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AI has already killed academia as we know it?

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Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#41

Post by senshan »

gchallen wrote: post #32
senshan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Mainly due to shortage of very good lecturers, no? I can not see a better way to cultivate the professional pride than to attend lectures of truly remarkable professors. The style, the manner, the attitude go much beyond the dry proofs. I'm an applied math major.

You're describing your response to a performance, not to a learning opportunity. Is it fun to watch a great performer? Sure. Is that an effective way to learn? No. Does lecturing have a place in disseminating ideas? Sure. I love that scene from Oppenheimer when he attends Heisenberg's lecture, being exposed to cutting edge ideas directly from the mouth of a truly remarkable professor. Watching that gave me a better a…

> Is that an effective way to learn? No.

Sorry, but I must disagree. There is much more to learning process than just the material itself. We are social animals, so the emotional aspect matters to the majority of us. Highly technical fields are not an exception. The attitude of the lecturer and his reaction to the questions from the audience, sidetrack discussions -- it all counts. At least to me and the people I have known.

At the same time, lectures of those with no charisma is a real torture, no doubt about that.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#42

Post by kajman »

theamk wrote: post #10
chris_money202 wrote: post #9

Flip the classroom, make students learn the material on their own (Using AI or whatever resources they want to use) and then in-classroom time is divided on working on problems (without AI assistance which can be controlled in this environment) and quizzes/exams (again without AI). We don't need lectures anymore, they are an incredibly ineffective way to learn.

I had some "reverse classroom" classes back in college, and it was the best kind of class for me. Read the papers on your own time before class, and spend class discussing and in tests. It did, however, absolutely require everyone to prepare for every class. Some people complained a lot about this, which might be why this was not as popular as more common lectures.

I worry the sort of core classes that are in massive lecture halls (and everyone remembers hating) would be more of a "blind leading the blind" situation if run like this. Maybe not with lavish funding and small classes. I had a couple classes like you describe, but they were on specific topics I was very interested in near the end of my undergrad program.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#43

Post by artyom »

root_axis wrote: post #31
artyom wrote: post #23

And I welcome the change. In my long experience in academia, I've only found two types of practitioners: 1% are the absolutely brilliant minds that academia was originally created for. People that, without a doubt, leave their mark in the vast corpus of human knowledge. I consider myself fortunate for meeting and learning from them, and I thank the academia ecosystem for that. But the remaining 99% are the maximalist…

> An embarrassing lot of CS professors would stumble around your average production codebase. As would be expected. The value of computer science has very little overlap with navigating a typical production code base.

Well, as would be expected of the 1% of brilliant-mind CS professors.

As for the remaining 99%, maybe they should stop pretending they know (and giving advice) about navigating a typical production code base.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#44

Post by refactor_master »

gchallen wrote: post #19
chris_money202 wrote: post #9

Flip the classroom, make students learn the material on their own (Using AI or whatever resources they want to use) and then in-classroom time is divided on working on problems (without AI assistance which can be controlled in this environment) and quizzes/exams (again without AI). We don't need lectures anymore, they are an incredibly ineffective way to learn.

Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning. All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy…

I still remember one course where the lectures were basically just 1:1 summaries of the textbook, so I said "This is a waste of time. See you at the exam", and many of the more traditional showing-up-is-half-the-battle crowd were like "GASP, you can't do that!" because from very little we're taught that attendance is more important than outcome.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#45

Post by waffletower »

FloorEgg wrote: post #29
waffletower wrote: post #21

"Yes, going back to paper and pencil strains our current resources, but is a likely necessity" -- When I reached this sad, arthritic point in the article it was clear that the author has no constructive idea about what happens next in education. There is no critical dialogue regarding assessment and its necessity. There is no critical understanding and projection for what intelligence as a service represents for soci…

It frustrates me that your comment is being down voted, because I agree with your sentiment. Too many educators don't actually know how to educate, and only focus on what to educate. LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn (and therefore how well they learn, what they learn,etc - to rapidly accelerate and improve outcomes). However most educators, who are ignorant to the principles of how…

