k debt. The field might not exist in their location. She’s looking at relocating and losing custody of her daughter. Or working another job and staying put for her family. I’ve met a lot of brilliant people who’s ambition has been bypassed or delayed due to external factors.
Sometimes getting the brass ring means sacrificing more than you can give.
There's a lot more to life than credentializing for wage slavery.
Doing the same over $ONLINE_SERVICE is not quite the same experience, just like a terminal-emulator-in-a-browser isn't quite the real thing when you have slightly higher and jittery lag. And an async/await model (post code on forum, get back answer anything from minutes to hours later) is not the same thing at all.
For some students, they can only receive advice asynchronously and it makes it difficult to meet deadlines based on EDT timezones. Even video debugging/office hours for people in EDT is awful, despite advances in screen sharing/Zoom.
Also, I helped transition a professor to virtual instruction. They had never installed the Internet in their house before. They own no smartphone. They communicate entirely through landline and a dated desktop PC in their office. When absolutely necessary (course admin, journal paper updates) they will use Pine for email. This prof taught a 30-person graduate course in neurobiology having never touched any of the technologies they had to use. Bless that class.
A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.
Say you pay someone to do an inspection of your home that the gov is requiring before you can sell. Has that inspector taught you anything or made any tangible improvements to your home? No. What they've done is signal to the gov and buyers that your home passes inspections.
Colleges even market this aspect as the key differentiator from online classes.
In that case, I do think some refund is due on principle, because students at home in isolation definitely aren't getting that.
- less anxiety being in IRC than in class
- more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure)
- more communication with other students and teachers
- automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly-I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.
-There's less focus in online classes because now you have to manage all the different ways you have to communicate with everyone, official and unofficial, in the hopes you can get enough interaction to slog your way through the horribly written assignments and figure out what they actually want you to do.
-There's essentially zero communication with teachers -- they're almost totally absent, communication with other students can be helpful, or not, and you don't always know. There are typically two or three TAs for up to 600 students, so any kind of focused interaction with a TA is almost unheard of, and even if you do get that their level of expertise is often in question.
-autograders work well for some very defined sorts of problems, but they don't work at all for most workflows. The TAs, in my experience, spend most of their limited time fixing autograder screwups.
Like 1 in 5 college students[1], I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I frequently have anxiety in class, especially before the professor starts talking and is just scanning the room and occasionally making eye contact with me, or if I'm asked to interact with other students.
That said, I still think that MOOCs aren't remotely comparable to real college classes.
[1] pg. 16 - https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II_Spring_2018_Refe...
- I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material.
- I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time.
- I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person.
- Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.
Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale.
>Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming
I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.
Maybe even this is not that hard. People already compete virtually on mobile and console games of all kinds of complexity just to see their names at the top of a "leaderboard"
If you can tell from a resume someone attended in-person, it gives their degree more academic integrity. Not that you can't cheat if you attend in-person, but it's a whole lot harder to pay someone to take the exam for you.
Ivy league and other high end colleges are much more a brand than they are a product.
The what?
I believe the colleges when they say that their professors are doing their best. That they are delivering the same high level material. However, that is willfully ignoring the fact that content is a very small part of the college education experience. The delivery, environment, and people are what gives college its value. Lose that and the cost, especially for these high ranking colleges, is not worth it.
My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured.
It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you, while you're uprooted like a minor refugee and living who knows where that you didn't plan to.
Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. This is especially true that universities will be prepared this fall, and were not in late winter/early spring.
My sense is that a lot of the schadenfreude and resentment here on HN and elsewhere is due to a general sense that something is really very wrong with higher education at the moment, at least in the US, and wanting to see it radically reformed. I agree, but I think the problems are not really related to the value of in-person degree education vs what you can get online. The real issues have to do with the cost of the education in general, how degrees are viewed in vocational settings, and costs and spending within higher educational institutions. Until those things change, it will take a lot more than SARS-CoV-2 to change things.
