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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

#141

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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…

>Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters

But is that the default, common experience? I'm asking seriously: I finished my bachelor's 30 years ago and my master's 15 years ago and that has never been my experience.

Our professors were actual people we talked and interacted with, even the boring ones. And they made an effort to teach. Now, I didn't go to a huge "research" university, where I hear it's common to get profs who have no interest in teaching, but what you describe isn't remotely like what I encountered.

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

#142

Post by asdff »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #134
tenacious_tuna wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I concur. When we tried these things in undergrad, it would be three people on their phone, three people giving an earnest effort but having no clue what to do, and one person who actually understood what was going on being burdened to drag the other people through the exercise like an unpaid TA. If there was more than one person who understood what was going on that was almost a bigger issue, running into the 'too many chiefs and not enough indians' problem which kills productivity and ends in frustration on all sides.

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

#143

Post by asdff »

mattbk1 wrote: post #86
agentultra wrote: post #47

Without computers. Our school board is using MS Teams, SharePoint, and a custom web application. It’s terrible. Even adults struggle with SharePoint. Let alone an 8 year old kid. Let alone kids with different abilities and challenges. Remote learning is terrible and I doubt it will ever be good enough to replace a classroom for you kids. What could alleviate it is a device like a reMarkable. I gave mine to my daughte…

Our kids aren't in K-12 yet, but we're already seeing how the elementary school relies on tablets and laptops. It's probably going to push one of us to run for school board.

My 90 year old grandfather could do calculus in his head. The math abilities of his generation are just absurd to me. He was educated at Carnegie Mellon, during the war he was an engineer in the SeaBees who helped rebuild China after the Japanese occupation, and he went on to be an engineer at Alcoa, where the family legend goes that he designed the largest lazy susan in the world at the time. All of this was done with a pencil and occasionally a slide rule. The power of learning to do by hand.

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

#144

Post by isaacgreyed »

bitstan wrote: post #122
randomsearch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! Ok. That's a win for remote. Now my turn: how easy is it to gauge the mood of your entire class, turn to the person next to you and whisper a question or look at their notes? Go for coffee…

I think when VR technology improves a bit more it'll be the superior learning experience. Imagine learning history interactively. Don't just read about Julius Caesar being stabbed, why not stab him yourself? You could explore physics in a sandbox environment. Learn geography by going there. Practice theater by performing. Grabbing a cup of coffee is fun but so is hopping into a game of virtual paintball.

I'm not really sure if actually doing something will be effective for say learning history. I think of all the odd activities teachers had me do, and I kind of wish they just told me the story, but I'm a guy who now listens to history podcast so may just be personal.

Also think of all the odd physics demonstrations and I'm not sure they really often enhanced my knowledge more than a gif would of especially versus the expense. Does anyone know of any research around this area?

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

#145

Post by Nbox9 »

bitstan wrote: post #122
randomsearch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! Ok. That's a win for remote. Now my turn: how easy is it to gauge the mood of your entire class, turn to the person next to you and whisper a question or look at their notes? Go for coffee…

I think when VR technology improves a bit more it'll be the superior learning experience. Imagine learning history interactively. Don't just read about Julius Caesar being stabbed, why not stab him yourself? You could explore physics in a sandbox environment. Learn geography by going there. Practice theater by performing. Grabbing a cup of coffee is fun but so is hopping into a game of virtual paintball.

What is the rate of data processing of a human’s sensory organs? Until VR output data at that rate to every human sense being in VR will be less stimulating than being in real space. I think this is especially true of social environments, were subtle body language, facial movements, touch and smell are critically important.

Being around a group of people is easily 20x more stimulating to me than any VR experience I’ve had, and I’ve experience the state of the art in VR. Spending day after day, year after year, going to classes with the same group of peers was very socially validating and helped me be more engaged with my time at school.

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

#146

Post by annoyingnoob »

I think at least early education is better done in person. The classroom experience for little ones is about much more than traditional skills like reading, writing, math, etc. This is where they learn to work with others, learn the social skill that they need to succeed in the future. Little ones need their peers as much as education.

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

#147

Post by DoreenMichele »

UncleMeat wrote: post #124
DoreenMichele wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really a lot more complicated than that. If you have someone strong in science but weak in math, their math disability can actively block their ability to learn their favorite subject. But I really shouldn't ever bother to discuss this on HN. The only person who knew me before I joined HN knew me through homeschooling and gifted circles and never once said anything nice about me, just politely nitpicked my comme…

Huh? I think you likely did a great job raising your children. Nothing in my post was intended as an attack on you (or women or mothers or homeschoolers). In general, I find that this community is extremely receptive to nontraditional education methods. My concern was largely in what I saw as a priority mismatch when considering individual examples vs population-scale policy.

Sorry, I get an excess of grief on some topics and it's especially aggravating in this case because I feel I really ought to have a reputation as something of a subject matter expert and would if it weren't for an eight year long campaign of very polite character assassination, something which stopped after I blogged about it at some point but was never remedied in any fashion.

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

#148

Post by User23 »

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…

Counterpoint: WGU's set your own pace online learning is absolutely fantastic for responsible adults who want to grind out a regionally accredited degree fast and affordably. They built their system remote only from the start.

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

#149

Post by codingdave »

Like any new solution, you need to understand the full problem. Creating an educational system that works for the 80% isn't good enough. You need to handle special education, special needs. The school system provides free meals to lower income children. It is also the reason that struggling single parents can find time to work... while their kids are in school.

Any solution that only solves education, without also solving the societal gaps the public system fulfills is a non-starter.

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

#150

Post by ryanmercer »

teddyh wrote: post #139
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 .

>The cloud will not help you.

If the software was installed on a remote server, the children would have had no way of knowing how to gain access to it to cut the internet to an entire data center. Instead they simply looked at the side of the school building. So, you're mistaken at best?

> 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.

So they're going to drive to the home of every teacher and cut their power or set their homes on fire? If the software was on a server not hosted at the actual school building, my wife could have been teaching today. From home. Most people do have the internet at home you know, however their only software that isn't hosted inside the school building is zoom.

If they have a snow day because the buses can't safely get student to school, they could remote work at home, even if the power went out at the school building as it's highly unlikely every teacher would be affected by a limited power outage.

Etc.

>you need physical security.

They do have physical security, but unless you're planning on automated defense turrets laying waste to children that get too close to an exterior wall, or enough humans to constantly monitor every last inch of the property via live camera feeds...

Again, hosting all of the software in the cloud, instead of on a server inside the school building, is a far cheaper solution.

A company providing this sort of hosted software is in a far better position to provide physical security, DDoS protection, etc if they're hosting the software for many schools instead of expecting thousands of schools to be able to do this on their own on a fairly limited budget.,

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