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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

#101

Post by ryanmercer »

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 school, today they had to use a waiver and completely cancel school since teachers can't actually assign work and the like.

facepalm

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

#102

Post by TooKool4This »

I think trying to fit a single solution to the entire range of schooling is a bad idea.

In the earlier years of your life, a big part of schooling is “learning how to learn” whether implicitly or explicitly. By the time you get to university you have a good set of skills in terms of taking notes, referencing literature, practicing problems such that more time is spent learning the material rather than developing those meta-learning skills. I think that might explain the difference between your experience and your colleagues’.

I haven’t thought too much about the pre-k to grade school level, but at the university level it seems like universities are making an incredibly lackluster attempt at remote learning. They seem to have just taken the lecture aspect of university, thrown it into a zoom meeting, and called it a day. For the tuition that students are paying in the US (10-50k per year) there is so much room to provide value in alternative ways. I understand a large portion of those fees go towards paying faculty salaries but surely without having to run facilities they can invest that money in providing more value in remote learning. Things such as VR lectures/labs, improving the social aspect of remote university, more smaller group learning with more remote TAs, etc. There is so much opportunity here but there seems to be very low effort on the university side, probably due to massive sunk costs on the in-person learning side.

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

#103

Post by weff_ »

dangoor wrote: post #49

Khan Academy (where I work) is definitely trying to help people achieve mastery[1][2], and we have people who create studies to test our efficacy and help inform future course development. We care about proving the efficacy of our approaches and constantly improving. We've been putting in a lot of effort over the past few years specifically to help teachers help their students achieve mastery in their subjects. One p…

If you will, could you speak more to

> we have people who create studies to test our efficacy and help inform future course development. We care about proving the efficacy of our approaches and constantly improving."

I'm curious how that works, what the results are. For instance, is the endpoint metric how many more students pass standardized testing? If so, how does that leak into the definition of 'mastery'?

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

#104

Post by cjflog »

Unschooling. That's an actual term/movement you can Google.

You pointed out there are great, interactive lessons online, but the problem is the syllabus. Forget the syllabus. Shouldn't the goal be learning rather than conformity?

Then the problem to solve is not schooling but childcare.

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

#105

Post by nickelcitymario »

bachmeier wrote: post #23
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…

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…

> I think hybrid classes are probably better.

Back in 2000/2001, my high school was experimenting with Cisco classes. We did modules online, but the teacher was in the room to answer any questions and to oversee projects as we networked servers together, etc.

It was great! I remember thinking this was the way all education should be done, and that it was inevitable that it would become the standard.

I don't know that I still consider it inevitable, but it worked well.

Contrast that to my experience in university... the endless lecture halls, overpriced text books, and emphasis on memorization over understanding. Absurd.

Equally absurd: Online courses. I'm big on self-directed learning, but the problem with online courses is that you're on your own. This is a problem when you run into subjects where you don't even know what it is that you don't know. (You can only Google for solutions if you know what to Google in the first place.)

So I like the idea of the hybrid model: Let the student take the lead, provide all the online tools needed, but do so in a supportive environment where problems can be troubleshot immediately with a teacher.

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

#106

Post by DoreenMichele »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #92
DoreenMichele wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know. I've taken remote college classes. I'm familiar with the concept. Have you actually homeschooled? A lot of homeschooling parents don't actively guide their kids through anything. I used to have a page of education quotes, which included ideas like "The ability to learn is older and more common than the ability to teach" and "Education should be the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pale." I surve…

I have not home-schooled my kids, however the topic for this post was remote schooling. I think those are two different topics with some overlap. Parent engagement in their child's education is probably a big factor regardless of home/public schooling. The more engagement, the better the outcome is my guess. From an efficiency perspective, I'd agree public schools aren't efficient on time usage nor are they effective…

My sons are in their thirties and when I was homeschooling them around two decades back there were already online homeschool umbrella schools. This has existed a long time, so someone has to know something better than what I'm hearing this past year from schools that suddenly and unexpectedly became remote-only overnight due to the pandemic.

Homeschooling has a really terrible reputation -- which I tend to forget because I didn't homeschool for religious reasons and those who do have something of a tendency to give the practice a bad name. So the idea that homeschoolers know anything useful gets dismissed out of hand and then a lot of homeschooling parents are the moms. Homeschoolers are often middle class families with a full-time homemaker doing the teaching and the world is really bad about acting like homemakers are all idiots who don't know nothing.

I am out of the loop on this and have baggage over how I've been treated, so I mostly just shake my head and pass on participating in such discussions on HN. I don't need the grief. But "Homeschoolers know something useful that can be borrowed upon" is exactly the point of my initial comment.

What I've read about remote K-12 schooling has been truly horrifying. I think it would be difficult to do anything worse than what I've seen described.

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

#107

Post by abdullahkhalids »

atmosx wrote: post #94
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some material is better taught in an async fashion. Based on the experience of teaching this semester by multiple colleagues, the problem, of course, is that students will not consume that material at all. If you try to do short quizzes to ensure they watched it, they will cheat, or just take the grade penalty. The problem with online is that the the modicum of shame present in offline classes that forces them to p…

If we're going to base our educational system in shaming and pushing "knowledge" down the throat of uninterested group of ppl, then we might want to start asking "why are these ppl uninterested?" and "how we can change that?", "why uninterested parties in X took the subject", etc.

Shame is completely natural emotion that exists in a wide variety of human social interactions to modulate behavior. Sometimes it is negative, sometimes it is positive. Here is a positive example: https://habitica.com/

In education, fear of failing your in front of your peers or teachers is a strong motivator for most people. It is a positive thing in most such cases.

> "why uninterested parties in X took the subject"

As for this, it is known, that sometimes in life we have to beneficial things that we hate. Like washing the dishes. We are not "basing our educational system on it", but part of it will often be beneficial+uninteresting.

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

#108

Post by aloisdg »

randomsearch wrote: post #87
slykar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

In my country, most classroom have an unofficial facebook group or discord channel. My little sister (20y) organizes zoom call for her own group of classroom friend to work together. They work but also chitchat, comment world politics, social issue, etc. It is awesome to assist.

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

#109

Post by svrtknst »

TooKool4This wrote: post #102

I think trying to fit a single solution to the entire range of schooling is a bad idea. In the earlier years of your life, a big part of schooling is “learning how to learn” whether implicitly or explicitly. By the time you get to university you have a good set of skills in terms of taking notes, referencing literature, practicing problems such that more time is spent learning the material rather than developing thos…

In addition to "learning how to learn", esp early schooling offers a lot of social benefits, plus (depending on country etc) food and time away from home, which are important to a lot of kids (unfortunately).

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

#110

Post by Sileni »

I'd look into more project based "classes" instead of a rigidly taught curriculum. As more of a guided process than explicit steps, with the student getting to pick the direction they'll go in.

That's what taught me the most. It's a shame there aren't more opportunities like that in classes in general. Could be a question of teacher hours available, or because we can't effectively measure progress between wildly different projects. Still, I think it's more in-line with the way a workplace functions now.

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