For some large classes in certain universities, yes. In the rest it's a regular professor giving a live lecture who is now doing it over Zoom.
> Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students.
Students aren't the only people on campus.
"There will be more openings than usual for tenure-track jobs in a year"
[1] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6926-mayhhsbriefing/...
So no, we're getting lectures over Zoom at the UCs, at least. If my group of friends had the inclination to talk about serious school stuff, and not literally anything else that keeps our minds off of the state of the world, I could ask people about the situation from anywhere from Rice to Stanford to Princeton. But we don't talk about this, because it's heavy, and if we can shrug that burden off for the time we have together, then that's enough. [0]
Going to back to UCSD in particular, the Chancellor's name is particularly acrimonious in connotation. A couple days ago, I wrote a post here on the state of UCSD's much touted dining [1]. Spoiler: it's not pretty. If you look at the privately shared memes, there's a lot of negative sentiment.
[0] Last night's OST: https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883
I have my doubts that students will be back in the fall. The contagiousness of this virus is not going away, and students (particularly undergraduates, almost all of which live in dorms at Stanford) are far too densely connected for social distancing to be effective.
> major universities doing online stuff have video production crews
Yes, but those crews don't have the bandwidth to suddenly help every professor transition to online teaching in the space of two weeks.
Also, the online versions of courses which those professionally produced videos are part of, are priced lower than the in-person courses which are currently being taught on Zoom. However at my wife’s college the price has not come down, no partial refunds are being given, no deferments are being allowed, and no transitions to part-time are being allowed.
In other words, students get to choose between leaving the course or paying the same vast amount of money for a reduced level of service.
> It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you
No, that's precisely what it is. One week all classes were in person, then the college cancelled all classes for two weeks to transition, then all classes resumed on Zoom. Neither the professors nor the students had any more warning than that. The college did pay for a Zoom Enterprise subscription so that classes aren’t time-limited by Zoom’s free tier, but that was the extent of the help given to professors. Many professors have never used video conferencing before, or have poor WiFi. Many students have no private quiet spaces to join chats because they’re sharing accommodation in a very expensive city. There was inadequate time and no training or help for professors to adjust lesson plans or teaching resources, and library and printing facilities were closed to students.
The college’s entire response was very ad-hoc. This is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, all of us are making it up as we go along. The problem is that this institution is still charging the same sky-high tuition (six figures for a course) to students who are pouring into it their life savings, or going into lifelong debt. Meanwhile the college is delivering less value and sitting on an enormous multi-billion dollar endowment.
We’re not involved in the lawsuit, but we certainly understand where it’s coming from.
I agree with you actually... what I'm suggesting is that the current situation with online teaching isn't really generalizable to long-term experiences of it, or the situation where something is planned with online teaching in mind.
I know things will vary by institution for sure, but for a lot of schools going forward they're going to try to avoid the problems you're mentioning.
My guess is even when students return, there will be things like substituting large lectures with online material, etc. Colleagues of mine at other institutions are being told that going forward training and skills in online instruction is being expected of everyone. This sounds obvious but what it means in practice is that the university probably won't find what happened this past semester acceptable.
There's a lot of issues for sure, but I don't think that the long-term experiences of online instructions can be generalized from this past semester.
The colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use those endowments to hedge exactly this sort of risk.
There were a lot of articles over the past few years about various teeny tiny colleges investing their entire endowment in funds and yelling from the rooftops that they out-performed Harvard's endowment.
The bill is going to come due. Over the next two years, a lot of small colleges that were investing for annual returns instead of for ensuring institutional survival are going to collapse under the quadruple whammy of refunds, lawsuits, decreased enrollment, and decimated endowment.
While I wouldn't argue leaving endowments completely untouched in this situation is necessary, I think saying that "the colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use these endowments to hedge exactly this rot of risk" and criticizing them for investing their endowments is a dramatic oversimplification of the situation.
