Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition • Hacker News Board

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#211

Post by kmonsen » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #172

barry-cotter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another difference there is that life in Europe is much nicer for the average middle class, but personally I think it’s nicer in the US for upper middle class, the top 10%. This is a gross underestimate. One can quibble about whether the top 40% or 80% of the US is richer/consumes more than in Europe but the idea it’s only true for the top 10% is delusional. Germany has a lower GDP per capita than every state bar M…

The gini coefficient of Germany means that the average citizen of Germany has likely more money and a higher standard of living than the average American. Germany has far fewer ultra-rich and ultra-poor people. Gdp per capital is misleading without talking about measures of income inequality

Yeah this is the point, life in for example Germany has a very acceptable life quality for less money.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#212

Post by shinjitsu » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

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…

>College students heading into the fall semester should take a gap year. I know I would.

The problem with taking a gap year for current students (in the US) is that many of them have federal student loans whose interest is deferred as long as they are studying full time. A gap year means they will incur interest for the rest of their University time and have that much more to pay off at the end.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#213

Post by 7thaccount » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

It's a shame. I'd like to work on an online masters in engineering to supplement my bachelor's. The cost for 4 years of an online program that actually has relevant classes of interest is like $50k even with my company paying over $5k a year. That's rediculous. They try to sell it to me based off of the potential earnings it could lead to, but I'm already well established in my industry (capped out on the technical track), so the degree is 100% worthless from a career point of view. I really just want to learn new things. I'd gladly pay some money, but it is currently priced 4x higher than I can ever justify paying. So instead, I buy the textbooks and read in my spare time.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#214

Post by j0hnml » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

2snakes wrote: post #200

j0hnml wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the mere presence of MS on a resume may not mean much to employers, I almost think it’s more important to weigh its usefulness against your current skill set. For instance, I work in tech but majored in something other than CS, and so I sometimes feel “weak” when I need to write more formal code. I’m going back to get my masters in CS so I can learn some of the foundational aspects that I unfortunately missed o…

This has been brought up before on HN: https://teachyourselfcs.com You don't get initiated by the teachers, you get initiated by doing the practice problems so you can develop schema for what strategy works.

That looks fantastic, thank you passing this along.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#215

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

Some other countries have free college, so "worth it" is very relative.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#216

Post by deskamess » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

humanistbot wrote: post #78

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…

Except "embracing" is definitely not the right word. Very few professors I know are happy about this whole situation. Universities are begrudgingly accepting the fact that they can't have in-person classes, so they have to turn to online alternatives. Tuition can't be changed because the few costs that are being saved (facilities still need maintenance) are offset by the massive losses in revenue from student housing…

> Very few professors I know are happy about this whole situation.

Exactly this. It is not the same experience being in the same class and teaching. All the energy that could have gone into that is now spent twiddling with gadgets. There is no coordinated 'course production system' in many environments. So teachers have to improvise and they are ending up on different ecosystems. Many of them are now learning to twiddle cameras instead of helping out students. I think many universities have to take a 'gap year' to bring in companies to help them reorg across departments.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#217

Post by jb775 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

Are there any schools that are opening their online material to the public? What a great opportunity to spread knowledge. With all this "defunding" talk, it's probably a good time to reassess how much taxpayer money goes to universities in relation to how much they give back to taxpayers.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#218

Post by soylentcola » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

MagnumOpus wrote: post #121

soylentcola wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cool, thanks for the info. We don't do as much with Zoom since our WebEx license covers Events and hosting recorded videos (among other things) but it's still good to know.

I've only used Zoom in the basic/meetings sense. Seems like a rough parity between the two (which makes sense given their origin, I'd imagine).

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#219

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

I hope that as a side-effect of this extended remote schooling, fully-online degrees become more acceptable to hiring managers.

I'd like to finish my BSCS degree I started over a decade ago, but when you live and work in the most expensive place in America (the Bay Area), there aren't a lot of in-person options. Gotta pay rent.

Re: Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

#220

Post by meej » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

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…

Agreed. I got my MSLIS from UIUC's online program; I enrolled in 2006 and was a member of their 11th cohort, so they had already been doing online learning for a decade by the time I attended. They really had things figured out. Online students paid the same tuition as on-campus students.

We attended synchronous online lectures while logged into an IRC server. You could listen to the lecture and chat with classmates about it in real-time as it was happening without interrupting the lecture, and it was delightful and extremely engaging. Frankly, I found it superior to the in-person class meetings I had in undergrad.

Also, class discussions are hardly the only way to engage learners, there are all kinds of active learning techniques that can be employed. In my own teaching, I'm personally fond of using live polling tools to ask formative assessment questions. Many online meeting tools have features for things like breakout sessions where you can ask students to do a think/pair/share.

If a student is not engaged in an online learning environment, I think that points more to instructors not being prepared to teach in that setting rather than an inherent limitation of the setting itself.