Comment by wiseleo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiseleo | Hacker News Reader

I prefer pre-recorded classes. It saves me the hassle of taking notes and preserves the instructor's sanity. I don't like class discussions.

The instructor's role is ideally to answer questions. Having to orally re-deliver content to a huge room of people feels archaic and inefficient. This does require the students to be motivated to learn the class. The challenge is maintaining the motivation for the extraneous content required for a degree but perceived as unnecessary by many students. If I am learning information security, I am far less interested in art history.

I believe any course should be waivable by a conversation with the instructor. Someone using LibreOffice on Linux is wasting time in the intro to computers course.

I once took a course on introduction to Internet. I advised the instructor I was an experienced CLI Internet user but wanted to take his course to learn how to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical audience. I also informed him that asking me questions could derail class discussions. We talked about Unix shell applications like archie and gopher in that class.

The instructor was great and I learned a lot about presenting technical content to non-technical audience, which was my goal. He once asked me a question during a lecture on NNTP on the permanence of Usenet posts and I canceled his post with a control message. ;)

There's two problems with that approach, which matters from 2 very different perspectives. From the business point of view, one-on-ones with a highly knowledgeable professor don't scale. The big benefit that the businessman sees from online learning is to dramatically increase the number of graduates who pass through some level of filtering, so scale matters a lot.

The other, "education is important because educating people is important" point of view, runs into a more human problem: most students don't get one-on-one time with their professors, even when the professor ends up sitting in an empty office hour regularly, because doing so takes work. Students need to be reasonably proactive about reaching out, and that weeds out a lot of people regardless of how accessible the professor makes themselves. Online learning makes this even worse: In person, assuming the class is small enough (that's another can of worms), there's a fair amount of opportunity for small interactions: greetings, questions during lecture (for when the professor has completely lost you, which suggests he may have lost others, too), questions after lecture, hell, even body language exchange, where the professor can pick up on students being bored (i.e., they're going too slow, or they've lost the class). All of these make the professors far more approachable, where a brief exchange can become a "hey, let's continue this during office hours". I spent a lot more time in office hours with the professor who memorized all our names and faces before the first lecture than the one who was lecturing at a class of 300.

Not to mention the heightened ease of interacting with your fellow students, which is, IMO, 60-80% of the benefit of higher education.

And at smaller universities, the bureaucracies are a lot more malleable, too. Classes being "waivable by a conversation with the instructor" was very much a thing, albeit with the extra step of having the dean and registrar's office rubber stamp it.

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