A small minority of colleges have endowments worth discussing.
To me, it feels like a technical problem. Staring at a small screen in a browser window vs being immersed. Even being able to "see" your classmates or an avatar for them might help.
I'm also an avid educational content watcher, so I've seen and tried to learn from the best educational content creators over the past decade or so. I've also followed the EdTech space, as a hobby, since before the MOOC acronym even came into existence. Combine all of that with tangentially related hobbies like:
* watching and reading about game design and how to incorporate it into traditional learning styles,
* listening to how podcasts and online content is created/delivered,
and that's where I learned about teaching online effectively. I wish I could continue working in this space, but well... that's a story for another time.
If the restaurant can't serve me pork, for example because they've run out, then the right answer is still not to just assume I'll be ok with beef instead.
I don't see how "this other thing is of equal value" (which is debatable in itself) is a defense to a claim that I'm not getting the product or service that I signed up for?
Note that there are already refunds for at least some of the in-person stuff such as dorms and gym access. So were already in a position of compromise and partial refund. It's just an argument of what that number should be.
Can't the respective student stop paying by quitting the university (of course, he will leave without a degree)?
That's going to be the sticking point, I guess. You could say that giving me beef instead of pork achieves the aim of feeding me just as well. I might disagree (in this analogy, imagine I'm a Hindu).
There are two critical points to keep in mind: cost of instruction increased, and this was something the schools couldn't control. A refund for the last few weeks of the semester with no credit makes sense (the students can withdraw and get a prorated refund). An arbitrary refund when the students have access to the material and instructors and get the same credits is not reasonable.
the problem with this analogy is that a restaurant just isn't very similar to a college. it's really important to a restaurant not to lose a good customer over a single bad experience, and it doesn't cost them much to comp a single meal (it costs even less to give credit towards a future meal). a college doesn't have to care that much about any particular student, but giving refunds causes serious cashflow issues.
that said, I don't think what the students are asking is necessarily unreasonable. if you go to a cheap state school and you're still getting the degree, I'd say you don't have much to complain about. if you're paying $60k for world-class facilities and face time with world-class researchers, I'd say the institution should do at least something to make you whole.
A "bad night" because it was hit by a tornado. Your wording implies the universities did something wrong. It's not like they could have done anything differently. They weren't responsible for the pandemic and they were legally obligated to shut down.
> I'd say the institution should do at least something to make you whole
I'd say it is unreasonable. They're not asking for a generic "something to make them whole". They want all the benefits plus a healthy refund. I don't know what the legal basis for their argument would be. Almost certainly they have lawyers who expect bad publicity to force universities to pay. That kind of rubs me the wrong way.
Disclosure: I work at a university.
> They want all the benefits plus a healthy refund.
I don't think this is an accurate portrayal of the situation, unless you think the entire value of a college education is instruction, grading, and the piece of paper at the end. the school I went to was very much like this: I went to class, got good grades, graduated, and got a good job. no fun, no frills, just business. it was pretty cheap though, so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth.
I don't think people pay $60k a year for the "just business" experience. if they're not walking around the beautiful campus, going to events, or using expensive science equipment, they're not getting their money's worth anymore. online class is a sad substitute for this experience.
That would be part of the reason universities are getting money from the government through this, as compensation for their efforts, and for taking care of students. For all that has cost the school, they've also got a lot less costs (residential utilities, food, campus entertainment).
And business continuity would behoove them to have had _some_ contingency in place. Alas, my partner, who works in university administration, has seen just how little many universities have had, if any, for having to shift to remote learning, partially or completely.
as I understand it, there's a certain amount of "funny money" going on with private institutions. the actual cost of a year of school doesn't reconcile with tuition receipts; it gets supplemented with donations, state funds, and returns on the endowment. this makes it sort of hard to put a dollar value on what a fair tuition refund would look like.
