Students fight back over course taught by AI | Hacker News Reader

Students fight back over course taught by AI

theguardian.com

123 pointslevel87137 comments

Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces.

Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.

Which universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?

All universities outside of the US

Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!

Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing campaigns in the Indian Subcontinent in order to get people to come and pay those sweet, sweet foreign-student fees.

Are Polytechnics not considered universities in Europe? RPI (Rensalear Polytechnic Institute) or CalPoly (California Polytechnic Institute) for example in the US are just normal universities, usually with more of a technical, engineering focused. But they are essentially the same "level" as a university.

In Finland, the institutions that now call themselves “Universities of Applied Science” in English for marketing reasons, are still known in Finnish as ammatikorkeakoulu “tertiary professional-training institutions” and this is a rung below actual universities (yliopisto) in terms of both quality of education and social prestige.

The UK collapsed the poly/uni distinction thirty or so years ago, as it was seen as a source of class discrimination.

> The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 (c. 13) made changes in the funding and administration of further education and higher education [0]

It was more about reducing budgets. That Conservative government was not filled with class warriors. Oh, how times have changed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_and_Higher_Education_A...

Really? That was the motive?

It actually made it a lot worse if anything.

British universities do the same marketing. Seen it there.

The problem in the UK has been ridiculous the expansion of universities. if we shut at least half of them down, reduced some of the others in size, there would be a lot more money for the rest.

AI teaching is the opposite of what the best universities do, which is things like small group tutorials on top of face to face lectures.

Too many universities and colleges seem to love opening buildings to name them.

AI might be a threat because it can't take up as many buildings as students?

They often get donations in return for naming buildings after people. They can name other things after people instead - organisations with the university.

It's surprising because so many countries have taken billions from international students, mostly from one country, and is now blaming the the students for having parted with their money.

The University mentioned in this article is in England.

The original article is about a UK university. Cashflow and revenue generation is a very important topic for UK universities. They have copied the approaches of US universities, and in many cases have created overseas campuses when they have some name recognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_branch_campus for examples.

Interesting link, thanks for sharing!

Plenty of US colleges and universities are primarily about education and/or research, even today. Far from all, to be sure—and some are primarily about connections and the school name (primarily Ivies), rather than any of the above.

None of which exist without making sure the organization isa bout sufficient cashflow from government, students, and industry.

I shouldn't say it so simply, it might result in attempts to convolute it to distract from the fact that bureaucracies serve to maintain revenue/income and grow it.

There's a big difference between "the organization needs to maintain a sufficient cashflow" and "the organization is primarily concerned with its financial status, at the expense of its putative mission".

That sounds about right.

The only thing I’d add is there are too many institutions obsessed with growth (new buildings to name and dedicate) which means growing cashflow.

Many post secondaries are dependant on international student revenue and income to build all those new buildings to dedicate to the current president.

Allegedly most of them, since they have non-profit mandates and are often tax-exempt.

The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow".

In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.

Cash flow and profit do not have to be the same thing.

> Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.

Check out the "Who Wants to be a Teacher?" episodes of the Educate Podcast. I remember listening to these and shaking my head. Worse, if you go back further in the same groups older podcast, you'll hear the tragedy of students being taught to read using provenly bad methodology and teachers defending it saying they don't care that studies show that it's the wrong path. It made me genuinely very angry on behalf of kids. They're being robbed of their future.

https://www.apmreports.org/collection/educate-podcast

If you live in a city with multiple colleges/universities check out the cars in the staff parking lot. Many will have parking passes/stickers for multiple colleges on there. These are adjuncts that have to drive all over town to cobble together a full time job as an instructor.

My experience with adjunct professors is they're much better at teaching than old tenured professors who just want to do their research and couldn't care less about the students.

> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”.

This is the future guys, get used to it.

The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.

But muh vibe coding :/

I'm now able to create a fucking shit nobody will ever care about in no time!

But the flip side is that the tuition will at least go down! ...right?

AI will continue to stratify education.

The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.

Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.

I kind of wonder whether we are past the point where waiting to be trained is feasible.

What do you mean by that?

