Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#81

Post by red_admiral » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

dibstern wrote: post #46

I am highly skeptical of the research that shows low attendance causes poor grades. I attended 2/24 lectures for one subject, and I got the highest grade for the year, out of both semesters. And I have friends who don’t attend lectures often and do similar. We focus on assignments - programming & software engineering assignments eat far too much time to get top marks and still attend classes. When I finish assignment…

It is definitely possible to lecture in such a way that students gain no benefit from turning up. The classic way to do this is just click your way through a powerpoint, reading out the slides as you go along.

That doesn't disprove the claim that it's possible to lecture in a way that students do benefit from turning up.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#82

Post by the_new_guy_29 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

Its actually about perseverance and not some made up conclusions..

People who keep on attending classes simply have higher perseverance to anything they do and perseverance is the most important trait determining person success in life.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#83

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 6:56 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #69

aleksei wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the university life portrayed in American tv shows is also quite unfamiliar to Nordics. Your experience mirrors mine in Finland. You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams. No one cared whether you attended the lectures or the exercise sessions, you were simply expected to be able to apply the material by the end of the course. However it depended heavily on faculty or even field. I think the hu…

I went to a state university in Oregon... > You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams And aside from a few exceptions, this is exactly how I approached my studies. I'd show up on day 1, the day of each midterm, and the last day of class before the final exam.

I did this as well. I had to take “economic statistics”, as it was discovered late in my senior year that AP Stats couldn’t be used in my major.

I didn’t show up at all, as the class notes were available online and all assignments were online submission (on a VAX, of all things in 1999). When I arrived at the midterm, the professor called the UPD, as he had never seen me before.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#84

Post by ska » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

bcheung wrote: post #77

frv103 wrote: post #3

I'm not sure that course completion percentage is necessarily the best metric to be drawing conclusions from. I will often sign up for MOOCs and courses for a single talk, chapter, or topic that I'm interested in with no intention of actually completing the course. I wonder I'm an outlier in this regard or if this approach is much more common than the author of this article realizes.

Agreed. I notice that many MOOCs have this academic mentality that something must be complete and a certificate earned. I could really give a damn about a certificate. Gaining the knowledge I need is all I care about. Udacity really makes me mad when they remove courses that I paid for if I don't do every little exercise (even the ones that are so horribly designed and have little learning value in them).

Gaining the knowledge may be all you care about, so long as you never have to demonstrate that gain.

Certificates/exams/etc. are all used as proxies for demonstrating that in a complex and expensive way.

Perhaps Udacity et. al. need an equivalent to "audit" - sounds like that would work for you.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#85

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

DelightOne wrote: post #80

j45 wrote: post #24

I've been a technologist in academic and industry online education for almost 20 years. Life is not linear. Why are traditional education and MOOCs linear and monolothic? Career paths are no longer linear, but so much education continues to be linear. The pace of innovation adoption in education is very slow, partially due to the lack of technological abilities of leadership and management in education. There is ofte…

> Self-directed learning is going to be a real thing, because it already is. We search constantly for answers on mobile, to construct new abilities. The current options are abysmal, sadly.

It really is abysmal, between the ineffecifencies of creating content, delivering it and keeping it looking to the future instead of anchored in the past.

Still I'm starting to feel optimistic for the first time in a long time.

There is a horizon on the future, finally thanks to the convergence of more accessible connectivity, devices and capabilites of digital experiences in the next 2 years.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#86

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #53

nemo44x wrote: post #43

For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consumable in a short period of time. Have it focus on a specific thing someone would want to do within the domain of the greater problem. This lets people pick and choose which isolated topics (can have pre-req's) they need to take and because they can learn the ta…

While your point is valid, the counter is there are some difficult things that would never be done. Some problems are hard or take a long time. "War and Peace" is not a book you can study as a single short task. Breaking it down doesn't work because every class assumes you have read it recently and done the previous class - we would end up with thousands of people who complete just one or two classes and very few who…

Agreed, but you can break down all large tasks into small ones.

We don't read war and peace in one sitting either, we read part of a chapter. Likewise working through materials can be done in smaller pieces while part of a larger whole.

The monolith structure of a course that can't be broken down is the challenge.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#87

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:17 PM UTC

dibstern wrote: post #47

nemo44x wrote: post #43

For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consumable in a short period of time. Have it focus on a specific thing someone would want to do within the domain of the greater problem. This lets people pick and choose which isolated topics (can have pre-req's) they need to take and because they can learn the ta…

I couldn’t agree more - I’ve made most progress in MOOCs whenever there is a set of relatively small but valuable, achievable goals. And I’m pretty sure the MOOCs I ran out of time for required big chunks of work.

Moocs are designed after lectures, lots of time invested to extract knowledge.

Flipping the classroom means having concise entry points to all the lessons which a learner can more broadly dip into.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#88

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

DavidHm wrote: post #5

Strongly disagree. What you get from MOOCs is directly proportional to how seriously you approach them. Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses. But they are also 100x cheaper and easier to access. If you approach them the right way you can get way more. I do still believe that for your 1st degree a traditional university is still the right choice…

It's less about having adults behave like adults and more about helping people to build habits of focus, progress and growth, instead of getting sucked into distraction hell on a mobile device.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#89

Post by LeanderK » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

I never understood online-learning ([1]) for non-trivial topics. I need to discuss stuff to really understand it and to also have fun with it! I don't know how somebody could do a complete degree or even some harder lectures purely by watching some videos on your computer. Having access to some smart phd-students, talking with peers and solving hard problem-sets together is part of the fun.

I can only imagine doing this for things like a math-light "intro to neural networks" (my only completed MOOC and more of an tensorflow-tutorial) or "Accounting for dummies".

EDIT: What I want to say: to me, it feels nearly impossible to learn the stuff I learned in my more challenging lectures completely on my own with online-videos.

[1] this feels weird as a ML-dude

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#90

Post by jaddood » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #72

Wouldn't it be cool if all the online ads you see featured topics you want to learn? Repetition is the mother of retention. Might be worth even if you had to pay a fee for it and take tests to set it up. Or maybe interstitial ads could handle the testing. Learning would be constant but not require a big time commitment. It's integrated into your leisure activities. Nor would it be easy to set aside.

This is a very good idea, and could be used by Google or other advertisement agencies (if only they want to.) You may pay the revenue the ads make and get the stuff you want to learn instead. This way, Google gets its money, and you get to learn. Also, this could be uesful in that it doesn't require too much tracking of the users. It is definitely not fully sustainable, but it could be better than nothing.