Future of college will involve fewer professors | Hacker News Reader

Future of college will involve fewer professors

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I am not positive about this development. I did take some online courses in undergrad, and my masters is through omscs which is a great program for online. But in person is a strictly better format. The cost of universities is not driven by professors, it is driven by administrators and absurd buildings and easy money for loans. I have great relationships with some professors, that you just do not build online. You do not build relationships with class mates online the same as in person. Online is convenient, sure, and it can teach more people, yeah. But in person is a much better experience and I think more conducive to learning long term. And as those relationships and networking are oh so often important in life, online and the rise of adjunct professors doing the bulk of teaching is really going to do a disservice to people. Its the equivalent of thinking about this quarter profits that harms long term profits.

In person is a better experience for some. I have Tourette’s and my in person lectures were my nightmare. I got shit from every single professor because of something I couldn’t control. So no, in person isn’t strictly better. I know a lot of people with other learning difficulties that would also agree that online is better for them.

I am surprised the professors would say anything about a student with a disability. My schools have all had offices for disabilities that worked for accommodations and most professors, or humans hopefully, would work with them happily.

Tourette’s wasn’t considered a disability until after my time in college, but they were given notice that a student with Tourette’s was joining their class. Did it help? Nope. The amount of times a professor would point out my outburst, throat clearing, grunting made me hate going to school so much that I dropped out with only a semester left to graduate.

Has anyone polled the students?

A decade ago I was an undergrad being polled about virtual learning. Unanimous "it sucks" came from the students. The customer knows when they're getting screwed in cost savings measures. The piece of paper is the most important thing they're paying for, but it'd be nice to learn something too.

Perhaps the G&A could be cut down 50-80% to save costs without affecting the education.

It’s an obvious cost savings ploy when so many classes are already taught by TAs.

When I was an undergrad it was irritating paying full in person tuition and then get duped when a TA showed up to teach the class. I could have just gone to a community college for a better experience at that point.

In my experience several professors had the large universities by me, that were not tenured, also moonlighted at local community colleges, or split between the universities in the area. So its possible expensive private school and local cc had the same professor for the class.

The quality of TAs I had in college was far and away better than anything I had at community college.

I'm in education, teaching post 16 up to adults.

This is an obvious direction teaching is going. During the pandemic while we were all in lockdown, I recorded my lectures as I did them live. Students would then go back and watch them multiple times. It was very interesting to observe this behaviour.

So the next logical step is to keep those lectures online for future students.

And I'm not particularly photogenic, I'm not a trained actor. I'm a coder.

So why not get Brad Pitt to record my lectures, make them entertaining, informative. Make each lecture the perfect lecture.

Then just show these lectures to students.

[edit] mix in some AI to help debug code / mark work. I see someone has commented that we should poll students and get their reaction. I talk to them every day, I've done flipped classroom. I've worked through the pandemic. I'm sure you still learn things, watch YouTube videos on how to do stuff, e.g. DIY or painting or how to code. The future of education is very interesting.

It's so obvious I'm sure there are companies out there doing this at the moment. Then colleges and unis could subscribe to these lecture videos and .... that's the end of qualified lecture staff.

The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient. Many advanced topics require the student to actually sit down at some point and do the work, and that's where educators and peers come in.

I think we are already in an unprecedented golden age for people who are able to self-educate, i.e. have the material and mental means (money & self discipline) to actually sit down and learn. Unfortunately, I don't have the impression that this is a viable path for the vast majority of people.

That doesn't mean I find your scenario unlikely: administrators may find this an attractive way to cut costs, only to be surprised after a year when the learning outcomes have completely collapsed (except for the 5% mentioned above).

> The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient.

I tried to take extra credit from Udacity / MIT OCW once as a brick-and-mortar student.

The main problem with MIT OCW is that it is incomplete. What you really need as a student is for all courses in a degree program to be available, and for every course to be complete. Scientific knowledge has a dependency tree, and every degree program tacitly relies on its students to have certain knowledge at certain times.

Individual OCW Courses themselves are often incomplete. For example, in the problem set discussion sessions there is often a second lecture, which is critical to understand the main lecture, but this sort of thing is often missing from the OCW. In brick and mortar, students with partial attendance often fail, so it's unsuprising that OCW takers fail.

Students actually going through a degree program is a form of testing.

Asynchronous online courses generated during Coronavirus are probably more reliable than OCW/Udacity because these were actually used by degree seekers.

A law should mandate perpetual open access to the complete content of all asynchronous online courses that were held during the pandemic.

It's important that outsiders can access content, not only registered students. The main users would be students registered elsewhere, who want to compensate for their university having a bad course in some subject, or who want to take extra courses from a different department (often these can't be taken locally due to timing collision / travel distance).

Switching everything to online while maintaining gatekeeping would be the worst-case scenario.

Agreed. May as well have one lecture developed in high quality, with a charismatic speaker, etc.

It’s like with books.

How about fewer administrators?

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