University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs • Hacker News Board

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#411

Post by glenstein » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:46 AM UTC

brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #301

glenstein wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people in this thread breezily dismissing the value of effective writing is taking my breath away. I don't think these confident declarations we're getting in this thread paint a remotely accurate portrayal of skills that actually help career advancement. I think everyone's kind of playing a game where it's treated as a trick question and they're looking to emphasize the exceptions as much as possible.…

Throughout grad school, I worked as a writing tutor to support my humanities habit. Each new class of high school seniors was less skilled —and even less interested— in writing than the last. These were kids with 3.9 GPAs who went to Dalton, Horace Mann, Brearly, Choate and similar. I think great writing is a valuable life skill. I wish I could see more real-life evidence that employers care about it in the real worl…

I literally just gave three or four entire industries where I feel it's almost certainly an important career skill based on my career contact with those fields.

The lack of responsiveness comments have to one other on the internet is disorienting to me, because I would have thought that this would merit acknowledgement. Your anecdote may as well have dropped out of the sky in response to basically any comment in this thread.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#412

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

awirth wrote: post #212

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example (3 years) is extreme. I could not get 15 CS credits to transfer from one private, 2nd tier US college to another (Boston university). BU refused and i took the classes again and paid for them twice. It put me in the rare position of being able to compare the quality of education at the two institutions side by side.

I'd be curious to hear your observations. I did BA/MS at BU in CS (CAS of course) and found the classes often hit or miss, but the ones that were good were really good. That being said, I did have an interest in theoretical CS while many CS undergrads do not, which is what the department emphasizes.

The student:professor ratios at Boston University CS classes were much higher. I didn't realize the importance of that until i had this comparison with the other institution.

It led to many fewer questions by students, teachers assistants (something the other institution did not have and did not need because one professor could attend to all of his students), and in general less interaction between students with each other and with professors/TAs.

The curriculum at both were essentially the same for this set of classes.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#413

Post by Illesam » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

Hello. I have just completed my first term with UoPeople. For me, it's been a blessing to be able to pursue a higher education from home and on my own schedule, without the financial commitment that other institutes have.

My purpose for getting a degree is to A.) Have a degree, and B.) Have the competitive advantage over others in my field. Many employers these days want 2 things from employees: a degree and experience. I've already gone off into the world, worked for a few years, and started a family. Now it's time I complete my resume by getting a higher education.

Specifically with UoPeople, the educational method here is much different than what I've experienced before. Peer assessment has it's ups and downs. The fact that we are headed by peers (on written assignments) I think is an effective when done right. I'm an English teacher and I've started implementing it with my intermediate students.

Only time will tell how the rest of my path goes. For now, it's a good solution to my situation and I plan on taking advantage of it.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#414

Post by freeone3000 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

andykx wrote: post #160

StupidPeople wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you Except learning isn't really the reason most go. It's to get a well paid job at the end of it.

I returned to college after 10 years in the insurance industry. I’ve always viewed programming as a hobby, but decided to take the leap and pursue a career that I might actually enjoy. Anyway, I notice a lot of younger students have this attitude and it frankly causes them to produce really crappy work. As long as they pass the class, they don’t really care to absorb the material. I can’t help but wonder what kind of…

The one class I took in college that was relevant to my job, at all, was the AI course on structured vector machines, which were irrelevant after two years. For most programs, correctness is a nice-to-have, forget speed or responsiveness or data structure choice.. and in production code, non-technical and constant factors override theoretical solutions. University computer science courses, on the whole, are quickly obsolete or obsolete to begin with, incompatible with software development as it's practiced, and are best reviewed in the week before seeking a new job to score well on leetcode. The best skills you're going to learn are the metacognition you're picking up in university, the ability to learn new languages and adapt to new environments and solve new problems, not anything that's actually taught.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#415

Post by territop » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:50 AM UTC

wrkronmiller wrote: post #362

territop wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plagiarism was how the germans caught up on the industrial revolution. plagiarism is how china cought up to the western world. the strict argument on this is that ideas cannot be owned. no one owns an idea. ideas just float around and can be left aside or captured. that's how i think about it anyways.

There's a moral argument w/r/t the concept of stealing IP, but in the context of education there is arguably more damage being done. If you steal a design for a jet turbine, you still have to learn how it works and you add that understanding to your personal/corporate skillset. Basically you have learned a secret. If you have someone write your college essay for you, then you probably do so in order to avoid putting…

Oh yeah you're right let's not mix that both. I thought he strictly meant the first.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#416

Post by mazly » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:53 AM UTC

This school saved my life in more ways than I can relate. It is like any other school, where students copy paste and struggle with plagiarism, so if you think that there is a college without these, you are so wrong. The only issue here is the accreditation and how limited the transfer places are for now. I hope they work on this.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#417

Post by blackrock » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:54 AM UTC

deathgrips wrote: post #401

enjoyyourlife wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithms is also an elective class at Berkeley

This gives more ammunition to my hot take that degrees from elite universities don't teach you anything special.

Most university classes on Algorithms, is simply to build a Binary Search Tree. Or maybe a Red Black Tree, for the more advanced courses.

The concept is easy enough.

The challenge may lie in the part where you must write the code in an unfamiliar language to yourself, like C++, which has its own pitfalls in trying to understand how pointers work, and to code it out, while not destroying your program.

Recall that the core language is easy enough to learn. Rather, it is all the libraries and standards around a language, that is challenging to a new programmer to learn, and this basically requires time spent to master it.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#418

Post by antepodius » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

zarathustreal wrote: post #291

antepodius wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: Objective reality might exist, but it's not necessarily present in the universities, which are mostly there as an IQ test by proxy with a filter for the most lazy, with some social indoctrination thrown in. Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day.

>Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way

Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly: Only that science or truth that is doesn't contravene the current social order is allowed air, allowed to be talked about without reprisal and shunning. The degree to which this is true is a canary for how totalitarian and neurotic your micro-society is. The micro-society of universities generally seems to be becoming more, rather than less, rabid and paranoid.

A lot of it is like Bostrom's idea of the decentralized electroshock dystopia: even though a significant proportion of people are witches, everyone's afraid of reprisal for not actively hunting witches, so the witches-in-hiding hunt their own when they're unmasked.

But this is the way of things; this wave will pass, eventually, as well. And like the soviet scientists who kept their heads down and mouthed the party line, the secret iconoclasts will survive till the current order is replaced by the next, with its own peculiar tabboos.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#419

Post by Tung_Ng » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

In this kind of time, i believe online study is the way to go. It takes self-motivation to study on a computer in the comfort of your home with lots of distraction.

What is there to against a revolution that serves a great purpose of demolish education shortage in different parts of the world. I personally enjoy the flexibility the school gives me so i can be partly working or traveling.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#420

Post by sjy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

Melting_Harps wrote: post #238

themodelplumber wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical I remember experiencing this at a private religious university. At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Since then I've been exposed to additional perspectives on plagiarism. It is an extremely deep and nuanced topic. A few years out of school, I ended up mentoring and then teaching college student…

> At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Then you would have lost your mind during some of my upper division STEM courses, where the normal class average is in the mid 40% on the high end and high 30s most semesters. We had a class average of ~83% in one of them, and when the professor was in total disbelief about how blatant they were being (several di…

All universities have pretty serious problems at this point, but we can't write off all of academia as a "corrupt money-pit." It sounds like you are generalising from your own experience at a single institution, and there are a lot of bad universities out there.