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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

#101

Post by Fomite »

gmu3 wrote: post #32
obblekk wrote: post #3

Academia, 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 concept of tenure is definitely somewhat controversial, but it is incredibly difficult and rare to fire tenured professors. I doubt you could cite many if any examples of professors losing tenure because they're not publishing. (Although sure professors who don't publish probably won't receive tenure in the first place)

There are all manner of things a department can do to make a tenured, non-productive faculty member's life harder. The sudden loss of lab space is a particularly common one.

Also, keep in mind that a good many tenured professors are still in "soft money" positions, and have to bring in grant support for parts of their salary.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#102

Post by Fomite »

DiggityDug7 wrote: post #93
acangiano wrote: post #2

My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

I do webdev for a big hospital and when we brought up the possibility of patients reviewing their doctors, the doctors got really defensive. Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work. Too bad for them public rating systems are inevitable.

"0/5, Recommended my child be put on the standard vaccine schedule."

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#103

Post by pdubs »

dasil003 wrote: post #50

With all these negative anecdotes I thought I'd share a counterpoint. In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a new student group registration site from scra…

UMN also allowed some Schedulizer website (now defunct :() to pull their schedules so you could just plug in your courses and search for optimal schedules.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#104

Post by mathattack »

Is the issue privacy, or making it too easy to compare faculty ratings with one another? In general faculty and class ratings are not popular with tenured faculty who view greatness as synonymous with citations. Tenured faculty also are fighting the "dumbing down of classes to improve ratings". (I'm not sure if this is a reality or not at places like Yale)

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#105

Post by bsamuels »

datphp wrote: post #85
hisabness wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate

I've seen several schools decide to implement mandatory functionalities using ActiveX... You know the thing that forces you to use the most dreaded program of all times... Edit: I hope you were /s'ing

>You know the thing that forces you to use the most dreaded program of all times...

lotus notes?

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#106

Post by sirkneeland »

I'm sorry, was someone under the impression that Yale or any other institutions of higher education are progressive, cutting-edge institutions employing best practices in IT or cost management?

These are reactive, hidebound institutions that have been able to go for at least a century without transformative reforms.

They're rather overdue for it.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#107

Post by CamperBob2 »

DanBC wrote: post #42

Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain) website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a few. http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25 He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got…

It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.

Paychecks.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#108

Post by darkarmani »

bertil wrote: post #9
obblekk wrote: post #3

Academia, 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…

> 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.

Who cares about that level of reviews? The validity is weighted by the source and level of discourse.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#109

Post by mhewett »

bertil wrote: post #9
obblekk wrote: post #3

Academia, 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…

A study showed that 90% of professors rate themselves as good or excellent at teaching. My experience from 18 years in college is that about 2% are excellent and about 20% are good.

This is now my second favorite self-rating statistic, after "50% of males rank themselves in the top 10% in athletic ability".

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#110

Post by chris_wot »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #94
TeMPOraL wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he wrote a few lines more before getting to /s, could the sudden electrostatic discharge fry your computer? ;).

Goodbye Macbook Air as I throw it across the room :)

Thrown by the electrostatic discharge, I presume.
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