This counts on there being more juice to squeeze out of learning than I think actually exists. The people currently spending $1000s/month on real tutors are probably learning at ~90% of their potential. An idealized AI might push that to 100%, but the people who can't afford tutors or college are going to see greater benefit from even the cheapest models. That scenario results in decreasing stratification.

> AI will continue to stratify education.

> The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.

> Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.

The better-off children whose parents are "spend[ing] $1000s/month" will get real teachers who are people, not fancier AIs.

I mean look at food: The lower classes are eating industrially-processed McDonald's food, the upper classes are not eating more expensive but still industrially-processed stuff from McDonald's, they're eating organic, locally grown stuff from the farmer's market (which used to be the standard for food for everyone).

Technology is still involved.

Good food is refrigerated and bad food is frozen, because it's cheaper to freeze as that preserves food indefinitely. This is true even at a farmer's market.

I promise you that students from wealthy families will continue to get human tutors for the foreseeable future. And it will have nothing to do with whether an AI can beat a human on a test or not.

History shows that you are right:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-conta...

This pattern has recurred in every era where "technology will disrupt X" -- the affluent pay to "opt out" of the ersatz tech-supported version of X, while people of fewer means have no choice but to put up with it.

I've had human tutors and a well-equipped AI, e.g. Deep Research-like, can often be better.

But an AI tutor at that level can be more expensive than humans. An hour of deep research with a SOTA model that has hundreds of thousands of context tokens is going to be much more than $80.

Again, I don't think this is about doing better. This is like arguing that a Casio watch is better than Patek Philippe.

Wealth buys you is access and that's what it's often used for. Personal trainer, personal banker, personal tutor, personal doctor instead of waiting in urgent care. It doesn't matter that YouTube yoga is great, it's still less dignified. It's what poor people do.

This is the culmination of decades of cuts to education. I mean, what else was going to be the end point of having teachers buy supplies for their own kids, demonizing professors, demonizing higher education and the idea of education generally, not training enough teachers, and underpaying the teachers you already have.

In America we have to deal with school shootings, the latest religious group mandating the 10 commandments be put up or rainbows be taken down, irate parents mad that you failed their kid who didn't do work all semester and has severe behavioral problems no one is allowed to discipline. And now of course with AI, the students aren't doing their work, and if you call them out on it they call their parents, they sue, you get deposed and have to admit you can't 100% prove it's AI... so why bother? Who would ever want to grow up to be a teacher anymore?

So yeah, cut education, end up with AI students submitting AI papers to AI teachers. We have arrived.

The only question now is... what are we going to do about it?

I think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.

Spending on education has increased over the last couple decades, not decreased. Outcomes, however, have gotten worse. You're entire premise is flawed.

This is America, we have perfected the art of spending more to get less. That doesn't mean cuts to education aren't happening. See also: the entire healthcare system.

I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe teaching environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agency in disciplining students.

Fact is when I look at my district, over the last decade we've had to do more with less, and I don't know a single teacher who can say the opposite. So it is true we are spending more overall, it's not true we aren't cutting education.

In my school district, the only new facilities being built are charter schools. We have unlimited funds, it seems, to send to these private organizations but not enough funds to build or expand a public school or hire teachers/aids.

Some of my kids school aids have been homeless because the pay isn't high enough. The aids and teacher all work second jobs.

Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools.

Also, charter schools are also public, not private.

The data seems to contradict everything you claim about charter schools.

"we" (taxpayers) send more money to traditional public schools than to (also public) charter schools.

> charter schools are also public, not private.

Charter schools are publicly funded and privately operated. That's what I mean by private.

And the per child payment is less because charter schools are experts at keeping children with disabilities out of their facilities. They have to accept them, but they can deny entry if they don't, for example, employ special ed teachers, therapists, etc.

Public schools have to provide those services. They have to accept all children.

> Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools.

The public school system is much larger and has a longer tail to support than charter schools. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of their operating budget. Public schools also have to support every student in the community no matter how high it costs, unlike charter schools, which support a lower proportion of them. Both factors manifest as higher per-student costs if you just average it all out.

