Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present • Hacker News Board

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#121

Post by xenonite » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:55 AM UTC

kleinsch wrote: post #102

davesque wrote: post #79

As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an an…

We’re moving to Boulder next month. With houses starting at $800K and larger houses going for $1.5M+, it seems like the local economy must be driven as much by the tech companies that flocked to Boulder bc of the school as by the school itself.

Usually, the tech companies in college cities are driven by university graduates. It is not hard to guess what happens after a while.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#122

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:27 AM UTC

gbronner wrote: post #18

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don…

As long as employers require a degree, universities will not die.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#123

Post by tkgally » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

cl3misch wrote: post #117

tkgally wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected. The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with p…

That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live? Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos. Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped,…

> How large are the classes you are teaching live?

My own classes are not very large: I am teaching two undergraduate classes with about 17 students each, and one graduate seminar with nine students.

The graduate seminar feels closest to an in-person class; it helps that most of the students leave their cameras on and that I have taught most of them before. For undergraduate classes, we have been asked to let the students leave their cameras off (out of privacy considerations, and because some students have metered Internet access). It's frustrating for me not being able to see the students' faces. I've adapted by having them submit questions and comments through an online form, which I then respond to through Zoom. It's less conversational, but the exchanges seem more deliberate and focused. I hope that next semester, if we are still teaching online, we will be able to ask undergraduates to turn on their cameras most of the time.

We don't yet have comprehensive data on students' reactions to online classes. That should be available in a few months. A preliminary survey suggests that most, though not all, prefer live online classes to prerecorded lectures, and that a significant minority prefers online lectures to in-person classes. The ability to ask questions more easily in large online classes is one reported advantage for students, as is the convenience of being able to participate from home without having to commute to campus. (My university is in central Tokyo and not many students live near campus; most would normally be commuting by train, often an hour or more.)

The biggest complaint we've heard from students—and it's been heard at other universities in Japan, too—is that the students are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of schoolwork. One reason seems to be that teachers are assigning more homework than usual, perhaps as a way of getting more feedback from students. Another may be that the students, because they cannot see how seriously the other students in the class are studying, are working harder than normal out of fear of being outcompeted. Lockdown fatigue is no doubt another factor. As a result, the administration has asked teachers to be less demanding.

There's a lot of trial and error going on with online classes, and I'm sure many improvements still need to be made. But considering how inexperienced we were with online education a few months ago and how little time we had to prepare, things are, as I noted above, going much better than expected.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#124

Post by me_againnnnnn » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:25 AM UTC

gbronner wrote: post #18

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don…

Extinction event is the buzzword of the week. Soooo stupid.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#125

Post by kungato » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

greenyoda wrote: post #38

kungato wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My whole country pays 0 while the price if you repeat a year is 1200€

Those universities need a lot of money: professors don't work for free and buildings don't maintain themselves. You can be sure that you'll be paying for your college education out of your taxes for the rest of your working life. It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college educati…

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp some nice numbers here

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#126

Post by _Understated_ » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

I find it odd that even now, after all that's happened in recent months, and with the reserves of cash that some of the elite establishments (in the US at least) are not taking advantage of online degrees.

To give you an example. I am planning on starting a degree in October. I'm 45. It will be through the Open University. It will cost about £6000 to complete the degree.

I looked at a ton of Universities in the UK and their online offerings are abysmal. there are some in Europe that look ok but the US ones are in the $30k+ price range...

If I thought that Yale, Harvard etc. would do an online degree for a fraction of what an actual degree currently costs in person, I would jump at the chance... who wouldn't want that on their CV?

With the resources they have they could easily extend their degree programme to the rest of the world via online learning. Same lecturers, same material.

Instead, they're sitting on their hands while their entire foundation burns...

I agree with one of the other comments that this could be the beginning of the end for the bricks and mortar universities

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#127

Post by Google234 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

_Understated_ wrote: post #126

I find it odd that even now, after all that's happened in recent months, and with the reserves of cash that some of the elite establishments (in the US at least) are not taking advantage of online degrees. To give you an example. I am planning on starting a degree in October. I'm 45. It will be through the Open University. It will cost about £6000 to complete the degree. I looked at a ton of Universities in the UK an…

A big part of the brand/prestige of Yale and Harvard is the exclusivity.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#128

Post by Kinrany » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #119

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th cen…

> Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time It's as though, if you concentrate a lot of smart and well-meaning people in one place, they make a great institution! Maybe not any particular university, but the idea of elite, sequestered scholarship itself has long outlived neoliberal capitalism. It was never about money. Moneyed in…

Finding other smart and well-meaning people and coordinating with them to meet at the same place is not trivial though.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#129

Post by _Understated_ » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

Google234 wrote: post #127

_Understated_ wrote: post #126

I find it odd that even now, after all that's happened in recent months, and with the reserves of cash that some of the elite establishments (in the US at least) are not taking advantage of online degrees. To give you an example. I am planning on starting a degree in October. I'm 45. It will be through the Open University. It will cost about £6000 to complete the degree. I looked at a ton of Universities in the UK an…

A big part of the brand/prestige of Yale and Harvard is the exclusivity.

Valid point but there are hundreds of other institutions that don't have that exclusivity that have very little to offer when it comes to online learning.

From what I can see, the OU is miles ahead.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#130

Post by Google234 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #58

outoftheabyss wrote: post #4

I’m doing a distance data science degree at a fraction of the cost and I would imagine I’m getting much more out of it than this September intake will. There’s been a revolution in remote working, will education follow?

Be careful in your assumptions here. Online degrees still carry a huge negative stigma with them (which is interesting given that all students in the current cohorts at normal universities will have had several semesters of remote learning). Signalling of the college brand is also largely underappreciated by online students. You're getting a degree for a fraction of the cost of an in-person one, but it may or may not…

I personally don’t get the appeal of hiring someone that did a DS degree. Most of the data scientists I know are phds or former post docs in math, physics, statistics, or neuroscience. I feel like as long as these fields keep producing too many graduates then it will be hard to get into the field.