Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds • Hacker News Board

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#161

Post by newsclues » Mon, May 04, 2020, 12:59 PM UTC

gibolt wrote: post #4

As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to increase access. Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only. To…

Professors don’t get much training on how to educate.

Schools could run a month long course, aimed at online learning, to match their current IRL teaching training

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#162

Post by koheripbal » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

raslah wrote: post #159

As someone who finished a Baccalaureate online, I’d say these students simply aren’t prepared for the mind shift to having to learn independently. Most of my professors seemed to loathe having to teach an online class and merely threw together a mountain of almost random assignments and research papers as if to say, “if you can survive this, you can have a degree”. Most of my courses didn’t even offer video lectures…

As part of my engineering degree, it wasn't all books and lectures. We had to learn the machine-shop, operate the lathe construct a robot, mix chemicals in organic chemistry lab, experiment with lasers in different mediums, wire hard drives... etc...

A lot of that is hands on work. No Zoom session is going to make up for that.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#163

Post by treis » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #85

gibolt wrote: post #4

As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to increase access. Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only. To…

Education has been disrupted. The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying. Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while. The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal. Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education. Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content. Y…

>The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.

As a counter point to this, roughly 1/2 of med students attend class in person never or rarely. They use online resources because they think it's more efficient. They still pay the 50k a year for med school because they need the credential and it's the gateway for the clinical instruction in years 3/4 that has to be done in person.

The problem with the MOOC model is that it doesn't serve as a credential that people trust

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#164

Post by red_admiral » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

unishark wrote: post #71

red_admiral wrote: post #58

If I go into a restaurant and order pork, but get served beef, I have a right as a customer to complain. It doesn't matter whether beef is in some way better than pork, or whether other customers are perfectly happy with beef, or whether I eat beef myself at other times. I order pork, I expect pork. If the restaurant can't serve me pork, for example because they've run out, then the right answer is still not to just…

This analogy can still go either way. You ate half the meal. Then there they had to kick you out to finish at home with a doggy bag. You're losing out on some ambience, but the thing you showed up to achieve will be achieved. Note that there are already refunds for at least some of the in-person stuff such as dorms and gym access. So were already in a position of compromise and partial refund. It's just an argument o…

> but the thing you showed up to achieve will be achieved

That's going to be the sticking point, I guess. You could say that giving me beef instead of pork achieves the aim of feeding me just as well. I might disagree (in this analogy, imagine I'm a Hindu).

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#165

Post by wolfgke » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #90

unishark wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analogy can still go either way. You ate half the meal. Then there they had to kick you out to finish at home with a doggy bag. You're losing out on some ambience, but the thing you showed up to achieve will be achieved. Note that there are already refunds for at least some of the in-person stuff such as dorms and gym access. So were already in a position of compromise and partial refund. It's just an argument o…

The first half of the meal, the portion they ate, was what they paid for. The meal was suddenly changed halfway through, but there was no option to stop paying. And in this case, the first half of the meal doesn't mean anything without the second half.

> The meal was suddenly changed halfway through, but there was no option to stop paying.

Can't the respective student stop paying by quitting the university (of course, he will leave without a degree)?

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#166

Post by jccalhoun » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

I've taught some online classes for a few years and at least in my field, I don't think they are very great. I don't feel like a teacher but a grader. I post mini-lectures and other videos to try to get some connection with students but I don't feel that it is as effective.

In a sense I was lucky when this quarantine in place happened because my college does 8 week classes and we were on a break when things started. Therefore, all the classes I'm teaching right now have been virtual/online from the start and I didn't have to switch gears in the middle of a semester. Even in these classes where we do live zoom meetings I don't really feel like I know my students. It is better and more like a real class than online but the added tech issues make it less than ideal.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#167

Post by jki275 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #108

supernova87a wrote: post #2

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which…

Depending on the place and people (i wasn't very well when I was in college), MOOCs can be better in many metrics. - less anxiety being in IRC than in class - more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure) - more communication with other students and teachers - automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly

As a GA Tech student for two years now (GA Tech's OMSCS program is all MOOCS), MOOCS are generally horrible ways to actually teach.

-I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.

-There's less focus in online classes because now you have to manage all the different ways you have to communicate with everyone, official and unofficial, in the hopes you can get enough interaction to slog your way through the horribly written assignments and figure out what they actually want you to do.

-There's essentially zero communication with teachers -- they're almost totally absent, communication with other students can be helpful, or not, and you don't always know. There are typically two or three TAs for up to 600 students, so any kind of focused interaction with a TA is almost unheard of, and even if you do get that their level of expertise is often in question.

-autograders work well for some very defined sorts of problems, but they don't work at all for most workflows. The TAs, in my experience, spend most of their limited time fixing autograder screwups.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#168

Post by jki275 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #111

shawnps wrote: post #55

Online classes can work, but it makes sense that students are frustrated by courses put together quickly due to unforeseen circumstances. I've been a student of Georgia Tech's online Master's program for a few semesters now. They've had years to iterate based on previous students' feedback. I am learning an incredible amount for a decent price. But it is a Master's program and involves a lot of self-motivated researc…

Gt's master in CS prices are, I think, the biggest reason for a large refund for this online half semester. Where in state tuition is $13k a year, out of state is $33 and a masters program is $10k total (or $1700 a year based on the same calculations)

GT's MSCS is a totally different instruction model. It's all MOOCS, not focused online learning with regular sized classes. Most of the classes have 600 students in them.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#169

Post by grumple » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #19

gibolt wrote: post #4

As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to increase access. Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only. To…

Why was this downvoted? I failed a class and took the online version once so I got to see both sides. The online version had: 1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?) 2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. wi…

Online courses I've taken have been much better than in-person courses.

Online courses have several advantages:

1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added.

2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses).

3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material.

4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures.

5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class.

6) You learn at your own rate.

Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#170

Post by pr0duktiv » Mon, May 04, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

em500 wrote: post #28

pr0duktiv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, at least speaking for my uni (ETH Zurich), lots of grad students from Asia come here for cheap tuition & good PhD salaries, but almost all Chinese grad students I asked want to go back to China afterwards. Ideally we would keep talented people here instead of paying for their education with taxes and have them go back afterwards.

> Ideally we would keep talented people here instead of paying for their education with taxes and have them go back afterwards. Not sure how Swiss uni financing is setup, but I believe in most countries international (undergraduate) students pay full price so it's hard to argue that the host country is "paying for their education with taxes".

Not here, tuition is very low (<2k per year) at ETH (due to being heavily subsidized) and doesn’t depend on nationality