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Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

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Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#131

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nvarsj wrote: post #44
impendia wrote: post #13

I'm a professor at a US university. The honest answer (at least at the university level) -- probably we don't. From what I can tell, there's very little enthusiasm for online education, on the part of either professors or students. Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen. For a dissenting perpsective, read Joshua Kim's columns at Insid…

Have you heard of OMSCS? The online revolution is already happening. Many schools are moving to copy the model. I've been in OMSCS for almost 5 years now. I can assuredly say that remote university education works incredibly well. Even better than in person in many respects. Not only that, but I truly believe it is vital to ensuring equal access to high quality education. The current university system with 5% accepta…

Two comments:

First, what's OMSCS? Could you supply a bit more detail rather than just "have you heard of it"? What is it? What's good about it?

Second, 5% acceptance rates are not typical of "the current university system". That's only a few "elite" schools. 40k/year may be more typical, but you can easily find less than half that.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#132

Post by cultofmetatron »

For one thing, the requirements for effective teaching is going to be vastly different between a captive audience of 5-10 years olds that effectively need to be disciplined and educated and grown ass adults who seek out the content on their own.

I think remote learning could be done far better for older teens and adults. The remote experience is always going to be subpar for young children.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#133

Post by sumnole »

nvarsj wrote: post #44
impendia wrote: post #13

I'm a professor at a US university. The honest answer (at least at the university level) -- probably we don't. From what I can tell, there's very little enthusiasm for online education, on the part of either professors or students. Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen. For a dissenting perpsective, read Joshua Kim's columns at Insid…

Have you heard of OMSCS? The online revolution is already happening. Many schools are moving to copy the model. I've been in OMSCS for almost 5 years now. I can assuredly say that remote university education works incredibly well. Even better than in person in many respects. Not only that, but I truly believe it is vital to ensuring equal access to high quality education. The current university system with 5% accepta…

I would like to see a platform take this even further, as OMSCS still seems to be tied to an antiquated model of education where students have limited freedom of choice.

If a school chooses any of say teachers / projects / learning material sub-optimally, why should a student need to suffer through?

Taking a look at 3blue1brown video comments, you see many students expressing that their tuition paid professor had failed them and they didn't truly have an intuition for the topic until after watching the 3blue1brown video.

Ideally, a decentralized model surfaces the best to the top so that everyone can learn from, and the creators be rewarded as such.

Beyond that, the new model should do away with timed blocks in favor of true self pacing. This accommodates people with limited time, handles emergencies well, and enables quick learners to accelerate their path without any special permissions required.

The platform should be as 'hands off' as possible, providing only the connections between the creators, tutors, certifiers, students, and recruiters.

It should have no admissions process, and ideally be free. Traditional colleges do a lot of gatekeeping. Education should be accessible to anyone. Let students pursue education, regardless of their presumed 'chance of success', or financial status.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#134

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #99
tenacious_tuna wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm personally appalled that instead of leaning hard into a "flipped classroom model" by having kids watch (or read!) lectures on material on their own, and then working in small groups with their teacher, the US public school system has instead doubled-down on just retrofitting the classroom environment into remote hell. As a developer it's difficult enough trying to remain engaged on any remote meeting with more th…

Thinking on this more: There's a high level of self-direction required of students in a flipped classroom model, and by my experience in the US public school system, the kids who're already doing well will do just fine in a flipped (or otherwise self-directed) model, but the at-risk kids are the ones who would need more attention--just like in the classroom.

So I'm friends with one college student, and she hates flipped classrooms. It's not because she's irresponsible, either. (This is college, not high school.) She feels like it takes more time and she gets less out of it. It really doesn't work for her.

So I think that

> the kids who're already doing well will do just fine in a flipped (or otherwise self-directed) model

is not true in all cases. I suspect she's not the only outlier, either.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#135

Post by watwut »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #95
qsort wrote: post #8

If remote or partially remote education is to become the default, you have to scrap the teacher-students-classroom model; it hardly works in real life and it's even worse when not happening in a physical space. Moving to a fully asynchronous model is the only way you can maintain any semblance of educational standards. Put content online, have the students access it at their own leisure. Use the saved time to arrange…

I'm personally appalled that instead of leaning hard into a "flipped classroom model" by having kids watch (or read!) lectures on material on their own, and then working in small groups with their teacher, the US public school system has instead doubled-down on just retrofitting the classroom environment into remote hell. As a developer it's difficult enough trying to remain engaged on any remote meeting with more th…

> "flipped classroom model" by having kids watch (or read!) lectures on material on their own

Pretty much all classes before college I had were mixture of in-class exercises and teacher explaining things. It is not like teachers in high school would talk for an hour straight and then sent us home with homework. Plus, people asked questions or teacher prompted people to answer teachers questions. That does not really works the same way with video. In college, there were lectures and labs. In lectures they talked, in labs you solved exercises. Plus, there were office hours where you could ask.