There's a parallel to private insurance which can kick out the sickest individuals, and a public option which must take everyone. Obviously the latter is more expensive to operate, so private insurance prefers dealing with the former, leaving the public to cover everyone else at taxpayer expense.

> Also, charter schools are also public, not private.

OP said "to send to these private organizations" not that charter schools are private schools. While charter schools are public, many charter schools are run by private organizations.

> Also, charter schools are also public, not private.

Charter schools are funded by the public district issuing the charter, but can be any of public, private non-profit, or private for-profit.

They are public in the sense of being governed by the rules (with exceptions provided in the charter, but which exceptions are allowed is also part of the rules) applicable to the public system, which they form part of, but they aren't necessarily public entities.

It certainly has increased. The question isn't whether the increase is enough, but rather if the destination of the funds is the right location.

There's also an issue with home life that heavily impacts educational outcome.

My own school district spent a fortune making a palace for the district admin. Meanwhile, the public schools are falling apart with the kids packed in like sardines. They've literally started adding cheap prefab trailers to the school grounds to accommodate.

In Ohio (USA) primary/secondary education funding hasn't outpaced inflation based on this data from 2009-2024 https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Finance-and-Funding/Overvi...

I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc.

I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

I've had this experience as well, but I also noticed I am much less blown away when the information is put to the test.

So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.

What kind of area were you talking to it about?

There's no problem with that.

It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?

I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate.

The problem isn't that someone learns to prompt AI and is selling the output. The problem is that the customer thinks they're paying for human instruction and they're getting something else.

>> It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?

> I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate.

That's not what you pay the plumber for. You pay the plumber for the training and years of experience needed to 1) correctly diagnose the issue and identify the part to replace, 2) install it correctly so it won't fail in 10 years, and 3) do it all efficiently with a minimum of collateral damage. It's not practical for a homeowner to develop that level of skill without becoming a plumber themselves. A homeowner can do a lot, but even with YouTube there will be a lot of deficiencies in all those areas compared to someone who knows what they're doing.

You mostly don't. Household plumbing and wiring is nowhere the near of complexity of, say, a lawnmower engine. It's mostly "the p-trap is leaking", "the faucet is leaking", "the toilet's flush valve is broken", "the wiring nut is loose". The kind of stuff you don't need skill to fix properly.

There are situations where you do want to call a pro, but it's not what you usually call them for. Most of it is one notch above "my trash can is full, can you come over and empty it".

Besides, your argument applies to the AI case too. You're not paying for AI output. You're paying for my expertise in prompting and my ability to evaluate the output and say "yep, that's right".

I somewhat suspect you would not find it so amazing if you paid £9000/year for it, though.

This type of use while asking for annotations for all facts can be insightful to have the start of an informed conversation with a professional.

I am using it mostly to try to understand and get context about what the professionals tell me, the treatments they are offering, etc.

But you aren't a student paying for a university education presumably taught by someone that has experience in the field.

Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI?

Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination from a chi manipulator? How much of it was based on dated research? How much of it came from a random blog post by a crazy person?

I have the sense overall, from talking to it about aspects of his condition that I understand well, and also using it as a coding assistant in work, that by and large it's on point.

Well, that's certainly one piece of anecdata. I guess that refutes the experience of all the college students.

sorry, i didn't even read the article because I have everything blocked. From the comments, whatever it is it sounds terrible.

Next try it on something rare you're an expert in, and be amazed at the low quality.

i quiz it often on aspects of my son's condition that I understand, and it gets things right most of the time, with the occasional glaring bit of misinformation.

It will work better if you try it with something you know really well.

> Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc.

Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?

> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated

You guess it is a small percentage? How much do you guess this small percentage was the most important part about this disease?

Because it seems like you were taken in by the empathic answers by gpt and think it got things mostly right.

> You guess it is a small percentage?

Well I am operating within a space where his doctors are setting the parameters in terms of the pathways targeted, the therapies offered, etc. And I'm asking, how does this therapy work? How is it related to X and Y? How strong is the evidence? Questions like that. I think I can throw the appropriate grain of salt on it, but yeah, some fake facts could creep in. It's stuff that will be validated, but super valuable to just synthesize the lay of the land and give me context for understanding what the docs are saying.

> Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?

Partly just how tailored and conversational ChatGPT is. It gets right at my needed level of explanation. It knows how much education I have. It remembers salient details about my son and his condition. It really explains things well. It knows so much. It's quite remarkable.

[note, i didn't read the article so am not opining on its content in any way. An AI college education sounds terrible in many ways]

> It remembers salient details about my son and his condition. It really explains things well. It knows so much. It's quite remarkable.

Yes but that doesn't mean the answers are right. And while you acknowledge it might be throwing some fake facts in, you don't know what those might be. You still seem to think it is remarkable just because

> It gets right at my needed level of explanation.

And similar issue the AI college education seems to be going through. Someone somewhere created the college slides using AI content and voiceover, didn't know any better but said - Hey, that sounds near to what might be taught in this class. Close enough. Good for college education.

> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated,

Which percentage?

And how important/misleading was that particular percentage?

(As an aside, personally, I precent the term 'bullshits' to 'hallucinating'; the latter is the daft Silicon Valley term.)

i guess i'd rather have the understanding it's offering me, with a smudge of, sure, call it bullshit, than not know it at all.

If you think about it, there is no source out there that is unimpeachable, and there is a need to consult many sources to get closer to the truth. triple all that for a rare disease.

You're absolutely right. I should have used micrograms instead of milligrams in the prescription. /s Sam-abomination-5.1

As long as we're reciting unrelated anecdotes to attempt emotional appeal over anything of substance, "Chat" has also driven young children to suicide. No one in their lives would have paid as much detail into reaffirming every negative thought pattern they had until they ended their own lives as much as an emotionless token predictor LLM running 24/7. They got their nihilism and idealization pushed back at them in a clear, cold tone they would have never gotten from docs, reading papers, reading textbooks. I dont think their outcomes were as amazing. Their mental condition wasnt even as rare of a circumstance to properly handle and treat, yet it failed at a fatal level.

I dont know why asking to not have LLMs shoved in your face in every facet of society always has to be rebutted by a subjective miracle experience akin to openai PR statements. You can have these conversations with chatgp- oh, your friend "Chat" without it being proliferated to education platforms. These concepts aren't in conflict with eachother, yet by coming to defense of their use as a mandated platform you want to brush away critique for reasons that are unknown to anybody else. Go ahead and keep talking to "Chat", maybe let the people suffering at the hands of low quality slop have their voice and chance to speak?

That's the Baumol effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts:

- A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing).

- A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching).

2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees.

3) Divergent Cost Impact:

- In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease.

- In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase.

4) Resulting Price Trend: The prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) must therefore rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Pric...

5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. In the US that's not going to fly, so cost pressure incentivizes orgs to cut corners and reduce quality and automate as much as possible.

In this specific case the university was in the UK.

http://archive.today/ipTpO

Soon we'll have a system where students use AI for homework and teachers use AI to grade it. I'm sure it's already happening.

I'm lucky to teach in a school with relatively small classes (~25) and I can manually grade and review everything. (The autograde scripts I wrote in bash help.)

But yes, it's happening. If I had 300 students, I couldn't do this. I'd need a bunch of TAs or some AI. Or just pure autograding, which I always hated since the person who did nothing gets the same F as the person who left out a semicolon.

And students are definitely using AI, evidenced by their stratospheric code improvements in the last 18 months.

It is. It's called magicschool, and districts have already signed contracts

i have seen this joke beaten to death so many times in so many forms

Speaking as an instructor, everyone's goal should be to be better than the LLM. This includes teachers. And, yes, that requires work, but that's what we're getting paid for, and it's not particularly difficult to best an LLM in any field.

If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer.

In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make those themselves with minimal effort and zero cost.

It is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.

I was drawn to engineering by the joy of learning and problem solving. The pain of puzzling over a difficult problem, then the ecstatic release when you figure it out and get it working. I don't understand why someone would want to give that up. It gives meaning to the work.

Pretty much all the experienced devs I know are bored with AI at work. Most of them just turn it off because it's in the way.

