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Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

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Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#111

Post by thomasfortes »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #76
abvdasker wrote: post #69

I agree. For some degrees it's less of an issue but for areas of study like chemistry, biology, physics and many others, access to the college's physical resources like laboratories is part of what you're paying for. I don't know how you solve this problem with the current constraints imposed by COVID-19, but you can't expect these students to pay full-price for an inferior education.

You won't find anyone willing to teach several sections a day in a teaching laboratory with 24 students, the risk of infection is (correctly) perceived as too high. The market has adapted, there are kits to do experiments at home. Research labs are much less densely packed, and in-person interaction is less. In less affected states lab-based research is starting again.

> there are kits to do experiments at home.

For high school level, sure.

But I can't see a sane way to let students handle acids like I did in chemistry labs during college, and physics labs have equipment that is too complex/expensive/dangerous to send to the students.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#112

Post by ck425 »

reallydontask wrote: post #65
ck425 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you work but no one where I work considers the current situation fine. It's workable but it's definitely no where near 100%.

> I don't know where you work but no one where I work considers the current situation fine why not? My previous team was distributed across three sites with some people WFH and it worked really well. Admittedly the people WFH, myself included, had a home office (i.e. a dedicated room for work), the lack of which, I guess, is the main reason for a lot of people not enjoying WFH, that and the children running around :)

So very few people have separate dedicated working spaces. Lots of folk have childcare duties. Many of those who don't live alone live alone and that's extremely difficult in its own way (I'm in that boat and it's been rough on my mental health).

Even without those issues WFH requires a lot of self-discipline to create and stick to a routine. That suits some people but a lot of people need and value the external factors of a commute and office to enforce routine.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#113

Post by rightbyte »

barnabee wrote: post #36
entha_saava wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

This. The value I got out of university was mostly not tuition, but I think overall, (very pre-pandemic) the whole package was worth it. I've learnt vastly more by reading, engaging with people, and doing both before and after university though, for much less cost. I've also never been on a paid training or course that was worth the cost and didn't involve something above and beyond the tuition (networking, project b…

Ye well the major upside with a degree for me was forcing me to learn stuff I would never have bothered with. I mean, at the time when I started in uni I had no clue where to even begin. Nowadays I would prefer reading a book rather than taking classes, but I think that is because I went to uni and learned to learn.

I feel it is the same with books on programming. They are worth reading first when you already know how to program.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#114

Post by x87678r »

kerkeslager wrote: post #106
x87678r wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on a gap year when you can backpack around the world. This is literally the worst time to have a gap year. If you're stuck at home you might as well study.

You can study without paying tens of thousands of dollars. There are also tons of productive uses of time that can be done during the pandemic. Now is a great time to volunteer.

Volunteer - unemployment is the worst for decades. There are literally half the population not working right now with nothing to do, its the least useful time to volunteer.

(OK maybe I'm wrong)

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#115

Post by pdabbadabba »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #107
game_the0ry wrote: post #29

A couple of years ago, I was looking into MOOCs for tech education, Udacity's nano degree in particular. I remember stumbling across a video on Youtube where some Udacity folks were discussing the merits of online education with college professors and admins. What stood out to me was how vehemently the college folks were against online education. They were visibly livid - there was no way substituting a live class ro…

The problem with gap years is you loose an additional year of income at the college graduate level on the backend, that's a pretty big missed financial opportunity. With the economy in the state it's in now, it's unlikely most college students will be able to land decent paying jobs during a gap year, if they can find a job at all. Better to just finish the degree as quickly as possible and be ready to enter the work…

If your point is that students shouldn't take a gap year just because its a year when they aren't getting paid, then I think you are missing the nonmonetary value (or value that is difficult to capture in monetary terms) of travel, volunteering, and the other things that people do during gap years that are much harder to replicate once you're out of school. (You're "waste of time" comment makes me thing that this is probably what you mean--but I'm not sure.)

But if your point is that gap years are expensive, and not everyone has the luxury to take one--especially in the current economic climate--then I totally agree.

