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Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
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Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#2Online only. $10/month for unlimited access to lectures. No schedule, monitored testing, fully accredited. The ivory tower would come crashing down.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#3I think the movie Accepted is pretty close :D
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#4As strange as it may sound, the lectures at universities is not the only thing students are looking for from a university.
I can sneak into most universities' general education classes for a semester and no one would notice or care. Why aren't students doing that instead of taking on debt? Or for that matter my not take all your courses online for mostly free?
1) it's extremely hard to finish a course when no one is pushing you to do your work. You may be able to finish a few abut not 4 years worth.
2) Employers(society) put a lot of weight on where someone got their degree. Students are looking at a university's reputation.
3) University is a social experience in addition to an educational one.
4) Many Students need additional help to learn in addition to the lectures.
There are more but I'll stop there.
So given the previous, you need to charge enough to recreate some of the other things that students need from a university. It's probably a few thousand a year but that's after automating as much as possible. It's not impossible but it's a lot harder than just putting a few lectures online.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#5Make it exactly like Lambda School. Align incentives of admins, teachers, students.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#6Online only. $10/month for unlimited access to lectures. No schedule, monitored testing, fully accredited. The ivory tower would come crashing down.
The ivory tower is undercutting this at $0/month though. You can often find full courses and lectures on YouTube, and edX offers more than that.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#7Smaller class sizes and discussion groups. The best courses I took in college had less than 10 people and were discussion-based, not lecture-based.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#8Online only. $10/month for unlimited access to lectures. No schedule, monitored testing, fully accredited. The ivory tower would come crashing down.
The ivory tower is undercutting this at $0/month though. You can often find full courses and lectures on YouTube, and edX offers more than that.
That's just one of several things I said. Course credits are key here.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#9As strange as it may sound, the lectures at universities is not the only thing students are looking for from a university. I can sneak into most universities' general education classes for a semester and no one would notice or care. Why aren't students doing that instead of taking on debt? Or for that matter my not take all your courses online for mostly free? 1) it's extremely hard to finish a course when no one is…
Really good points! Motivation, incentive, social component, and sources of assistance will all need to be meticulously crafted if one were to challenge the current system.
Re: Ask HN: If you get to open your own university, what would you change?
#10Make a significant number of courses much more self-study oriented with pass/fail exams to demonstrate basic understanding.
Move towards projects (mostly individually done, but at least 1-2 larger student-team efforts) that are heavily guided and curated by 2-3 professors/teachers with the goal of requiring real effort and a portfolio-worthy finished effort.
Most professors at my institution barely, if even then, pull this off for MS students. Most undergrads are lost in the noise . . .
We ask too little of students and I kind of feel like we insult them with "check-list" courses. Students who struggle seem very passive to me - when I chat with them individually, I sense most are ambitious, but not particularly vested in the practice required for success. But they mostly bloom if nudged into a "just get going and try hard" effort mode.