I know for some jobs it's a great accelerator, but those jobs tend to be the ones that don't involve a lot of heavy duty problem solving, it seems.

I tell the students up front that AI is capable of solving all the problems we give them as undergrads. But I elaborate and tell them that it's because all the problems we give them are easy for software developers with any experience, regardless of how difficult the students find them to be. They're dumbbells designed to help you build muscle. Do you take your robot to the gym to lift the weights for you? Eventually you're going to get to a job interview and they're going to see that you don't have any muscles. And then you'll be 80 grand in debt with no job prospects. You might as well just quit now and buy a Corvette.

I like to think that it has some impact, and yet I know they still use AI.

Tangent: There's a short story I vaguely remember from when I was young about a kid being raised in a bunker after a nuclear war and the big twist was that all his friends he went to school with (virtually on the TV screen) were just AIs to keep him company. I could never find it again though, even when interrogating google or chatgpt I couldn't find it. Anyone else know of this story?

The story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other children via screens, only to discover – in a scene involving a hollow pumpkin – that his parents and classmates are all artificial constructs created to keep him company. This twist reveals he is the last real child on Earth. The story was first published in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).

This isn't true. You can read Just Deserts here https://readfrom.net/chris-van-allsburg/page,10,143450-the_c... and it isn't at all like your AI response is saying.

It is an AI response... I remember chatgpt telling me the same thing. Except I'm remembering this from the late 90s.

If that wasn't made clear prior to enrolment I would be surprised if it wasn't fraud.

Howso? I think it might be hard to prove.

Hard to prove that a paid course at a university, which throughout the history of modern western education (1000 CE to present) has been taught by a human, didn't perform it's duties?

The shrinkflation of higher ed?

Will make it a lot cheaper and more accessible.

So one question is who owns the IP then?

I know at the UCs, anything you do on campus is the UCs copyright. There's even little brass plaques they put in the ground when you walk on campus delineating that line.

But when these PIs are sending all the student's data up to OpenAI (presumably via the free version), then OpenAI has that data and it's copyrights.

Likely, yet another essay on the causes of the French Revolution is not ever going to be cared about. But there is a chance that something a student does in an upper division class may be worth something.

The student confronting the teacher was great! Well done.

Slides were generated via gamma obviously

It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there.

Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.

Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.

When I started undergrad, my father told me that university was not for learning; that was what the Internet was for, and since I was in tech; it wasn't quite for proving myself either: that was internships and portfolio. It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.

Given that the discussed lecture was delivered remotely, I don't think is offers much of a social experience too...

In person lectures delivered one way can be pretty non-social and non-interactive as well.

I think @exitb is referring to how it's harder to interact with other students after the lecture is over in a remote course. There's a lot less likely hood to strike up conversation.

That's a fair point.

Looking beyond it for a second, We see students carrying portable communication devices connected to social networks to follow algorithm curated feeds instead of interacting with humans.

Maybe there's a way to use an internet forum or something.

> It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.

Now, you can "grow up" and "matter" with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok etc. They are "people", you know ?

> It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos.

This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly competitive for the relatively low compensation because there are a lot of people who want to teach and teach well.

You can find some decent learning material on YouTube but it’s still mostly geared toward infotainment. I have a lot of bookmarks for excellent YouTube videos that I share with juniors on certain topics, but on average it’s really hard to find YouTube teaching resources that teach at the level of a university professor. When you do, it’s hard to get people to actually watch them as true teaching often involves slogging through some of the less exciting content as well. Most YouTube videos are designed to trigger “aha!” moments but only provide a surface level understanding. The type of learning where you think you understand a topic but couldn’t really explain it to someone else well or solve problems on a test because you haven’t gone through the full learning yet.

> Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.

You’re missing the biggest one of all: Accountability. We already saw with the MOOC trend that releasing high quality university lectures online from top universities is not enough to get many people to go through with learning the material. Getting them into a place where they know there will be a test and a grade and they have some skin in the game makes a huge difference.

Some people learned from MOOCs, but in general the attrition rate and falloff was insanely high from lecture 1 to the end.

