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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

In both online and inperson, a major choke point occurs when students get stuck on a problem and have nowhere to go to get help, or when students don't get useful feedback after submitting their work. This is directly related to the teacher-student ratio, regardless of whether it's online or not.

I imagine a huge factor is also parental involvement, when it comes to encouraging students to set aside several hours each night for study and homework. In the absence of parental involvement or in cases of parental neglect and indifference (woefully common in many situations), the role of the teacher becomes far more important in encouraging the student to develop good study habits. This might be more difficult in the online situation.

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This is directly related to the teacher-student ratio, regardless of whether it's online or not.

One of Malcolm Gladwell's books made a convincing argument that reducing class size quickly runs into the issue of diminishing returns. A cursory Googling suggests there's plenty of research to back it up[0][1]

The effectiveness of in-person learning may have more to do with social interaction and peer motivation. A teacher with about 20 students who is able to create a general excitement for learning in the class seems to be the most effective. A classroom where the "spirit" of learning is alive is ideal for a lot of kids.

[0]https://edcentral.uk/reading-list/431-what-we-have-learned-a... [1]http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/evidence-class-siz...

In some of these online classes I've heard of >1000 students signing up with one professor and maybe two assistants. In that case, maybe a model would be to recruit the top students (selected early in the course based on their submitted) work) to act as tutors for say groups of 10 or so. Pitch them on the idea with "the best way to learn something is to explain it to someone else."

So like being a grad student without the abuse and poverty pay?

And what happens if they don’t want to do it?

Make their course completion contingent upon doing so? That’s a bit draconian of course, but you could also provide something positive to juice the deal instead. Incentives 101.

in my school they pay students to tutor. it was actually quite competitive. A lot of tutors I knew went on to get really good jobs right after graduation.

it works out really well for the student. instead of working a regular job during the year you get to do something that benefits your career, you build a relationship with your professors and it pays more than if you were working at the local grocery store.

https://cse.ucsd.edu/undergraduate/readers-and-tutors

So the education system is contingent on making students teach other students, or else? Lol

It’s not as if this isn’t already a requirement for some.

https://biosciences.uchicago.edu/content/teaching-assistant-...

> All graduate students are required to serve as a Teaching Assistant in at least one course for academic credit before the Ph.D. degree is awarded. Appropriate courses may be undergraduate, graduate, or medical, but must be in the Biological Sciences Division (exceptions may be made for students in the Biophysical Sciences program).

Grad school is not a requirement in the United States as far as I know.

How about offer to pay them for their services?

That's why you should use a "flipped classroom" model, to focus in-person effort on these limited chokepoints. That still leaves everything else that can largely be done non-interactively and at the best pace for each student.

part of the problem is that homework is just treated as a given obligation rather than something students should be able to do voluntarily, as-needed. combine this with teacher quotas [students MUST do 10-20 hours of homework a week] you end up with bloat and students being tasked with just as much unneeded busywork as actual crucial practice for the areas they are struggling. this also exacerbates the treadmill effect where students who are struggling are perpetually falling further and further behind under a pile of red marked assignments they simply do not understand. the best model i experienced as a student was where homework (and class for that matter) were treated as entirely opt-in and classrooms served more as a centralized hub for ad-hoc tutoring/study hall. in this model, in person class time primarily served as a resource for unstucking and freed up everyone else to get on with their day. also what no one wants to hear is that good study habits are primarily driven by student investment in what they are learning and said investment is the product of learning things they actually care about.

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