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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

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

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

Charter schools are funded by the public district issuing the charter, but can be any of public, private non-profit, or private for-profit.

They are public in the sense of being governed by the rules (with exceptions provided in the charter, but which exceptions are allowed is also part of the rules) applicable to the public system, which they form part of, but they aren't necessarily public entities.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#122

Post by [deleted] »

chemotaxis wrote: post #96
palmotea wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves? > I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot,…

You mostly don't. Household plumbing and wiring is nowhere the near of complexity of, say, a lawnmower engine. It's mostly "the p-trap is leaking", "the faucet is leaking", "the toilet's flush valve is broken", "the wiring nut is loose". The kind of stuff you don't need skill to fix properly. There are situations where you do want to call a pro, but it's not what you usually call them for. Most of it is one notch abo…

[deleted]

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#123

Post by danaris »

j45 wrote: post #84
danaris wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of US colleges and universities are primarily about education and/or research, even today. Far from all, to be sure—and some are primarily about connections and the school name (primarily Ivies), rather than any of the above.

None of which exist without making sure the organization isa bout sufficient cashflow from government, students, and industry. I shouldn't say it so simply, it might result in attempts to convolute it to distract from the fact that bureaucracies serve to maintain revenue/income and grow it.

There's a big difference between "the organization needs to maintain a sufficient cashflow" and "the organization is primarily concerned with its financial status, at the expense of its putative mission".

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#124

Post by disqard »

chemotaxis wrote: post #87
jjmarr wrote: post #38

AI will continue to stratify education. The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.

I promise you that students from wealthy families will continue to get human tutors for the foreseeable future. And it will have nothing to do with whether an AI can beat a human on a test or not.

History shows that you are right:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-conta...

This pattern has recurred in every era where "technology will disrupt X" -- the affluent pay to "opt out" of the ersatz tech-supported version of X, while people of fewer means have no choice but to put up with it.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#125

Post by j45 »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #47
_yvnd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All universities outside of the US Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!

Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing c…

It's surprising because so many countries have taken billions from international students, mostly from one country, and is now blaming the the students for having parted with their money.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#126

Post by j45 »

graemep wrote: post #104
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing c…

British universities do the same marketing. Seen it there. The problem in the UK has been ridiculous the expansion of universities. if we shut at least half of them down, reduced some of the others in size, there would be a lot more money for the rest. AI teaching is the opposite of what the best universities do, which is things like small group tutorials on top of face to face lectures.

Too many universities and colleges seem to love opening buildings to name them.

AI might be a threat because it can't take up as many buildings as students?

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#127

Post by thisisit »

marstall wrote: post #95
thisisit wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less? > I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated You guess it is a small percentage? How much do you guess this small percentage was the most important part about this disease? Because it seems like you were taken in by…

> You guess it is a small percentage? Well I am operating within a space where his doctors are setting the parameters in terms of the pathways targeted, the therapies offered, etc. And I'm asking, how does this therapy work? How is it related to X and Y? How strong is the evidence? Questions like that. I think I can throw the appropriate grain of salt on it, but yeah, some fake facts could creep in. It's stuff that w…

> It remembers salient details about my son and his condition. It really explains things well. It knows so much. It's quite remarkable.

Yes but that doesn't mean the answers are right. And while you acknowledge it might be throwing some fake facts in, you don't know what those might be. You still seem to think it is remarkable just because

> It gets right at my needed level of explanation.

And similar issue the AI college education seems to be going through. Someone somewhere created the college slides using AI content and voiceover, didn't know any better but said - Hey, that sounds near to what might be taught in this class. Close enough. Good for college education.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#128

Post by zen928 »

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.

As long as we're reciting unrelated anecdotes to attempt emotional appeal over anything of substance, "Chat" has also driven young children to suicide. No one in their lives would have paid as much detail into reaffirming every negative thought pattern they had until they ended their own lives as much as an emotionless token predictor LLM running 24/7. They got their nihilism and idealization pushed back at them in a clear, cold tone they would have never gotten from docs, reading papers, reading textbooks. I dont think their outcomes were as amazing. Their mental condition wasnt even as rare of a circumstance to properly handle and treat, yet it failed at a fatal level.

I dont know why asking to not have LLMs shoved in your face in every facet of society always has to be rebutted by a subjective miracle experience akin to openai PR statements. You can have these conversations with chatgp- oh, your friend "Chat" without it being proliferated to education platforms. These concepts aren't in conflict with eachother, yet by coming to defense of their use as a mandated platform you want to brush away critique for reasons that are unknown to anybody else. Go ahead and keep talking to "Chat", maybe let the people suffering at the hands of low quality slop have their voice and chance to speak?

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#129

Post by j45 »

zerkten wrote: post #49
_yvnd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All universities outside of the US Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!

The original article is about a UK university. Cashflow and revenue generation is a very important topic for UK universities. They have copied the approaches of US universities, and in many cases have created overseas campuses when they have some name recognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_branch_campus for examples.

Interesting link, thanks for sharing!

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#130

Post by jjmarr »

chemotaxis wrote: post #87
jjmarr wrote: post #38

AI will continue to stratify education. The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.

I promise you that students from wealthy families will continue to get human tutors for the foreseeable future. And it will have nothing to do with whether an AI can beat a human on a test or not.

I've had human tutors and a well-equipped AI, e.g. Deep Research-like, can often be better.

But an AI tutor at that level can be more expensive than humans. An hour of deep research with a SOTA model that has hundreds of thousands of context tokens is going to be much more than $80.

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