In my experience some of the best courses in my college are taught not by “professors” but by “lecturers.” The distinction is that professors need to do research and teach, so they necessarily have divided focus. But lecturers only have teaching duty, are not tenured, so they are focused on teaching.

I've long argued that lecturer positions should also be tenure track, depending on metrics about effective education rather than research. Being taught by a researcher is overrated at the undergrad level. I've had lots of shitty courses taught by great researchers.

I worked in the tech side of education until 15 years ago or so, and it was already clear how problematic it was getting.

Distance learning was basically a dimly-lit grainy video, recorded 5 years prior, all acquired from the same provider and being shown to hundreds of classes all over the country. Instead of teachers, "tutors" (we couldn't call them teachers for legal reasons) making barely above minimum wage answering questions of dozens of classes and grading things on Moodle/Blackboard. A real teacher would be responsible for a class but they would barely see anything happening online, as they were just figureheads already busy with real classes.

I also remember some courses having almost half of the courses being long distance, so even people choosing traditional education were pushed into doing cost-saving computer shit.

The computers in the campus were obviously miserable to use, so I did everything in my power to at least make the software light enough so that people wouldn't suffer much, but in the end I hated myself for being in that industry.

It really depends what field. In some branches of history, archaeology, and linguistics, for instance, many matters of emerging consensus often reach students only through lecturers’ handouts that are not put online. What a curious person will find on the internet and in general-reference books can be a decade or more behind, and viewed within the field as horribly out of date.

If that information were valuable to learn, someone with access would be republishing it online.

Is "published online" the bar for valuable information? At this point published online is a good signal for junk information.

This is why the first day of every semester I ask my students "why are you here, in this room with all these other people, spending $$$, instead of sitting at home at YouTubeU watching this content better produced in 4K resolution with graphics and animations?"

You always get the typical "because I was told to" or "I need it for my degree" answers, but ultimately students will bring up:

- they tried that already and they couldn't pay attention past a few lectures

- they didn't have anyone they could ask questions to. This is less true with the advent of AI but still, many students are very skeptical of AI (as they should be).

- they appreciate having a local community of peers to study with

- they are motivated when competing against other students for a top grade

- they are motivated by showing off their abilities to their peers

- they are looking for mentorship and guidance from someone in the field, whether that be in research directions or professional career advice.

- they are looking to build a network with peers and researchers which they can leverage in the future

My takeaway is that the students attend university for their education differ from those who would be fine just watching YouTube videos in that they view their education as a sort of team sport or collective activity; rather than an individualized goal they are achieving for themselves, they approach their education as a journey they are on with their friends.

In a case of the worst person you know makes a great point, Jordan Peterson was remarking a few years back about how Youtube and MOOC's were really the new universities of the modern age. If you want knowledge it's there for the taking.

The legacy institutions really are just a stamp / sorting hat for young people these days.

For the money people spend these days on education, you'd think there'd be grounds for refunds based on false advertising of the product.

MooCs are just glorified long videos of classrooms from 20 years ago.

I wouldn't trust a Jordan Peterson type to have impartial position on a sudden EdTech psychosis when:

- he appears to have a relatively new online academy

- selling courses

- in a way that is relatively new to him

- don't seem welcome to teach in academic institutions

- uses psychology on their audience for the above

If MooCs weren't a thing, and courses on LaserDisc were, I think we'd know what we'd be hearing about a LaserDisc Academy by mail service.

I think that's not true. What I gain from university are three things:

1. Experts who compile/write the theoretical materials necessary (usually long form text, scripts).

2. The necessary pressure to actually read and understand these in order to pass the exams.

3. Social connections and the ability to work on interesting projects supervised by lecturers with experience and connections (clout if you will).

It's not that much deeper. The actual classroom is a nice "sugar" but that's not where the real learning and understanding happens in my experience. Videos are okay in order to learn but imo text is always much better. Sure you could compile this all yourself but the university provides a good path and everything around it for you to succeed.

Exactly. A degree is not merely a proof that you've been exposed to, and temporarily retained, a certain set of knowledge, but proof you can work towards longterm (4yr) and short-term (quiz on Friday, homework tomorrow) goals successfully.

