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The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
21–30 of 298 posts
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#22true
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#23hi guys
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#24I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information…
I've hired people, but wouldn't say I have a great deal of experiencing in the area, so here's an honest question for you: do candidates with a college education perform better at their jobs?
In my (limited) experience the answer is definitely yes. Not only do they have more exposure to the concepts we need them to understand (if not necessarily the specific tools), we have just had better luck with them as employees in general. They are more likely to do small things, like all the administrative overhead that's part of a job: responding to requests in a timely manner, having good written communication skills, showing up to meetings on time, etc. I am the first to admit this is a small sample size and a lot of the cultural fit could be that the workplace is already filled with college educated staff, but I'm curious what your experience is after the hiring process is over.
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#25> as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree Of course employers will embrace skills-based certifications, as they essentially offload the cost of any specialized training to the employee. Until now, it was not uncommon for the employer to pay (directly or indirectly) for the additional training. But I'm not sure if getting a speciali…
There are many more problems with CS degrees that just their price.
Would anyone here be comfortable running a WP plugin from the average 4 year CS grad? It is rare to find a CS grad who can write production code right out of college.
Let’s be clear, skills based certs are terrible at measuring things. You know what else is a terrible skills based test? A 4 year CS degree. I’ve interviewed a number of degreed working programmers who can’t solve even basic interview questions. Not gotcha questions, not difficult algorithms, but basics (read a file, sort a list of words, etc).
There’s lots of ways to learn, and this kind of talk just adds another barrier to people coming from non-traditional backgrounds. I understand this, because, as a self taught engineer, I’ve been the person at the table listening to engineers talk about how important a CS degree is and how you just need one.
Every time you make the point that you absolutely need a CS degree you’re telling someone who learned via another avenue that they aren’t good enough. At a time when we want more diversity and inclusion in software this message is the wrong message.
We need to think about how to bring education to more people through channels that work for them instead of telling them to fit themselves into a box that was designed for someone else.
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#26Looking back on my education 20 years later... obviously the math degree gave me the skill set to take advantage of the opportunities handed to me. (It’s how I got back into grad school & out with a PhD in just 4 years; it let me work with Mike Abrash.) but the skills I learned in school that have helped me as a person were from the courses that weren’t “certificatable”: literary analysis, my beloved history, the phi…
Yeah, the #1 thing I got out of college was critical thinking. History and philosophy are where I learned that. Would it have come without college? Maybe, and certainly yes for some. I do worry about a learn-one-task education system and what that means for society at large.
With the degree attainment rate at only 30% in the US, a share that is similar in many countries around the world, the "learn-one-task education system" is what society at large is already accustomed to.
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#27I think vocational education could have been better conveyed online, but with perfect pre-recording and editing. Coursera and Edx are a good example for a forerunner though. As a college student myself, this year, this semester is the worst for me -- I felt really lazy without any faith to keep me going, that with face-to-face activity I feel like I'm motivated to engage. But I hope this semester really is the except…
>Coursera and Edx are a good example for a forerunner though.
Are they really though?
Online lectures have been pretty much a solved problem since maybe the 80s. (Although, of course, video lectures didn't become widely available until digital and YouTube.)
Arguably broadcast video should less faithfully replicate in-person lectures but it's a lot easier cheaper to point a video camera and add some Powerpoint than to do something more multimedia. See also virtual events.
Automated grading of assignments works reasonably well for narrow classes of problems. (Like programming--and even then it can only give feedback for the most part if the answer is correct.)
Discussions are mostly a tire fire--although they can be better for small groups with selective admittance criteria.
A lot of people don't even like it when MOOCs stick to a schedule to provide some structure.
So, I've taken some MOOCs and gotten some value out of them but I think on the whole you have to give them a pretty mediocre grade.
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#28I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information…
For me, the biggest benefit of the university structure was 1) teaching me things I didn't even know existed and 2) teaching me things I didn't think we're important (but turned out to be).
(1) might be solvable with an online curriculum, but (2) requires an evaluation or end-game credential to force me to do it.
Other than that, as you mentioned an even bigger benefit was social, the shared experiences with others, and the cross pollination of ideas from these other people
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#29> as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree Of course employers will embrace skills-based certifications, as they essentially offload the cost of any specialized training to the employee. Until now, it was not uncommon for the employer to pay (directly or indirectly) for the additional training. But I'm not sure if getting a speciali…
It may well be impossible to walk back what has happened to universities. Large institutions move slowly. There are too many stakeholders. Even when they can change, it's inevitable that forces will resist the change, resulting in half-measures. So it may well be more expeditious to start over. There are many other models, and if nothing else, whatever success those models have will provide more capacity. That may al…
> So it may well be more expeditious to start over. There are many other models, and if nothing else, whatever success those models have will provide more capacity. That may also draw away students and force them to lower prices.
Don't you think the process of starting over is already underway? We've ha alternate training and evaluation methods (certifications, MOOCs, and vocational schools) for a long time. What do you mean by "start over" in this context?
Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age
#30If I needed inspiration for a new online educational program I’d look to video games to see what’s going on.
Take Rocket League for example. This is a game that’s incredibly simple to get started: you drive a car and hit a ball. But to master advanced techniques, like dribbling in the air as a literal rocket, it takes hundreds to thousands of hours of practice.
To practice in a consequence-free environment there are standard and community-created training packs. To gain skills relative to your peers there’s a matching engine to create “fair online games”. To compete openly, there are ranked matches with precise criteria for getting into and falling out of a rank.
Furthermore, the community is incredibly supportive of questions, show-and-tell streams, and is light-hearted enough to create their own memes. There are even tutors who will review your games play-by-play with you to fix your game sense.
There’s so much good stuff here to pick apart on how to build good programs that are safe, inspiring, and lead to real skill progress for the participants. The university does a lot of it naturally but from what I’ve seen from Rocket League, you should be able to push a lot of those benefits into online formats.