Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
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Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#2My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#3Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it.
The basic reason why Yale doesn't want this information easily accessible is because it would force them to acknowledge that many of the staff are brilliant researchers and absolutely lousy teachers.
This notion that thinking freely about tough problems, and having the ability to pass your knowledge down the generations go together isn't true in the hyper-competitive academic environment today. If a professor doesn't publish, he/she can lose tenure, but if a professor doesn't teach well, he/she can have more time to publish.
I think the best universities to learn are those where the professors truly want to teach. Where their research isn't an end in itself, but a way to inspire questions for another generation. Yale seems to be asserting that it's not in this category.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#4Were there any updates since the last discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#5Why not just limit access to validated students?
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#6One of the author posted on Reddit that they had been contacted by the administration and their project was being re-considered.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#7How about open sourcing the tool. Release the tool as a self hosted solution, and let any one who wants to host it, host it. Or just use for their own purposes. I am not sure if that could get them in trouble, as I am not sure what crazy provisions Yale has in their student honor code. To be safe I would obfuscate my connection to the open source tool, if I were a student.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#8Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reaso…
The professors I had at Yale were all pretty good. Of course, I was a grad student, so I didn't take all that many classes.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#9Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reaso…
I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually cheaper.
Yale understandably knew that such platforms can be useful, but need some tweaking: anonymous reviews tend to aggregate YouTube-grade insults — and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late.
“Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would love.
Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down
#10My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rather than use that system I hacked together an easier to use alternative from my bed using python + flask in literally 60 minutes and released it[1].
The administration went crazy when hundreds of students started using it and asked me to take it down. While its not as impressive as something made at Yale it seems to be a common theme, I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity.