Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present • Hacker News Board

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#131

Post by chongli » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

sys_64738 wrote: post #37

Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have. Extend that to degrees and that's the stigma you have to deal with when trying to get a job. Telling an employer you got your degree remotely V the in class person, who are you gonna hire?

The value of a university education (in many fields, anyway) is in the degree. It’s the signal to employers that you made it. People who drop out in 4th year, even if they’re only one credit away from receiving their degree, are worth far less in the eyes of the employer, despite having passed all but one of the same courses as a grad. This isn’t what you’d expect if every course a person passed contributed a bit of value for the knowledge it imparted. Nope, for the employer it’s all about who crossed the finish line and checked off the box.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#132

Post by fastball » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

gbronner wrote: post #18

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don…

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th cen…

I think you might be underselling the total paradigm shift that is the internet.

Nothing that came before it really compares when it comes to impact on education, except for maybe the printing press, but in many ways that probably strengthened university's grip on education. The internet does the opposite.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#133

Post by jimhefferon » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 10:01 AM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #123

cl3misch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live? Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos. Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped,…

> How large are the classes you are teaching live? My own classes are not very large: I am teaching two undergraduate classes with about 17 students each, and one graduate seminar with nine students. The graduate seminar feels closest to an in-person class; it helps that most of the students leave their cameras on and that I have taught most of them before. For undergraduate classes, we have been asked to let the stu…

I'm on the EdTech committee at my school and we had something interesting happen about the question of syncronous vs asyncronous (that is, live classes vs recordings). At the end of the semester we gave a version of the usual student eval. Half of the faculty on the committee had taught sync and reported that their student evals thanked them for doing that and said it was much better. The other half of the faculty did async and said their students thanked them for doing what they did.

I did async and my students were clear that it was better for them, that they had other classes where they had to lose time at work to attend, etc., and async was so much better.

We saw the same effect in the feedback we got from a survey of all faculty, so it is not just the people on the committee. I perceive that it is like on class evals where there is a tendency to get pretty much the same scores on each item, even on an item such as "Returns quizzes promptly" where you can measure whether that is true, because students really only have one thing to say and there is a tendency to just say the same thing on each item. (My speculation that in this case students recognize that their teachers did a lot of work to turn the course on a dime, and students did a lot of work also, and there was an in-this-together sense that they wanted to express.)

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#134

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #119

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th cen…

> Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time It's as though, if you concentrate a lot of smart and well-meaning people in one place, they make a great institution! Maybe not any particular university, but the idea of elite, sequestered scholarship itself has long outlived neoliberal capitalism. It was never about money. Moneyed in…

In the history of universities, what is "neoliberal capitalism" and what does it have to do with it?

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#135

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 10:20 AM UTC

davesque wrote: post #79

As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an an…

So it is not about education, just about the money. When people started to call college education a massive scam I disagreed, but I start to understand some of their points.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#136

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 10:22 AM UTC

vgchh wrote: post #41

For universities to fully crumble and education to become significantly cheaper, in addition to all the advancements that have occurred in last decade, I believe we need a credible way to certify students online. Imagine if someone sitting in Tibet or slums of Bombay could prove to Googles of the world that he/she (and not some hired help) successfully completed a highly ranked test online, it could be transformative…

And then you get what you measure for: people that can pass some very specific test. Not good employees, I guess.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#137

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 10:24 AM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #70

vgchh wrote: post #41

For universities to fully crumble and education to become significantly cheaper, in addition to all the advancements that have occurred in last decade, I believe we need a credible way to certify students online. Imagine if someone sitting in Tibet or slums of Bombay could prove to Googles of the world that he/she (and not some hired help) successfully completed a highly ranked test online, it could be transformative…

It would be transformational if firms would be okay with some of their team working in a different timezone. It's hard to collaborate when you can only meet in the evening for one worker, and early morning the other. I don't know if there's any logistical solution to this.

It's done on large scale: just split the projects into teams and each team can be on a time zone, so intra-team communication works well and inter-team is done as much as needed.

This is how companies have offices across the world, more and more in low cost locations. It this is what you want ...

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#138

Post by jgalt212 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

Full professorships, irrespective of institution eliteness, are a tough job to get. If I were the provost, I'd just sack the folks who refuse to show up to work this fail. Most of them would be very easy replace (certainly if you value teaching skills over research skills).

Furthermore, the health risk to professors is much lower than it is to primary school teachers. 20 year olds can wear* masks for 45-90 minutes at a clip, 2nd graders won't be able to do that for six hours straight.

* or legally forced to, as they are adults.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#139

Post by jki275 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #53

vgchh wrote: post #41

For universities to fully crumble and education to become significantly cheaper, in addition to all the advancements that have occurred in last decade, I believe we need a credible way to certify students online. Imagine if someone sitting in Tibet or slums of Bombay could prove to Googles of the world that he/she (and not some hired help) successfully completed a highly ranked test online, it could be transformative…

Online tests are wide open to cheating if they aren't taken in person. Hybrids exist (take online test in a testing center, e.g. AWS certifications), but aren't all that useful for the slums of Bombay. And in a way Google is already doing this in person with their interview process: they ask obscure questions aimed at knowlege gained in a computer science degree (or by good test preparation).

Proctortrak.

It’s not a perfect solution (and I despise it), but it does resolve a lot of those issues.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#140

Post by Balgair » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

jonfw wrote: post #60

creato wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard from people (and read accounts from people on HN) that companies use all kinds of software that does this during remote interviews. Recording the screen, turning on the camera to watch the interviewee, etc. I doubt the main problem is ensuring integrity, it's that it's hard to test knowledge and capabilities reliably, and that's already a hard problem regardless of where the candidate is.

Exactly. If a single test becomes important enough, it will be very heavily gamed. Conventional education avoids this somewhat, because there are so many models by which you are measured against, over a very long period of time. This makes conventional education much harder to game. You need a system that encourages people to optimize for maximum problem solving ability, but a formal grading scheme encourages people…

I mean, cheating is pretty rampant even at places like Berkeley or Yale.