So the whole flipped classroom model sounds like downgrade to me. Or more like someone again needed buzzword.

Anyway, afaik, my best guess is that majority of my peers would half-ass the videos watching at home. Even assigned readings had pretty bad compliance and people skimmed them at best. Unless the flipped classroom starts with graded test, there is no proof that you have done it, no consequences if you did not and then it is too tempting to skip that.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#136

Post by CodeGlitch »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #59

> Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university. Unless you go to an elite university like Stanford or MIT (whose lectures actually are among those on YouTube), an ordinary university lectures usually are garbage (in both how deep and how easy to understand they are) compared to what is available on YouTube. It is common (among people I knew)…

University degrees are totally doable without going to lectures, or attending any classrooms at all. People of univeristy age should be able to self-learn, and I see no difference to a video of a lecturer vs sitting in a hall. As long as questions can be emailed to them.

Schools on the other hand...plenty of students are unable to learn on their own. "Self learning" is a skill, that even at the ago of 40 I'm still trying to master. (Anki seems to be the key here!)

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#137

Post by asdff »

slykar wrote: post #14
impendia wrote: post #13

I'm a professor at a US university. The honest answer (at least at the university level) -- probably we don't. From what I can tell, there's very little enthusiasm for online education, on the part of either professors or students. Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen. For a dissenting perpsective, read Joshua Kim's columns at Insid…

Coming from a different country I don't really know why remote is not the default option. Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters is an awful experience compared to a video recording that you can stop/rewind. Heck, you can even take some proper notes that you will actually understand! For labs it's not like you get any help either. You just have to follow some instructions point by p…

>For labs it's not like you get any help either.

That's never been the case in any of my lab classes from multiple departments. The whole reason you have TAs is so you can ask questions constantly and get instant feedback. Stuck on something during a lab? Flag down the TA and they will set you right. Drop your test tube full of precurser during organic chemistry lab on the floor? No worries, the TA appears moments later with an aliquot of precurser to give you so you can proceed with the lab exercise. Motion detector not working during physics lab? The TA gives you a new one out of the equipment closet or helps you troubleshoot the lab software.

I actually taught a remote version of a lab class this semester and it was horrible. You can't learn lab techniques by watching videos and slideshows or using various virtual lab simulation programs; you gotta get your hands on these things. You wouldn't know how finicky a western blot is until you've accidentally ripped your gel cracking it out of the precast case trying to transfer it to your membrane; all you get on the virtual format is 'be careful,' rather than training sufficient to start work in a research lab immediately.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#138

Post by asdff »

gibspaulding wrote: post #31
bachmeier wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US university professor too. I agree with this: > Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen. There's no substitute for in-person education. For years, I heard from the online education cheerleaders that online can be better. Online can be a quality experience, but you can't build the same relationships, develop the same comfort with aski…

> These options aren't university classes. They're the next generation of textbooks. Totally off topic, but if students were already paying $300 for a paper calculus book, I shudder to think of the extortion we'll see over the virtual, multimedia,cloud-optimized, probably-built-in-Adobe-Flash monstrosity that will be the "next generation of textbooks".

Not to mention the university library has a couple copies of that $300 textbook on reserve for you, so if you were doing your studying at the library anyway there isn't any reason to shell out. I would even take pictures of salient chapters with my phone if I really needed to take the content home.

Online only, there would be no avoiding those mandatory fees. Libraries don't have homework codes on reserve.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#139

Post by teddyh »

ryanmercer wrote: post #101

Step 1: CLOUD BASED! My wife's school is on a 2-week remote learning due to COVID flair ups. Yesterday afternoon, while teachers were at the building, 3 youth (caught on camera thankfully) went to my wife's school and physically cut the internet cabling going into the building, it was unable to be repaired by today. The servers hosting their various learning software are inside the building(s) at the middle and high…

The cloud will not help you.

If your threat model include adversaries willing to perpetrate a physical DoS attack on your infrastructure, you need physical security. I.e. if the students had no internet cables to cut, they could just as easily have cut the power. Or set fire to the building.

If you have physical assets threatened by physical attacks, you need physical security.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#140

Post by asdff »

polishdude20 wrote: post #119
bachmeier wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US university professor too. I agree with this: > Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen. There's no substitute for in-person education. For years, I heard from the online education cheerleaders that online can be better. Online can be a quality experience, but you can't build the same relationships, develop the same comfort with aski…

The best thing to do when coming back from covid and resuming in-person classes would be to try and take the good parts of online learning and keep them. For example, every professor should record their lectures to make them available anytime. Although, I can already see a bunch of professors complaining that if the students can watch the lectures later, they won't come to the live lecture.

Professors at university don't really care about attendance, since you are an adult and can make your own decisions with your education. Attendance was never tallied during my undergrad. Some of mine would make a joke of it about how the class seems to triple in population on exam day.
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