Is the benefit the college credit (which you seem to imply), or the education? Because they're not getting the same education. Your argument seems to be "well they'll still get credit, so what's the problem?".
Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only.
Tools are being built and the experience will improve thanks to this global reset.
Education is a space that hasn't really been disrupted ever. Definitely isn't happening within a few weeks.
The online version had:
1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?)
2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it.
3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now.
4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.)
The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.
But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common.
What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.
Online courses have several advantages:
1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added.
2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses).
3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material.
4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures.
5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class.
6) You learn at your own rate.
Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.
Make sure to blame the university, not the professors. We're trying our best with almost no help.
Just askin'
The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying.
Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while.
The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.
Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education.
Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content.
Yet We know that with this world class information and self selected motivated students (!!) only a tiny fraction of the class will finish.
In contrast, most people who get in, finish college.
In person education beats online education hollow.
Matter of fact even the work from home enthusiasm will wane and return to office work.
There are too many things people do by being in proximity to each other which may have nothing to do with the “mission”, but make the mission possible.
For example, when I am teaching a class, it is a dynamic process. I am responding to people's questions, they are responding to my response, etc. Most of that goes away online. There are some attempts to recreate it, but most students just do not find it is the same.
You put your finger on it exactly: "most people who get in, finish."
But that doesn't address the article. I am not a lawyer, but the suit seems foolish to me. Colleges were ordered to close. That seems relevant to me.
Conversations here usually shift from the article to some variant of "disrupt education" and college is signalling.
I find Bloom's 2 Sigma problem to be illustrative of the extent to which online learning is a loss to students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Studying in person has significantly different results.
The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
>The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
I'm sympathetic. The students aren't getting what they paid for. It's no one in particular's fault, but the service being paid for is being delivered in degraded form. I'm not sure you can even argue that, in general, the students will still get credit for this semester's courses because some classes probably can't be completed and, for a variety of reasons, many students will probably lose part of this semester and end up tacking on time to their degree as a result.
As a counter point to this, roughly 1/2 of med students attend class in person never or rarely. They use online resources because they think it's more efficient. They still pay the 50k a year for med school because they need the credential and it's the gateway for the clinical instruction in years 3/4 that has to be done in person.
The problem with the MOOC model is that it doesn't serve as a credential that people trust
This isn't really true.
"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 41% of first-time full-time college students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only 59% earn a bachelor’s in six years."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/19/just-41percent-of-college-st...
In contrast, these are MOOC completion rates:
>Among all MOOC participants, 3.13 percent completed their courses in 2017-18, down from about 4 percent the two previous years and nearly 6 percent in 2014-15.
www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their-goals
They add:
>Certainly 55,000 people got access to education they might not otherwise have had. But "rather than creating new pathways at the margins of global higher education," the authors write, "MOOCs are primarily a complementary asset for learners within existing systems."
They do allude to a construct called "Verfied Students" which I have no idea about, which have higher but significantly varying completion rates.
> And among the "verified" students, 46 percent completed in 2017-18, compared to 56 percent in 2016-17 and about 50 percent the two previous years.
I have never encountered how that cohort was constructed, however if we are to start breaking down sub groups of students from general numbers, your data shows that non-profit and public institutions have near 60% graduation rates at 6 years.
In general a random student will more will likely graduate from a college, than a random person starting a MOOC.
I don't think I've ever completed a MOOC. When I get what I want out of it I drop it. Now if I was paying for it or if completion was a requirement for a job or promotion I think I'd be more invested in completing the course.
This is one of the reasons that online education will fall behind real world college classes.
Another is whether people learn the same amount.
"The official four-year graduation rate for students attending public colleges and universities is 33.3%. The six-year rate is 57.6%."
Most MOOCs have poor retention because there's no commitment. There's no reason to continue to apply oneself.
I've had a great deal of success with Coursera and a small in-person study group to keep us committed.
I spent 4 hours yesterday on Kahn Academy remembering my calculus so I could help my daughter.
