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As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

voiceofsandiego.org

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Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#121

Post by stikit »

danaris wrote: post #107
stikit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hm. let’s start with how free isn’t free. you can then move on to incentives for fraud.

How about we start with knowing that it's not "free" as in "costs nothing to anybody", as UncleMeat has already acknowledged that it's being provided by the government through taxation, and actually address why you thin that it's bad, rather than just repeating "it's not free! it's not freeeeee!!!!" over and over again, as if we're idiots who don't understand how taxes and public funding work?

Please address incentives of free education and how they impact fraud.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#122

Post by palmotea »

gcanyon wrote: post #34
HamsterDan wrote: post #22

The author tried really hard to dance around the real problem here: California is apparently paying students to attend online community college. If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.

Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.

>> If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.

> Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.

I think the idea would be if someone's getting paid to go to school so they don't have to work, then they should go to in-person classes. Online classes probably shouldn't be an option.

If there's profit available and no personal cost (in either time or money), scammers will exploit the program as described ("fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds").

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#123

Post by MisterTea »

arp242 wrote: post #111
MisterTea wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the hard part of society. We want nice things but propose anything that can be gamed/scammed for free money and it's instantly shot-down before it even gets off the ground. That, or if by a miracle it launches, is constantly attacked and smeared by politicians using it to get votes from selfish assholes who dont want to share (I learned about sharing in preschool and kindergarten). Until you solve the primiti…

This type of fraud is not entirely a new thing, e.g. from 2014: https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/pell-grant-fr... But the numbers mentioned there seem tiny for a federal programme like the Pell Grant. A lot of times it's a matter of scale: a bit of fraud isn't ideal, but entirely manageable, so whatever. Since then the scale expanded greatly. This is often a problem when you move things online: you're i…

> which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.

Technology always seems to be the solution until the tables are turned.

> The solution is to do less things online and more in person.

And then we go right back to these programs being attacked for being inaccessible by e.g. poor people and the disabled. Obviously the solution is to hire people to go out and bring these services to those who need it but once you see how much effort is required to do that it rapidly requires a lot of funding and looks inefficient.

A cultural shift is required to fix all this and I am not sure how that will happen. Even given that the major religion in the west is Christianity which preaches that being selfish is not cool has been appropriated by selfish assholes who vote selfishly. I dunno what to say anymore. I am 100% for these programs which will be massively beneficial for humanity and all these fucks can think of is "muh tax munney."

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#124

Post by SecretDreams »

bell-cot wrote: post #118
SecretDreams wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I worked 20ish hours a week while doing engineering and I did well relative to my peers, but I can still recognize it was a lot. Full time in that world for 4-5 years would have been miserable. Just because I can do something doesn't mean it's something I would want or would suggest for the rest of the population.

Yes, it is fairly miserable to do both full-time. OTOH, life in America is very unfairly miserable for tens of millions of people who are not going to school. And trying to tell all the taxpayers that they have to provide nice quality-of-life upgrades, for people who are already enjoying taxpayer-supported free classes? NO - in our non-utopian world, where money is real, that is a very bad idea.

Yeah, I agree in our real world that it's a tall ask. I'd like to see us not burden all tax payers with such requests, though. Rather, I'd focus on the very top to be contributing substantially more into the systems that they've pillaged for their present wealth.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#125

Post by redczar »

zer8k wrote: post #98
redczar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few students watch lectures online. There is massive amounts of cheating in online courses. Almost no online course requires proctored exams. Online education is overall worse, in terms of actual learning, than face-to-face courses.

This might shock your worldview but cheating is absolutely rampant in STEM programs in person too. I still remember the corrupt graduate students who would circulate exam answers and/or take money to get copies of exams. Tutoring services range from valid to straight up homework cheating. Students share answers all the time, sometimes innocently, because humans want to help each other. Students are much, much smarter…

I have 30 years of experience teaching mathematics in higher education. Around 50% of higher education occurs in community colleges. Another large percentage occurs in regional state universities and small liberal arts colleges. Many of these don’t have graduate students and don’t have large lecture hall courses. Your experience is not normative.

Every accredited online course program requires proctoring.

You are wrong.

