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Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

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Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#81

Post by svnt »

giaour wrote: post #42
unicornhose wrote: post #22

Many parts of the elephant: no motivation to work on hard things without friends, professors, campus, well-paying jobs, and high-status contacts. Would be interesting to see MOOCs on daily stuff: cooking, gardening, cleaning & organizing, style, hospitality. Or MOOCs around hobbies: amateur radio, photography, sketching, watercolor, dance, music. Here there’s potential for the tech to meet users halfway.

You can absolutely find video tutorials on all the hobbies and daily stuff you list, and in most communities you can find groups that will teach you informally for free or in a slightly more structured way for a nominal fee. Where formal credentials exist, they tend to be based on observed skills (like a culinary arts degree or certification as a sommelier). I'm not sure the demand for MOOCs is there for most hobbies…

I agree with parent — there is no prestige issue and other contributing factors include a desire for specialized community that is absent in later years, plus reduced ability to/interest in relocating.

While you can certainly get it for free, having a cohort and a badge that perhaps could serve as a prerequisite could benefit all students and all teachers/schools.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#82

Post by thwayunion »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #78
thwayunion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key differences: 1. if you aren't Stanford, trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, and nearly impossible to gain back once lost. One bad placement raises alarms and more than one poisons the well for an entire degree program. There aren't many regional employers per degree program, and national/global employers are a "reach job" for most students. This is something that non-elite institutions know in a visceral and…

You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees. The material is worthless to them. I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.

> You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees.

Because it is. I'm not bullshitting. I talk with a lot of our top employers. They care about the actual skills and knowledge students bring. They can find plenty of people with good temperaments to promote into those roles if they only need warm bodies with good time management skills.

> I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.

This simply isn't true for most students in most regional economies. No one is paying a premium for a piece of paper anymore.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#83

Post by RyanShook »

paxys wrote: post #51

The answer to "why hasn't technology disrupted [XYZ]" is always that the problems in XYZ weren't technology related in the first place. The education system, voting/politics, real estate, healthcare... the list goes on. You cannot automate away problems when there are humans and human emotions/motivations/conflicts in the way. Colleges and college degrees are first and foremost a social signal. There is no tech subst…

If cost is an indicator of value then the apparent value/relevance of higher education has only increased over the past 30 years. I think we are in the early phases of higher education disruption but it will be driven mainly by socioeconomic reasons. Is the current annual cost increase in higher education really sustainable over the next 10-20 years?

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#84

Post by sudomatic »

armchairhacker wrote: post #41

From what I see technology has definitely disrupted higher education. Textbooks, worksheets, and report cards are being replaced by Khan Academy, MyLab, Canvas. Teachers are doing less teaching and delegating more tasks to these services: assigning online modules, quizzes, and resources to help students (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as some of these online modules are really good). I predict that very soon…

If AI tutors are not designed and implemented in a way that is inclusive and respectful of diverse learning styles and needs, they may perpetuate or even exacerbate existing inequalities and discrimination.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#85

Post by HDThoreaun »

thwayunion wrote: post #82
HDThoreaun wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees. The material is worthless to them. I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.

> You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees. Because it is. I'm not bullshitting. I talk with a lot of our top employers. They care about the actual skills and knowledge students bring. They can find plenty of people with good temperaments to promote into those roles if they only need warm bodies with good time management skills. > I agree that…

It sounds like you are a math teacher, so I suspect your experience is because you are speaking to employers who are looking to hire math students. In that case I agree, calculus is important. For students outside of STEM it’s a different story in my experience.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#86

Post by thwayunion »

makeitdouble wrote: post #80
syzarian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they…

You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc. Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem. I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowled…

> I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.

I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough.

Is that how you meant it?

I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#87

Post by analog31 »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #53

If you use a different definition of higher education -- not as a college degree but truly incredible learning on a variety of topics, I think the disruption has already happened. Youtube has completely changed how I learn. The most amazing videos on philosophy, quantum mechanics, psychology -- it's all on Youtube.

How good are you at solving moderately difficult quantum mechanics problems?

Maybe you're the exception, but when I meet people who've learned quantum mechanics from books, they've soaked up all the cool weird stuff, but can't write an equation.

Disclosure: I don't know how I would have learned physics without classroom instruction. I was viscerally interested in it, and in math, but didn't have the self discipline to do the work without some guidance.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#88

Post by thwayunion »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #85
thwayunion wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees. Because it is. I'm not bullshitting. I talk with a lot of our top employers. They care about the actual skills and knowledge students bring. They can find plenty of people with good temperaments to promote into those roles if they only need warm bodies with good time management skills. > I agree that…

It sounds like you are a math teacher, so I suspect your experience is because you are speaking to employers who are looking to hire math students. In that case I agree, calculus is important. For students outside of STEM it’s a different story in my experience.

I am not a math teacher. I have not taught professionally in a long time, and even then it was temporary and not in math. But I know Calc II in particular is an interesting crucible in terms of students' abilities to learn from an internet module.

I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations.

I speak with all types of employers for all types of students, in my capacity as a member of those committees/boards. Ranging from high school dropouts finishing their high school diploma later in life to masters students. My comments here are mostly about traditional undergraduate students, though.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#89

Post by Hermitian909 »

syzarian wrote: post #58
Hermitian909 wrote: post #30

I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers. Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first. It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone…

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they…

> With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth

I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post.

Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting that there's also a larger population of people who've achieved a bachelor's level of competence through study + work e.g. my experience is that it's not that rare for certain types of technicians to study to the level of an Electrical Engineering degree and no real effort is made to recognize that expertise.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

julianeon wrote: post #75
Hermitian909 wrote: post #30

I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers. Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first. It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone…

> It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this. Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Ta…

Look at this from the perspective of the participants of your test: you're asking them to play in a lottery, whose odds are one to million, and the price of admission is years of long, hard work.

No thanks, anyone capable of solving even the easiest of your tests will know they're better off playing the actual lottery, and spending the rest of the time on any kind of job or social activity. You'd have to offer something truly out of this world, like guaranteed UBI for the winner and their whole family, two generations back and two generation ahead, for it to be worth the risk.

But then, with incentives that strong, you'll probably have only fraudsters getting close to the finish line. Unfortunately, the deck is already stacked against higher education here: as long as your long-term economic prospects hinge directly on your educational performance, the most motivated and effective crowd will be cheaters. If you weed out people based on performance, you'll end up selecting for cheaters, and against honest students.

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