MOOCs are invaluable resources, but those alone are insufficient. Support and study groups are an important adjunct.
*: https://www.cappex.com/articles/blog/government-publishes-gr...
The whole point of things like technology is to make things easier, keyboards and mice make it possible to manipulate tools to increase the amount of actions we can execute by using programmed automation (for example).
VR just makes doing that more expensive.
Generally, professors are not trained to teach at all. They’re trained to research.
That being said, I was already teaching a hybrid online and in person course, so the transition was (at least from my perspective) pretty seamless. We’ll see how the students feel after we receive evaluations.
Schools could run a month long course, aimed at online learning, to match their current IRL teaching training
I've been a student of Georgia Tech's online Master's program for a few semesters now. They've had years to iterate based on previous students' feedback. I am learning an incredible amount for a decent price. But it is a Master's program and involves a lot of self-motivated research. Also, it costs roughly $850 per semester (if you take only one course). I'm not sure I'd have done it if it had cost thousands.
Where in state tuition is $13k a year, out of state is $33 and a masters program is $10k total (or $1700 a year based on the same calculations)
In fact, it seems like the Corona crisis will boost university applications in Europe - If you can't have your gab year and find work you might as well just study. In the US it seems like we will see the opposite effect - Less people will apply and commence studies.
Personally I don't really buy into the monetization-of-every-aspect-of-life. I did not take my education for its monetary value and I am more than happy to have been removed from that concern. That is a privilege I am more than happy to pay forward to current students.
Even if I had bought into that way of thinking and paid tuition up front, I am not sure how I could have used that information to decide on a major? Under all circumstances I would put myself in position for the highest paid role, regardless of tuition?
Anyways, this is a complex topic and one of the most fundamental differences in the European and American way of thinking. I don't see any right or wrong, just differences.
2. It is a well designed course, regardless of delivery format. Which means only a reasonable amount of deliberation and care is needed to make it good for online delivery.
My conclusion is that I don't think the format is the issue. I think the issue is that most courses are poorly designed in the first place. Insufficient effort and resources are applied and the result is crap.
This comes with the caveats that many topics are best learnt in practical settings (chemistry, some biology, arts etc) so they translate poorly to online only.
I am all for online education, but it's hit and miss how comparable it is. The course I'm taking at the moment is nearly exactly the same without it's in-class component: I wasn't even attending the in-person classes before the pandemic! But plenty of other classes I took were largely for the hands-on experience which couldn't be replicated over the web.
If I had a reservation at a restaurant before the Coranvirus, and the restaurant is now closed, I'm not forced to buy a take-out order instead—I just don't pay. That really sucks for all the people who work at the restaurant, but I don't think forcing customers to pay for a service they didn't receive is the right solution.
It can ignore a few months of disturbance, as demonstrated by long strikes or major events. It can't skip one cycle.
Make no mistake, the situation sucks for everyone. But it seems to me that actually educating people should take priority over meeting an arbitrary deadline.
For universities, it's gonna be a lot more tricky. They shouldn't get away with charging up to 50k a year for nothing. They can't deliver labs and practical trainings. There is no continuity between an undergraduate and an postgraduate, probably somewhere else.
Colleges could also snap their fingers and mail everyone diplomas in exchange for nothing, if they felt so inclined.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that schools aren't just meaningless certificate factories and that the students who attend them actually learn stuff. Just because the students are being moved up doesn't mean they're adequately prepared for next year.
If a child didn't fully learn to write, or a high schooler didn't complete calculus, they can catch up the next year. (schools will probably have to adjust their curriculum slightly to catch up). Schools don't teach anything major that can't be redone or skipped.
Universities don't have this luxury. If a future dentist didn't train on a procedure this year, too bad because that was the only time it's covered. Gonna have to discover it in the field if it comes up?