Your logic is quite bad too. The response to the statement that there is massive amounts of cheating in online courses shouldn’t be: “there is cheating in face-to-face courses too”. Obviously what matters are the relative rates of cheating and you’ve not provided any evidence or reasoning as to why the rates are comparable.

To think in person stops cheating is naive.

Obviously. And I never stated or implied that there is no cheating in face-to-face courses.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#126

Post by danaris »

stikit wrote: post #121
danaris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we start with knowing that it's not "free" as in "costs nothing to anybody", as UncleMeat has already acknowledged that it's being provided by the government through taxation, and actually address why you thin that it's bad, rather than just repeating "it's not free! it's not freeeeee!!!!" over and over again, as if we're idiots who don't understand how taxes and public funding work?

Please address incentives of free education and how they impact fraud.

Since you're the one trying to prove that free education is bad, why don't you address those, and then if we think you're wrong, we can rebut? Rather than demanding that your interlocutor prove your own points for you.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#127

Post by RHSeeger »

ethagknight wrote: post #83
RHSeeger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle students that are not capable of showing up on the first day in-person? - Live far away - Have a job they can't just not show up for - Having children to take care of - Health issues There's tons of reasons for people not to be able to attend in person, and not all of them are "because I didn't want to". And, for a _lot_ of those people, improving their education can have a huge impact on their qual…

Can’t show up for one day? That is such an incredibly low bar to also ask them to sit through a long series of courses and test. These college colleges are state funded, so if the person is overseas or on the opposite side of the US… then what are we really funding? That’s not the intent of a “community college”.

> then what are we really funding

A single mother than works at Walmart and another job delivering food, trying to support her kid(s), and will get let go if she misses a day at work; who is desperately trying to better herself so she can provide a better future for her family?

Look, I get that it's a balance between stopping the cheaters and not putting undue burden on the good ones. But it's not a simple problem, and there's a lot of people out there that are under constraints that a lot of us wouldn't even consider when trying to work out the solution.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#128

Post by RHSeeger »

ethagknight wrote: post #79
RHSeeger wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's still better than no course option available to people that can't attend in person. So the question becomes how do we improve it.

The whole discussion revolves around credentialing and certification that you actually learned the stuff you claim to have learned, that you jumped through the hoops required by a given college system whose reputation you want to lever into a career. If you just wanna learn stuff online, dive in and watch YouTube or any of the variety of online educstional services, but in reality you want a certification that says y…

The goal of the system as a whole should be to help people live better lives. That includes providing the knowledge for people to do the jobs that help society function. And whatever is needed to help them convince employers to hire them (ie, credentials). And (hopefully) other knowledge that helps them in a more general way (ie, the various generic classes that teach non-domain knowledge).

The fact that public colleges are a credentialing system is (supposed) to be in pursuit of the above; not the end goal. If we can find ways to help them achieve the above that doesn't actually need credentialing, that should be fine, too. I don't know if that's possible (or even a goal); but it's important to be able to distinguish between the actual goal and what we're trying to do (atm) to achieve them.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#129

Post by gcanyon »

disambiguation wrote: post #78
gcanyon wrote: post #31

This is an example of what I've been thinking about/warning about for several years now: we are entering a post-truth era, where there is increasingly no way to know what is real and what is not. When I've thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it's a perfect example: we're going to be increasingly unable to know what is "true" in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in ev…

>no way to know Wouldn't having class in person be a sure way to know?

I'm not saying this specific problem isn't solvable, just that it is an example of the problem I'm thinking of.

That said, there are tremendous advantages to supporting remote learning. Simply requiring in person has far greater costs than are being described in the source article.

Re: As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

#130

Post by datavirtue »

TrackerFF wrote: post #20
mnky9800n wrote: post #3

Stop offering online classes and expect students to show up in person. Online education sucks, everyone knows this. Everyone knows that they are making some kind of compromise when teaching or taking an online course. And if people are too poor to drive themselves to college or have to work too much or whatever else, then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education. Stop…

Why does online education suck? When I went to university, the first week we received the syllabus, and date for final examination. Lectures were some old professors pretty much just doing book recitals in a large auditorium - little to no interaction with the students. If you had questions, that's what the TAs were for. Any actual learning, you had to do in the library or study halls - and hopefully join a reading/s…

I had a much better experience than this at my local community college. Full engagement from all professors.
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