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Students fight back over course taught by AI

theguardian.com

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Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#111

Post by Yizahi »

GJim wrote: post #82
marstall wrote: post #14

I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, Which percentage? And how important/misleading was that particular percentage? (As an aside, personally, I precent the term 'bullshits' to 'hallucinating'; the latter is the daft Silicon Valley term.)

You're absolutely right. I should have used micrograms instead of milligrams in the prescription. /s Sam-abomination-5.1

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#112

Post by kjksf »

cogman10 wrote: post #67
ModernMech wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is America, we have perfected the art of spending more to get less. That doesn't mean cuts to education aren't happening. See also: the entire healthcare system. I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe teaching environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agenc…

In my school district, the only new facilities being built are charter schools. We have unlimited funds, it seems, to send to these private organizations but not enough funds to build or expand a public school or hire teachers/aids. Some of my kids school aids have been homeless because the pay isn't high enough. The aids and teacher all work second jobs.

Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools.

Also, charter schools are also public, not private.

The data seems to contradict everything you claim about charter schools.

"we" (taxpayers) send more money to traditional public schools than to (also public) charter schools.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#113

Post by karmakurtisaani »

palmotea wrote: post #34

> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”. This is the future guys, get used to it. The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.

But the flip side is that the tuition will at least go down! ...right?

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#114

Post by Yizahi »

danishSuri1994 wrote: post #4

AI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue

Content often already exists and depending on the course not much effort is needed to adapt it to next year. Feedback and teaching is what hard and time consuming. Thus we will see the hard part being replaced first. Grading and exams are hard? Let's automate it. Lecturing is hard? Let's narrate text by a program. Etc.

Meanwhile laying off "unneeded" teachers an getting hooked on the enterprise LLM subs. After these borderline bankrupt LLM corpos will raise prices several times universities will be paying even more while struggling with limited staff. This will translate into admin pressure on the teachers to automate more and more and more.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#115

Post by Balgair »

So one question is who owns the IP then?

I know at the UCs, anything you do on campus is the UCs copyright. There's even little brass plaques they put in the ground when you walk on campus delineating that line.

But when these PIs are sending all the student's data up to OpenAI (presumably via the free version), then OpenAI has that data and it's copyrights.

Likely, yet another essay on the causes of the French Revolution is not ever going to be cared about. But there is a chance that something a student does in an upper division class may be worth something.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#116

Post by stvltvs »

kccqzy wrote: post #68
Aurornis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly…

In my experience some of the best courses in my college are taught not by “professors” but by “lecturers.” The distinction is that professors need to do research and teach, so they necessarily have divided focus. But lecturers only have teaching duty, are not tenured, so they are focused on teaching.

I've long argued that lecturer positions should also be tenure track, depending on metrics about effective education rather than research. Being taught by a researcher is overrated at the undergrad level. I've had lots of shitty courses taught by great researchers.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#117

Post by cogman10 »

kjksf wrote: post #112
cogman10 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my school district, the only new facilities being built are charter schools. We have unlimited funds, it seems, to send to these private organizations but not enough funds to build or expand a public school or hire teachers/aids. Some of my kids school aids have been homeless because the pay isn't high enough. The aids and teacher all work second jobs.

Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools. Also, charter schools are also public, not private. The data seems to contradict everything you claim about charter schools. "we" (taxpayers) send more money to traditional public schools than to (also public) charter schools.

> charter schools are also public, not private.

Charter schools are publicly funded and privately operated. That's what I mean by private.

And the per child payment is less because charter schools are experts at keeping children with disabilities out of their facilities. They have to accept them, but they can deny entry if they don't, for example, employ special ed teachers, therapists, etc.

Public schools have to provide those services. They have to accept all children.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#118

Post by phatfish »

lupire wrote: post #98
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends what field. In some branches of history, archaeology, and linguistics, for instance, many matters of emerging consensus often reach students only through lecturers’ handouts that are not put online. What a curious person will find on the internet and in general-reference books can be a decade or more behind, and viewed within the field as horribly out of date.

If that information were valuable to learn, someone with access would be republishing it online.

Is "published online" the bar for valuable information? At this point published online is a good signal for junk information.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#119

Post by rhetocj23 »

pessimizer wrote: post #16

Well the truth has finally been openly accepted by the universities themselves. They sell fancy pieces of paper with your name on them in nice calligraphy, not knowledge. I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no…

[dead]

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#120

Post by ModernMech »

kjksf wrote: post #112
cogman10 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my school district, the only new facilities being built are charter schools. We have unlimited funds, it seems, to send to these private organizations but not enough funds to build or expand a public school or hire teachers/aids. Some of my kids school aids have been homeless because the pay isn't high enough. The aids and teacher all work second jobs.

Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools. Also, charter schools are also public, not private. The data seems to contradict everything you claim about charter schools. "we" (taxpayers) send more money to traditional public schools than to (also public) charter schools.

> Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools.

The public school system is much larger and has a longer tail to support than charter schools. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of their operating budget. Public schools also have to support every student in the community no matter how high it costs, unlike charter schools, which support a lower proportion of them. Both factors manifest as higher per-student costs if you just average it all out.

There's a parallel to private insurance which can kick out the sickest individuals, and a public option which must take everyone. Obviously the latter is more expensive to operate, so private insurance prefers dealing with the former, leaving the public to cover everyone else at taxpayer expense.

> Also, charter schools are also public, not private.

OP said "to send to these private organizations" not that charter schools are private schools. While charter schools are public, many charter schools are run by private organizations.

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