It sucks, but the real issue is that there's no social safety net for these types of folks in many places, which makes my first sentence sound kinda uncaring, but there's not many other options.
The other major issue is that, for a lot of the students in college, they don't really even need the degree as anything other than a key to the gatekeeping tool used by employers. I'm not saying education is worthless, it's important to have a well rounded knowledge of the world, but you don't need that degree to be a sales person or a realtor or a welder or a carpenter or maybe even a developer. In other words, we shouldn't be forcing them to choose: degree or livelihoods.
This sucks, and I feel for everyone (I'm unemployed as well) but we all will have to deal with some discomfort, I'm really sorry to say that though.
Both of those do require certifications (at least for some types of welding) and for good reasons tied to legal requirements and safety.
One option for K-12 would be to take fewer incoming Kindergardeners, perhaps by moving up the birthday cutoff date. Parents can get over themselves; this isn't a normal situation and some shared sacrifice is necessary.
None of this is a good, but I find it preferable to the current status quo. Making sure students get the education they're due should take priority over meeting arbitrary dates.
First, what did the schools promise? And, did they deliver on it?
I doubt it's spelled out in a contract but based on most schools' marketing, the "promise" includes instruction, state of the art classrooms & labs, access to professors, peers, extra curricular activities, dorms, a beautiful campus, and a number of other things. Obviously they've delivered some form of instruction and potentially a way to connect with peers.. but was it the quality or even the product promised/implied?
These promises typically happen when people are doubting about signing the contract, and universities are more like "don't worry about the loan, you'll get such a nice job afterwards that you'll be rich and this will feel like pocketchange".
The student that finish university and aren't able to land a good enough job due to their education can sue and do often win.
That's much simpler to handle in court than the questions you are considering, but it requires actually finishing the degree.
At the same time, university is extraordinarily expensive. If you are paying 50K/year and not getting what you paid for, you are going to feel like you are owed something. Add on the fact that many students' parents have lost all or parts of their incomes, or fear that they will going forward, and it would be surprising if we didn't see these lawsuits.
Ultimately, it's going to depend what is in the contracts that were signed. If there's a force majure clause favoring the universities, then the students may not have a case. If not, then yeah, they aren't getting what they paid for and should be entitled to refunds.
Another comparison would be to prepay for a sit down experience at a high end restaurant, only to be told the restaurant shut down and you're actually going to actually have to get the food delivered. Presumably you'd want a partial refund not just because you didn't get the "magical vibe", but also because you literally did not sit in the physical space for 2+ hours.
Yes, you can learn some things, but you can also learn it by just watching YouTube.
The whole point of being physically present in college, is to commingle with your peers. Because surely, you’re not going to make friends over Zoom. That’s just pretty damn lame.
Of course, you hope to sharpen a few skills, and learn a few more things in the 4 years, but just being present is part of the experience. But you’re definitely not going to make a life long friend over Zoom, as opposed to having beers or just chilling at a house party, after your midterms are done.
Colleges should offer online education for $1. It’s useful, but not quite the same.
>Yes, you can learn some things, but you can also learn it by just watching YouTube.
This relies on heavy assumptions.
I recently had a few programming classes with lecturer who has 15 years of experience in industry and a lot of in academia
Not only his lectures are at very good level - best practices, industry standards but also very fresh technology and additionally you have an opportunity to ask questions.
It's not that easy to find this kind of materials on Youtube or even paid services.
Youtube often covers topics briefly, so you have to try to find blogs of an actual experts.
3.7 million kids graduating this year, 70% of them planning on going to college, and probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal.
The drop in enrollment could be lessened a bit by lowering tuition for pandemic-related online classes, if required again (more than likely). Especially since many of those who take the year off may never return. If the colleges were smart they'd think about this before digging their heals in.
I can only imagine. It's by no means a given that all universities will even be open for the fall term--and it's hard for me to imagine it makes sense to start college under those circumstances. Of course, it's also not a given what the options for other activities will be if you just go ahead and defer for a year.