#Edit: I thought you were talking about gap years generally. But, looking back at the context, maybe you mean that 2020-2021 is a particularly bad time to take a gap year, and that current students should tough it out and get their credits in, saving the gap year frivolities for a year when there are more opportunities and less economic uncertainty. If so, I could see this being good advice for a lot of students (though, of course, much depends on one's individual circumstances).

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#116

Post by Dwolb »

cylentwolf wrote: post #59
Dwolb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure but then the question I would have is can we take cues from enthusiasm around Rocket League and bring those into the community? The real time ranking system I think is the root of a lot of this. It allows people to know where they stand and they can look to the community on how to improve their game.

I think a real time ranking system for students at a university that is visible by all is just going to be targeted for greedy or ambitious people looking to convert it into jobs or money. If I am in the top 10 percent of the rankings in Rocket League sure I can make a few grand streaming, but if I am in the top 10 percent of rankings at a school I can get a better job than the rest. What are the bottom 90 percent's…

> What are the bottom 90 percent's motivation for helping people improve at that point?

I think that's a great point but one that the Rocket League community somehow solves.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#117

Post by wutbrodo »

game_the0ry wrote: post #101
x87678r wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on a gap year when you can backpack around the world. This is literally the worst time to have a gap year. If you're stuck at home you might as well study.

> If you're stuck at home you might as well study. Exactly. It's a good opportunity for self directed study. I would spend time doing something productive, not traveling.

Self-directed study is challenging, especially for 17 year-olds that don't have anyone (eg parents) who are in tune enough with autodidactism to guide them.

One of the biggest advantages of college for me was realizing how much there was to learn and how easy it was to do it (after skating through all of my schooling with straight As), and I only really refined my autodidactic abilities in my mid-20s.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#118

Post by kcb »

soylentcola wrote: post #89
mumblemumble wrote: post #12

Online courses lack class discussions that are key to making courses engaging. This sounds absolutely nothing like how things worked in the online degree I received. I don't know what is typical elsewhere. I will say, from watching my son's Zoom-based classroom sessions, that Zoom seems to be almost specifically designed to yield a poor classroom experience. For reasons that I believe would also apply to Skype, Googl…

I'm not a Cisco employee nor am I married to WebEx in every way, but I do a mix of IT support and media production at a university and WebEx has been very useful for us so far. From what I've experienced, Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting" where you join a conference and it's an online approximation of a conference room. WebEx has a subsection called WebEx "Events" with a few minor tweaks that make it more useful f…

Zoom has the same feature called Webinars

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#119

Post by kumarvvr »

Despite all the discussion about online classes, there is one fundamental aspect of online teaching, that isn't fully 'disrupted'

Keeping students attention on the class.

Technology may improve, economics may change, industries created and destroyed, but ultimately, if the students attention is not held, everything is lost.

In today's world, it has become extremely difficult to even keep focus, with the myriad of distractions abound.

I guess in the future, every city will have tens or even hundreds of virtual training centers, which are classes but taught online, by professors in far away universities. Students will gather here for the classroom experience, keep focus and still get quality education.

Perhaps a new idea of "Infrastructure as a service"

I wish that were true, and I am already seeing signs of that happening in India. Think of how much savings and ease it will bring to a students life, if they can have the convenience of going to college a few streets away combined with the advantage of learning from the greatest minds of humanity.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#120

Post by mnky9800n »

game_the0ry wrote: post #29

A couple of years ago, I was looking into MOOCs for tech education, Udacity's nano degree in particular. I remember stumbling across a video on Youtube where some Udacity folks were discussing the merits of online education with college professors and admins. What stood out to me was how vehemently the college folks were against online education. They were visibly livid - there was no way substituting a live class ro…

I don't think this is fair. I worked at Georgia tech during the mooc "revolution" and helped put on a physics course with a lab, something most thought was really impossible because labs are so hard with a classroom and now we just got rid of it. There were positives and negatives of what we generated, but at the end of the day it worked well enough. I am not exactly for online education nor do I agree it can replace on campus education. The problem is that there are many parts of being on campus that lead to success after you leave campus and also that keep you attending your degree. So it's almost an apples to oranges comparison.

I definitely agree with you on the gap year.

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