Not directly related, but the Caltech rumor mill says that we'll following suit soon: since second quarter finishes in ~1 week, they'll probably make third quarter virtual somehow.
As it turns out, there's actually a potential case _on campus_ (which is, not gonna lie, kinda scary), so the affected individual's test results will probably influence what happens in the next couple days.
MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
421–430 of 605 posts
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?
> That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe. Poland is on the extreme end when it comes to high quality food being extremely cheap. In Berlin it isn't terribly hard to get a healthy and large meal for 4-8 euros at a restaurant for me,…
Really!? Not my experience - was last in Europe 10 years ago - VAT tax made eating out more expensive.
I thought it was VAT tax. Everyone said it was VAT tax.
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe. Poland is on the extreme end when it comes to high quality food being extremely cheap. In Berlin it isn't terribly hard to get a healthy and large meal for 4-8 euros at a restaurant for me,…
Really!? Not my experience - was last in Europe 10 years ago - VAT tax made eating out more expensive. I thought it was VAT tax. Everyone said it was VAT tax.
Not sure where you were, and what restaurants you were going to, but eating out is quite normal in most of Europe and is generally inexpensive if you don't go to a fancy place. Certainly far cheaper for a non-fast-food meal than I've found the US to be.
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is perhaps one of the more ignorant comments on this thread. > When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree. In many cases, you go to an elite college to pay for the experience to learn from, engage with, and collaborate with the world's best scientists, thinkers, engineers, and professors. In some cases, like Rice, if your parents make less than 130,000 a year - you don't pay a dime. Und…
I have a degree from an elite college (Amherst, #1 liberal arts college in the country at the time I went). I took a gap year before and worked as a professional software engineer, where I learned a massive amount. Then I spent 3.5 years taking a variety of interesting courses that have been utterly irrelevant to my future career prospects, before flunking out of my physics major, switching to CS, and completing that…
Honestly, I paid for access to labs and researchers and the network after graduating.
I dunno about Amherst but Rice students and alumni also have insane access to the worlds coolest toys - https://sea.rice.edu/instruments/all
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't about wanting to torture students. I never learned so much so fast before or since - and there was a lot to learn. I prefer teachers that expect a lot from their students. It's not fundamentally different from athletics. If you want to be a good athlete, you're going to have to work your tail off. If you want to be an incredible engineer like Kelly Johnson, that ain't going to happen if you party through sch…
It's wrong to treat the brain like any other muscle. It's more comparable to a neural network (pardon the tautology). You feed in data (knowledge) in hope that some of it sticks and forms new connections that you can use to better tackle new and existing problems. There's no rule of the universe that states that the process of feeding data into the brain has to be challenging. Now, I'm not arguing that hard work has…
> There's no rule of the universe that states that the process of feeding data into the brain has to be challenging.
No pain, no gain. You're simply not going to become an expert in any field, mental or physical, without a lot of hard work.
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone believes online is an acceptable substitute to a traditional MIT education, but it's a lot better than nothing, and better than continuing the in person teaching. I'm an MIT grad and know the benefits of being on campus. In fact I spent more time in the lab than I did in classes or my dorm and that just isn't possible online. My son's school (Courant) has sent everyone home too, with online subst…
I went to MIT too and with the exception of about three classes, every single in-person class was a waste. The value the school offers is, in order: - the people you meet - the brand name on your resume - the psets and structured guide to learning hard things Notice that the last two still work over Zoom. If I were in the hard sciences this might be different but as a professional Software Engineer, the classes were…
I disagree.
Maybe your specialty is a different case, but there's no way on Earth that I would have gotten access to the equipment I used without the lab. Doesn't have to be MIT's lab, but someone has to have the ridiculous amounts of money necessary to construct and outfit advanced research labs if a student is to replicate that experience.
And that hypothetical, "someone", would have been unlikely to allow me to use it simply because I taught myself a bit about, say, nanomaterials online.
Let's be frank, if you need a lab, you're screwed.
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#427Imagine how cool it would be if MIT would make "read only" transmissions of these sessions freely available. (I know that MIT has already made many courses available on yootoob. Those are wonderful, I've watched many myself.) Upon re-reading my lecture notes from long ago, they are sadly incomprehensible without the lecture that went with it. It would be great to be able to review those lectures and refresh my memory…
Have you tried OpenCourseWare from MIT[1]? Tends to have more stuff than YouTube :) lecture notes, and typically assignments as well. Also, some professors from MIT have courses on edx.org. [1](ocw.mit.edu)
The Roku box had an OpenCourseWare MIT channel which I enjoyed watching, but they let it die of neglect. :-(
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#428Schools could undercut one of Bernie Sanders' major platforms by using this as an opportunity to start offering free/low-cost, LIVE courses online, reserving networking and on-campus support opportunities for formally-accepted students. I'd be surprised that this wasn't happening, if not for the cluelessness and/or callousness the moneyed set that make up the constituency of America's top schools seem to be approachi…
Sorry to be flippant, but: https://www.edx.org/ They already do that. It's not quite "LIVE", but it's close. When you sign up for a certificate, you take the course along with a cohort of other students during a preset period of several weeks. There are staff and other students available to talk and answer questions in a shared forum, your work is graded, and the lectures/homework/exams/etc are spaced into weekly mod…
If it's "not quite live," then they don't "already do that." There is value to being part of a first-class experience as it plays out, even as a second-class observer, that's over and above dealing with a glorified educational DVR and meaningless certification. But the point is that MIT et al. have lost a credible rebuttal to anyone floating the notion of, "Why not?"; to anyone wondering why the live academic lectures of old, that were ostensibly open to the public but that were limited to people who could afford to be in a particular building at a particular time, haven't seen their progeny truly open to the public as the accessibility of mass communication has grown.
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the point is there's a wealth of options for food within a an easy hour round trip of walking (not just specifically the one Target). And a lot more if you have access to a bike. People are not going to starve to death when the alternative is walking 15 minutes to a grocery store. Let's be real. Downtown Cambridge is NOT some food desert like what exists in other parts of the US, where you could walk for hours…
This is the point though, if things deteriorate none of these options will be viable.
everyone breathe in some corona and we can all be sick together for a couple of weeks
Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are certainly restaurants nearby, but not sure I'd call them cheap. I imagine a lot of MIT students don't have the money to eat out every day. And since most dorms don't have any kind of kitchens or cooking implements, buying food from the grocery and cooking isn't really an option. Pre-made meals or other things from grocery stores that don't require cooking could work, but, again, I'd expect some/many student…
What dorms don't have kitchens? Certainly when I went to MIT, most (if not all) dorms at least had kitchenette's, 20 years back. Shared, of course, which is the main problem.
20 years ago, my shitty university didn't have kitchens in the dorms (except for the Engineering/Honors dorm, and just one floor). They'd confiscate George Foreman grills as a fire hazard during health and safety checks. We found dead rats in bug traps we put out. I got pneumonia and had to recover in the dorms.
oh and it was 2 years mandatory (most schools it's just 1 .. ours was out of money and shitty). I was so glad to get out of there. Those things are cesspools of ... cess. Get you meningitis shots kids.