Or on the flip side, everyone who starts this fall will have an advantage in the hiring market 4 years from now when fewer than normal graduates are entering the workforce due to those who encouraged their kids to take a year off now.
- Public schools? I pay a lot of property tax to public schools. They aren't running, but teachers are still getting paid. If we demand refunds from colleges, why can't we demand back-property-taxes?
- Parks and recreation? I paid taxes for state and local parks which are shut down, and I'm not allowed to use.
- The court system? We paid taxes for a functioning police and justice system, which where I am (Seattle) has basically shut down except for flat-out murder.
- Zoos, museums aquariums, and other civic institutions I can't access
I don't think it's fair or practical to try to make a tally of all the services which can't be fully rendered. Institutions are stuck with enormous bills for infrastructure they've built and staff they are (trying) to keep paying. This isn't the time to let lawyers start siphoning money off of institutions attempting in good faith to do what they were paid for.
What will be even more fun is watching the house of cards fall apart once the lockdowns extend into the new year and international students stay home. Now there's a cash drain no university can cope with.
The high prices were an unintended(?) effect of guaranteed student loans. So, a warped kind of free.
In a sense I was lucky when this quarantine in place happened because my college does 8 week classes and we were on a break when things started. Therefore, all the classes I'm teaching right now have been virtual/online from the start and I didn't have to switch gears in the middle of a semester. Even in these classes where we do live zoom meetings I don't really feel like I know my students. It is better and more like a real class than online but the added tech issues make it less than ideal.
I 've heard that online classes do not work. Conferences do, however, in fact i think they are preferable. And they get a ton more visibility and attendance too
If there's something about university it's that the culture of curiosity, studying and learning is contagious , and also there's the competitive element which pushes students to perform better. I don't know how you would recreate that in the virtual world. Perhaps with a lot of gamification
IMO: anything artificial is going to so filled with administrators avoiding liability because of the complexity of human interaction that it will be useless.
In summary, colleges are only in the business of pimping professor time and selling credits to a piece of paper. Apparently access to those expensive campus buildings and all the friends you made along the way wasn't part of the deal. Therefore, no refunds are necessary.
Not really applicable. Endowment funds ussually have guidelines attached. They are not for general use and are certainly not used for paying refunds. Much of the point of an endownment fund, as opposed to just handing over cash, is that the fund is protected from lawsuits by students demanding their money back, or anyone else making claims against the university. Endowed money is not the university's property.
I did physics. Good luck using a scanning electron microscope, or getting access to an optics lab at home.
A lot of disciplines require specialised and expensive hardware, software or equipment. Industrial design, medicine, electrical engineering, chemical engineering. That’s the value add.
https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-p...
Even worse, it was a certification but since it was so low touch the teachers were not grading anything. I do not know what they were certifying, I guess that you paid for the course. I withdrew and they gave me a pro-rated refund that basically charged 300 dollars per class. Absolutely awful education experience.
For some reason, I have a feeling that these firms will take a hefty fee and students will STILL end up with the bill eventually...
The country - and courts - might be surprised to learn that we've apparently only been dealing with this since mid April.
It feels both university and students want to have the cake and eat it.
It's disingenuous to use that as a reply to a post about the tax deductibility of a contribution to a charity.
If it's all online you've lost this important place to connect with others. What you learn is basically available for a fraction of the price. It's only the degree that you're left with basically.
I'm trying to understand the limits of entitlement in a pandemic scenario.
I live near a large (50,000 undergrad students) state university. They have means to survive, but are losing money at an amazing rate right now. If students come at the university with lawsuits and demand refunds en masse, it will be bad for everyone -- including the students.
This situation is different, unique -- and should be treated differently than "I didn't get exactly what I paid for," especially considering what went into a best-possible-alternative workaround.
Computer clusters that were previously on-site only were reconfigured with a Citrix-like access.