College is 100x less forgiving of missing deadlines than the real world of jobs, for instance - but then, in college the only serious source of delays is yourself and your choices. It's actually quite a good litmus test for the ability to apply oneself towards externally imposed goals - which is most of what a job entails.

The thought experiment I do when speaking with graduates is: assume you could just buy the certificate from the institution you went to for the same price as the tuition you paid, would you do that?

I do not always get a "yes" but most of the time I do.

These are generally people who went to top universities and now have well paying and respected jobs. I suspect if I asked most students of lower tier universities the answer would be "I'd rather pay for neither".

Thankfully, things are generally shifting, there is a push for apprenticeships and one can even become a solicitor or barrister via the apprenticeship route now. University will go down as one of the largest economic wastes in human history.

Unpopular opinion, but I dislike how universities embraced vocational programs. These students were not there for academics, they were there for job and career training. The irony is that they complain about the high costs of tuition when they're just there to get more money. These professors have much better things to work on. I apologize if my opinion upsets you.

Generally, it's easy to be unpopular with a healthy income rolling in.

Most students go to school to improve their access to opportunity to uplift their current and future descendants.

Yes, often economic uplifting is a part of that.

Uh, now is this different from "normal" university education? I'd wager that 95%+ of people who go to college do it because they were told they have to for access to better job opportunities, not because they want to stay in the academia to publish books and do research for life.

I get it that some professors don't like teaching and just want to do research, but teaching is what pays their bills, and if they can't be bothered to do their job well...

Checkout summaryforge

AI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue

We don't talk enough about AI as a vehicle for what's essentially austerity.

Skimpflation is the best term I’ve heard in a long time for hiring one person when three will do.

Teaching isn't bi directional.

Understanding before application are two different steps.

The issues you're outlining can be solved by arranging technology to go through a process to satisfy the above.

Still, instruction, and instructors aren't really needing to be replaced, it's the silent elephant in the room that is rarely talked about that hopefully considers evolving.

> Teaching isn't bi directional.

... said no decent teacher, ever. The flows aren't symmetrical, but they are bidirectional.

Agreed, if teaching really was not bi-directional than there is zero reason for there to actually be a teacher in the first place when it could just be a book.

There are some bad teachers where it is not bidirectional for sure. But to claim it isn't (or at least is not supposed to be)... is wild

Teaching will get to evolve when the subject matter is changing faster than the delivery mechanisms.

Where the subject matter doesn't change as quickly.. might be in for some trouble.

This article is kind of strange. I would title it "Digitally and AI illiterate institution attempts to deliver course that looked impressive and amazing to them." Students do have standards and students baseline digital literacy passed by institutions a long, long time ago.

I know, let's talk about MooCs.

Content often already exists and depending on the course not much effort is needed to adapt it to next year. Feedback and teaching is what hard and time consuming. Thus we will see the hard part being replaced first. Grading and exams are hard? Let's automate it. Lecturing is hard? Let's narrate text by a program. Etc.

Meanwhile laying off "unneeded" teachers an getting hooked on the enterprise LLM subs. After these borderline bankrupt LLM corpos will raise prices several times universities will be paying even more while struggling with limited staff. This will translate into admin pressure on the teachers to automate more and more and more.

What peice of trash thought that was an appropriate thing to do?

The real question.

Some human decision-maker is responsible.

Were I a student I'd be coordinating a class-action lawsuit. The impropriety and lack of responsibility is staggering.

Well the truth has finally been openly accepted by the universities themselves. They sell fancy pieces of paper with your name on them in nice calligraphy, not knowledge.

I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no pride, working for a university with no pride, giving students with no pride certifications that they can use to get ahead in an economy with no pride.

I'm bullish on AI in education, because of the possibility of creating an individual student model that the machine can use to constantly target weaknesses in understanding. But that hasn't been invented yet. What you would get now is a teacher that hallucinates, simply lies to bridge gaps, forgets what it was supposed to be talking about, and constantly fabricates references.

Prophetic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991581

"why can't college kids do math?"

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