UBC Engineering removes online classes, obstacles for international students
ubyssey.ca
ubyssey.ca
I for one am glad provinces are mandating in person classes again.
It’s natural to talk and collaborate with people around you in a physical classroom, but it feels so incredibly forced to interact with people in prescribed breakout rooms.
Not to mention it’s been a year and almost no curriculums have actually been adapted to an online format. If we’re going to shove a curriculum based around in person attendance down everyone’s throats, you might as well have the students show up in person.
All I see is dinosaurs trying to fight in every possible way to try and keep their right to exist. Feels a lot like mp3 in the 90s.
People who are there for the piece of paper generally don't give a rats ass about the rest.
People who are really interested in their field have so many other ways to gather knowledge and experience.
Yes. 100%. In my physics class last term, performance was so consistently poor on exams that the minimum score on exams was 40%, and you could earn 15+% on top of your final exam just for showing up to class. Instructional quality was very poor, due in part to the online format. Knowledge retention was equally poor.
If college is to move online, it needs a fresh start. Classes need to be designed for online interactions rather than in person.
Good schools typically want to filter out these people; You want an environment where people are there for learning and passionate about their field, not just checking stuff off a checklist.
For an area such as chemical engineering, how are you supposed to do lab exercises at home? Not to say, exams are a shit show with rampant cheating.
This would be trivial to avoid with something simple like a safety deposit; You leave 10k and you get it back once you legally depart the country at the end of your visa. Overstay and lose it. Alternatively, the home country could underwrite it. This would remove any incentive they have for keeping a student from returning home.
Even before the convenient excuse of Covid, it seems overstaying or illegally working on a student visa was quite common in Canada [0].
[0] https://thewalrus.ca/the-shadowy-business-of-international-e...
Some universities are addicted to foreign student money and could not survive long without it (not even the tuition premium: just having 40% of students from abroad).
Some others are pretty much living off endowments. They could shut down international admissions and give full rides to everyone and still make profits.
My understanding was the discussion is about undergraduate study ("second-year chemical engineering student").
International students in Canada can get work permits without much difficulty, and have a relatively easy path towards permanent residency & naturalization once they graduate.
The reason so many international students enroll in graduate studies have nothing to do with how much they can get paid flipping burgers, and everything to do with why they are enrolling in a foreign program in the first place. A graduate degree significantly improves their career prospects at home, and opens a lot of immigration doors abroad.
Current HN title: "UBC Engineering removes online classes, obstacles for international students"
Article title: "UBC Engineering removes all upper-year online classes as obstacles remain for returning international students"
The shortened HN title, upon my first and second readings, implies that UBC removed obstacles for international students. In fact, the opposite is the case, as the article title clarifies.
Example: San Francisco is home to law firms such as Campagnoli, Abelson & Campagnoli; Carlson, Calladine & Peterson; and Carter, Carter, Fries and Grunschlag.
x, y, and z; a, b, and c; and i, j, and k make common groups of variable names.
Anyway, agree it's at best ambiguous.
That's almost malicious and here's why.
What happens if a student catches covid? They stay at home and just miss class for 2 weeks? What if a student is a close contact? Do they still go to class or do they stay at home? You're incentivizing students to go to class despite possible exposure.
My school has mandatory vaccinations and is a small school but 1 week in there's already 68 positive cases. Thankfully everything is live streamed and stored for future viewing, and some classes will also host a zoom with a TA for live questions during lecture.
Whatever they'd have done if they caught the flu in 2019.
For example, in Fall 2019 (before Covid), I had 60 students across my various courses. Three of them missed weeks of classes each because they had some significant medical issues. Others missed a week of classes because they were going to some extracurricular competition. Nothing bad happened to them. We just accommodated for their issues.