Gyms, no. Of course not. Maybe a refund of those kinds of fees is reasonable.
I've been downvoted here so I can see that my view is unpopular. I think the university, at least the one I am familiar with, is doing everything short of welcoming students to campus in order to make the best experience for the students.
At a UC, we are paying ~1,000 dollars for services that simply don't exist. And don't get me started on out-of-state students. Add a zero on to that figure. These services, which have all been shut down include: shuttles, gyms, libraries, computer labs. We are pissed. Nothing has been changed from their usual online services for libraries, check out by mail isn't a thing. Computer access hasn't changed. And our school has not, and does not plant to refund any money. Keep in mind that they received $38 million from the government as part of the cares act, half of which was supposed to be given directly to students ASAP. Nothing has been said about that money.
I hope you can see why we are mad, and why we think the university isn't doing enough to address our concerns.
My experience at uni usually involved going to the lecture, not quite grasping the rushed material, then heading to the computer lab after to stream a YouTube video on the same topic to actually understand it.
Why was I going to the lectures then? Who knows, on the offhand chance I might ask a question.
Now I'm on the other side of the looking glass, I see three types of uni students - those who group collaborate and therefore are confident enough to ask questions in class (because they no longer fear their peers), those who are silent throughout because they do fear their peers, and those who are silent throughout because they've already read the lecture notes.
The only ones who gain are the students who make use of this collaborative environment to ask free questions.
TLDR - You pay for the environment. The lecture notes, the knowledge - all exist on YouTube
But then I had a slew of amazing professors in my final year including a philosophy class that was so compelling to me that, after graduating, I sat in their class for a semester without even being enrolled.
I went to a large state school (University of Texas). Sometimes I wonder how different uni would have been for me academically if I went to a tiny school with consistently small classes, as those were always my best experiences in uni.
For example, my calculus classes were so bad at UT (rushed, couldn't interact with the professor, assumed you learned everything outside of class) that I ended up getting my two calculus classes out of the way at a Houston community college over the summer. And man, the class was slow paced, everyone had a chance to ask questions, only 12 kids were in the class. It blew my mind that that class was $60 and my crowded, rushed UT class was $4500.
Something just isn't right in our higher education system.
In-person university lectures are the only time I experienced boredom because it felt like such an inefficient way to learn things.
The instructor has a serious impact on how the material is presented. I had transform mathematics from David Huffman of Huffman coding fame at the same time I had a similar physics math course.
Both got to the same end, but I only passed both because of the approach and the notes I had from Huffman.
Everyone learns differently and that situation where a professor can convey things on a way that clicks isn’t going to happen with a random YouTube video.
Many postdocs who teach are just beginning their academic careers and are juggling running their analyses and creating their profiles that will bring them fame, against their less rewarding teaching duties.
My academic has peaked, so I put more of myself into teaching and training and often find it rewarding when I interact freely with a few keen individuals, but the majority of students out there aren't keen. They're there because they are forced to learn to my schedule and not theirs
I do still however fondly remember my CS101 course with Richard Bornat (who I thought was an excellent lecturer) and wish I'd taken more interest in the lambda calculus elements of the curriculum (we had Peter Landin as head of department) but at the point in time I was heading more down a C / embedded systems / ASIC path.
Students have lesser avenues to obtain financing than universities; I imagine it’s more important to allow students to keep their finances in order rather than the university (which can access Government grants, PPP loans and apply for other kinds of relief. For those with endowments, they can dip into those funds too)
Because if everybody does this for everything at the same time the economy will collapse. Thing that can be solve later with a little negotiation should be solved later to cause as little as possible long term disruption.
If I've ordered a new Ferrari, and the dealership can only get me a used Toyota Camry, would you have me pay Ferrari prices?
Even in extreme times, if you pay for something but get something other than what you were promised, adjustments need to be made.
A lot of that is hands on work. No Zoom session is going to make up for that.