I hope some have already thought of this addition to the AI-inundated academic's bag of tricks -- in college and graduate school I was fortunate to have some important one-on-one conversations with professors, guests and peers where I had dialogues which meaningfully stimulated and advanced my thinking in a variety of subjects. It is clear that frontier models can provide similar opportunities on demand in nearly any subject. One assessment could be student sharing of raw chat logs on a course relevant topic where particular questions were engaged and discussed. The focus is not on the prose product, but the development, the grappling and the questions. There is intellectual value here in the depths of the nested questions, corrections, and unique additions made by the student during the exchange. If not a substitute for an essay, it could be required pre-planning for it.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#47

Post by artyom »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #26
artyom wrote: post #23

And I welcome the change. In my long experience in academia, I've only found two types of practitioners: 1% are the absolutely brilliant minds that academia was originally created for. People that, without a doubt, leave their mark in the vast corpus of human knowledge. I consider myself fortunate for meeting and learning from them, and I thank the academia ecosystem for that. But the remaining 99% are the maximalist…

I think it's very field dependant. In maths and biology I've seen very few professors that could reasonably be described as maximialists here; computer science really seems to be the outlier. My impression is that impactful CS professors tend to be more strongly associated with either maths, or the field that their cs research is being used in. Arts faculty on the other hand seem to basically just be a popularity com…

Matches my experience. Hard science may not have that many maximalists. Applied science and technology (electrical, electronics, computer science, even mechanical), I've found plenty.

What got me out of academia (yup, I was a professor) was:

Do you have vast field experience and want to get into the classroom to teach how it's really done? Tough luck, you should've spent your time writing papers.

No matter how much you know or how good you are, everything is about feeding the maximalist machine, if you're an outlier, worse people with better "scores", more papers and never leaving faculty will forever beat you until they retire.

I took a good look at the publishing process. Absolutely everything about it was back-channeling to carefully select the topic, scope and reviewers of a paper to get it through the process. Goodhart's Law at its finest.

Advice given to me: "aim for a lower rank and be happy with teaching the whole thing while the old professor takes a nap in the corner".

AI or not AI, anything destroying that self-perpetuating bureaucracy is welcome.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#48

Post by gchallen »

senshan wrote: post #41
gchallen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing your response to a performance, not to a learning opportunity. Is it fun to watch a great performer? Sure. Is that an effective way to learn? No. Does lecturing have a place in disseminating ideas? Sure. I love that scene from Oppenheimer when he attends Heisenberg's lecture, being exposed to cutting edge ideas directly from the mouth of a truly remarkable professor. Watching that gave me a better a…

> Is that an effective way to learn? No. Sorry, but I must disagree. There is much more to learning process than just the material itself. We are social animals, so the emotional aspect matters to the majority of us. Highly technical fields are not an exception. The attitude of the lecturer and his reaction to the questions from the audience, sidetrack discussions -- it all counts. At least to me and the people I hav…

A group of people sitting together listening to one person talk are not socializing. Once one person stops monopolizing their collective attention, then they can socialize. The more effective alternatives to lecture bring learners into more engaged contact with each other.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#49

Post by the_mar »

aunty_helen wrote: post #24
gchallen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning. All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy…

15 years later I can still remember parts of my lectures that were interesting. The only thing I remember about studying is those now banned little energy drink shots.

they banned energy shot drinks?!

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#50

Post by ricovigil1 »

I don’t think it has killed it per se. I think it’s a major shift and the long standing institutions were in equilibrium to where society was prior. It worked. Disruption came and quicker than ever. We are adapting much slower than we have before. This makes it seem bleak. Just like a market, we will reach an equilibrium again but it won’t be like before. We now have the opportunity to increase our learning velocity like never before. It’s important to distinguish between substitution and supplemental on where we go especially with AI.
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