Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

> My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured.

For some large classes in certain universities, yes. In the rest it's a regular professor giving a live lecture who is now doing it over Zoom.

> Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students.

Students aren't the only people on campus.

What should students who were planning on graduating and finding employment do?

I understand the frustration by the students, but I think there are a lot of parts of society and the economy where we are going to have to assume good-faith efforts to "make do" over the next year, and not get lost in the legalese. I mean, are we also demanding refunds for:

- Public schools? I pay a lot of property tax to public schools. They aren't running, but teachers are still getting paid. If we demand refunds from colleges, why can't we demand back-property-taxes?

- Parks and recreation? I paid taxes for state and local parks which are shut down, and I'm not allowed to use.

- The court system? We paid taxes for a functioning police and justice system, which where I am (Seattle) has basically shut down except for flat-out murder.

- Zoos, museums aquariums, and other civic institutions I can't access

I don't think it's fair or practical to try to make a tally of all the services which can't be fully rendered. Institutions are stuck with enormous bills for infrastructure they've built and staff they are (trying) to keep paying. This isn't the time to let lawyers start siphoning money off of institutions attempting in good faith to do what they were paid for.

About halfway through my college experience, I switched gears from extreme attendance-and-attentive-note-taking to extreme self-teaching, out of necessity (I was taking too many classes and working simultaneously, so I didn't have time to attend each lecture each week). Of course, I still did the homework assignments, studied for exams, etc.

Except for the occasional "gotchas" where professors say something random in class that shows up on the exam, it didn't adversely impact my GPA, and it saved a ton of time. I think I learned more efficiently on my own, which led to saving a ton of time shuffling from physical location to physical location. It freed up more time for working, exercising, and sleeping.

Given this experience, in retrospect, I think the most valuable parts of my education were not necessarily the classroom, but rather:

50%: The (well-written) syllabi. They point out which resources (books, blogs, websites, etc) are worth your time, if you have an interest in the subject. The best ones are filled with opinions, and "optional resources if you want to dive deeper into X". Even the lazily-constructed ones are a great foundation if you have no idea about how to begin learning X.

25%: The classmates and TAs. Oral/written feedback, delivered efficiently and with empathy is not essential, but a great catalyst to development. This one's a bit personality-dependent, for other's it might be higher or lower.

25%: The assignments, projects, and deadline pressure. To learn things, you really need time-spaced practice. Reading is not sufficient. The deadline and grade pressures erode as you get better, but they're invaluable early on.

I think that you can get 90% of each of these online, just fine. But that's me! It might require personal conversation for others, but in my experience a good collection of reading and tasks, some form of IRC, and rudimentary deadline pressure are more than sufficient to replace the classroom for self-starting individuals. I think Coursera's relative success proven that case.

One of my classes (mandatory writing GenEd) had an online version, so we get the videos from last quarter, and Zoom discussion sections.

So no, we're getting lectures over Zoom at the UCs, at least. If my group of friends had the inclination to talk about serious school stuff, and not literally anything else that keeps our minds off of the state of the world, I could ask people about the situation from anywhere from Rice to Stanford to Princeton. But we don't talk about this, because it's heavy, and if we can shrug that burden off for the time we have together, then that's enough. [0]

Going to back to UCSD in particular, the Chancellor's name is particularly acrimonious in connotation. A couple days ago, I wrote a post here on the state of UCSD's much touted dining [1]. Spoiler: it's not pretty. If you look at the privately shared memes, there's a lot of negative sentiment.

[0] Last night's OST: https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883