Live data from Hacker News

Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

thestar.com

121–130 of 329 posts

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#121

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 is like a basic WebEx "Meeting"

Zoom has the same features as the Webex Events in their zoom "Webinar", with separate logins for admins ("hosts") and panelists, q&a chat box etc.

Of course it's not free like Zoom meetings, but costs $300 or more - that's where they make their money... https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&from=webinar

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#122

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 think they're making the best of a bad situation ... not singing an entirely different tune.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#123

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…

Back in the day when online learning was channels on Community Antenna TeleVision systems reserved for Community Colleges, I was studying the digital bandwidth required for online learning via telecommunications.

Although I don't have a reference, I found a study by a German university that compared classes delivered by television with classes delivered with a combination of sound, pictures, graphics and text.

The result was that the latter was as effective as video for all categories of classes, even those teaching kinetic skills such as golf and tennis.

Moving pictures, especially those of the head and shoulders of a professor delivering a lecture, are completely unnecessary.

I think that the key to online learning is the care and expertise with which the content is developed, especially the narrative, pictures, graphics, and reference material, as well as the design and effective use of collaboration tools by the TAs and students.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#124

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…

My last one is a rising sophomore, and I concur. In fact, he's taking a class this summer. I wish he were taking more- getting an extra semester out of this at home would have been shrewd.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#125
post #40

And here I am in Belgium, paying 2000 a year for a Masters degree.

Something people never mention in the US is that there are public Universities with reasonable tuitions(less than $8000 a year) and accessible financial aid. Going to a $50k a year college is just a choice.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#126
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education so far as I can tell now is indistinguishable from a cult. You have to pay homage to various absurd beliefs, contribute money to them, and worship the value of it no matter what the apparent merit of it is, and more than anything it has its heresies which appear to be self-directed development and independent thinking.

What massive group of people is not indistinguishable from a cult? A book exists that argues that all mass movements (religion, cults, political parties) have very similar characteristics and can be analyzed with the same lens. I have no doubt that "supporters of X" can also be put in the same group where in this case X = higher education. I've never read this book but it was published several decades ago and I agree…

> all mass movements (religion, cults, political parties) have very similar characteristics and can be analyzed with the same lens.

I think this is bang-on, and it's evident in the flattening that every concept undergoes when it makes contact with the masses. But I don't know if the descriptor "mass movement" applies very cleanly to institutions like higher education. They certainly have different characteristics, in that institutions nominally have somewhat-centralized authority while mass movements are driven by the collective whims of the masses.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Part of the point is at the time of decision it's not clear that the students can do that gap year stuff if they take a gap year now. They wouldn't be doing it so they can travel to Brazil, but so they don't have a difficult semester (or year) in college.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#128

I started looking at going back to school around a year ago and online is basically the only way that will ever happen realistically. While most programs do charge a bit less for tuition, the amount of money they're charging for recorded lectures and a credential is almost comical. On top of that many programs, including some of the better looking ones (i.e. from flagship state schools) still differentiate between in…

I was considering MSc EE at Boulder, but the 20k price is way off the mark, especially being used to European prices.

Oh I saw that and it looked interesting, but an online EE degree sounds fishy regardless. Particularly at the graduate level.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#129
I sometimes worry that a lot of the online class feedback that while not wrong, is based on a bunch of self selecting folks who are good at / motivated to / prefer taking online classes.

If somehow we magically switched to online classes and everyone was good at making them ... I worry we'd loose a lot of people / the education quality could drop and we wouldn't know.

Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#130
post #67
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it because it disadvantages the politically competent types while advantaging the technically competent types. Guess which category I fall into.

We are definitely at a disadvantage in terms of having robust technical discussions before implementing new features at my work. Something that previously would be discussed by the whole team is now either just implemented solo or discussed between one or two other people before moving forward. One of the big issues we've had, which I think we're getting better at, is not realizing how much others on the team are in…

I think what you are expressing a difficult time with is more of an effect from the uncertainty and operating under a state of what was supposed to be a short term emergency measure to "flatten the curve".

Unfortunately I think that it is also a symptom of poor adaptation to the supposed pandemic, just as much as it is uncertainty for how long this will go on that keeps people and organizations from rebuilding and reorganizing to permanently/temporarily adapt to the current situation. Humans do not do well under perpetual states of uncertainty, no marginally advanced life form really does. Every life form wants and needs predictability, certainty, and habits/patterns. Patterns are the core of life, as they are to the technology sector.

Most people were told we need to "flatten the curve" for two or so weeks and therefore we need to take emergency and short term measures. That was now going on 5 months ago, and without any kind of definitive event horizon for when everyone can "go back to the office".

We hear anything from "we will reassess in two weeks" … every two weeks … to "not until a vaccine is discovered" … which could literally be never, and everything in between. Just alone that ambiguity and uncertainty is causing stress and anxiety because people cannot even plan for their children's education schedule. People are still often operating as if it's a short term emergency, while it is becoming ever more apparent that it may be a permanent shift in reality, especially as companies realize or are pressured to cut costs with remote work that cuts out overhead costs that can be translated into profits or at least revenues to offset the massive costs/losses.

Again, I find that the uncertainty and lack of commitment is a far more damaging situation that may also even lead to severe shake-ups as companies that did commit to remote work and reconsidered and reworked their whole structure to accommodate that, start gaining market share.

What a smart business would do is to commit to some long term schedule as some tech companies already have, e.g, no changes to remote work before the new year, so that people have some certainty, and they would also start investing and rethinking their processes to support remote work to accommodate the things you illustrate as challenges.

Post reply on HN