MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated 205
jyosim (904245) writes People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match. The report imagines a world in which students can take online courses they assemble themselves from parts they find online: "Much like a playlist on iTunes, a student could pick and choose the elements of a calculus or a biology course offered across the edX platform to meet his or her needs."
Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of a structured educational degree is to give you a damn well rounded knowledge set of the topic, giving you a reasoned idea why the individual components of the topical area are important as a whole.
Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...
Sometimes a students individual educational "needs" (rather, the term in the summary is wrong, it should be "wants" - the student "wants" to study the fun stuff, and "wants" to avoid the drudgery) is not the same as the "needs" of society as a whole as society would benefit more from graduates with a well rounded knowledge base rather than an enhanced specialism straight out of university.
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Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...
What astonishing arrogance. So anyone who hasn't taken an ethics course doesn't know right from wrong?
Most of this discussion is just humanities types hyperventilating that their redundant modules are going to be excised from useful disciplines. People get into computer science because they want to learn about computer science, not be force fed sociology as viewed through a Gramscian dialectic.
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What astonishing arrogance. So anyone who hasn't taken an ethics course doesn't know right from wrong?
Perhaps not, but they're probably not very good at ethical reasoning.
Let me guess: You're an autodidact?
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Interdisciplinary and Badges (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it may not be as bad as you guys think, depending how this is implemented.
Definitely, especially at the bachelors level, it needs to be a "guided tour" to help students learn about subjects they didn't even know they existed. They need exposure to certain important topics to serve as a base, allowing the student to go forward.
I think where this module idea can help is that, under the current system, you get a very direct track through basic major courses, then a bunch of liberal arts requirements to satisfy (arts, philosophy, etc.). There is not, in my experience, a whole lot of in-major electives. Everyone takes the same track. Degree programs are largely the same across the country.
I firmly believe our future Einsteins will come from the ranks of those trained in interdisciplinary thought -- the people that DON'T just take the same track, but go a little off script too. If a student understands the basic concepts of a field, but doesn't like it, why waste the student's time with more of that just to fit in 3 semester hours of a class to meet a checklist, when the student can switch half way through a semester to another field and see if that is a better fit? As long as the student understands the basics, I see no problem of letting the student explore a little more rather than trapping them in the class for another 6 weeks.
I think this would be the idea of a badges system -- rather than a degree and classes, you get badges when you show levels of mastery in topics (a novice badge, an intermediate badge, master badge, etc.). A bachelors could be awarded when X number of badges are obtained.
Re: Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Well rounded is not about jack of all trades in your field. It's about exposure to the soft skills needed like communicating to others, economic skills, and triggers for innovation (outside of the box thinking).
cost is to high and 4 years is to long for that (Score:3)
Well rounded is nice to have
But stuff like needing to take PE classes where 1 CLASS costs way more then buying a 2 YEAR gym membership is not needed.
Also why should have to take art history to work in IT?? art is nice to have but not at that cost.
For tech / IT we need more tech / trade schools.
Also the college time tables suck as well.
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For tech/it we have community colleges (or junior colleges or state colleges or whatever non-University places are called where you live) that offer AS degrees. Some University type places also offer BAS - Batchelors of Applied Science - more in-depth tech and hands on, plus a little more gen-ed stuff.
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I know it's an exception, but I intentionally picked a school that didn't have a PE requirement, because I knew going in how dumb that was.
As for art history? I took two of those classes, and they were the most interesting, educational, and mind-expanding classes I took. Also, when I ended up doing web development out of college, that little bit of art knowledge may have served to improve my designs, and probably contributed to my ability to get a job with a design firm in the first place. Now, again, I pic
Re:cost is to high and 4 years is to long for that (Score:4, Insightful)
IT HAS trade schools. You know them - they're the ones that teach you Java and PHP and all that other stuff. You can learn Cisco, Juniper, Linux, etc in them as well.
That's not a university or college, though, that's a trade.
Just like you have electricians and electrical engineers, one does not replace the other, and both have skills the other doesn't (the EE cannot, for example, wire up a new circuit in a house).
A university or college is used to produce a well-rounded student - someone who can take a problem and decompose it to parts and then figure out a good way to implement them (in Java, or PHP, or Python, or whatever, it doesn't matter), to which they can hand off the solution to someone who knows it better.
PE in university and college? Inactivity, obesity and sedentary lifestyles are a big problem in the western world. Sure you could sign up for a gym membership, but you'd be hard pressed to get a structured environment out of it (most people drop out of a gym membership within a year), so being "forced" to take a PE class may very well be essential. And PE might as well develop the mind further, enhancing student development by seeing parallels between worlds (many serendipitous discoveries have occurred because a problem in one discipline had a solution in an unrelated field).
Art? Geez, humans are creative beings, and sometimes seeing creative output and learning to appreciate them can expand your mind. Heck, if you can't appreciate how people did things without technology in the past, how can you appreciate what technology can do now and in the future? I mean, Michelangelo creating David (a rather large statue in real life) took months to create slowly chipping away at it. And it's worthy of appreciation to see how dedication and hard work produced something so impressive.
Let's just say that people DO appreciate things that look nice. The bondi blue iMac? Geez, that's a rather whimsical thing in an era of beige boxes that were literally boxes. Yes, it can get in the way of practicality, but people generally appreciate form as well as function - they exist as one whole.
If you want to just learn the technical stuff - go right ahead, there are plenty of trade schools to do just that. But if you want to get the mots out of university or college, the soft skills to balance the hard technical stuff are what techies really need to concentrate on. Because really, when you think about it, we techies haven't evolved much social skills over say, general laborers on a construction site.
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not saying no to PE. Just no to PE at that COST.
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Are you talking about PE or are you talking about pseudo-classes to allow the Football to work-out in the weight room 5 hours a day?
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This is especially important when talking about computer systems. You get someone who knows about databases and can tell you the optimal page size for a c
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I'd reply to you, but I'm busy signing up for a module on "Page Size Optimization for Specialized IO Systems", it seems to have been a weak point in my Master's program, and an "Intro to Systems Analysis for Database Administrator's" module.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
As the other poster says, well rounded is not jack of all trades, its just well rounded in what you do - so a web developer knows about HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, the Dom, interacting with the server side, and the various aspects of the server side part of the equation, so how to handle requests, state, database accesses, design patterns, data structures etc etc.
What I fear MIT will do is producing someone who graduates from their Web Developer course being absolutely excellent in HTMl, JS etc but knows sod all about caching, state management, design patterns, UX etc.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
"The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago"
The push for 'DevOps' seems to contradict you.
You need both generalists and specialists (Score:5, Insightful)
The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago. Specialization and people who are that passionate and WELL educated (have become "gurus") about specific areas are what is valuable today.
Specialization with no understanding of topics outside of the area of specialty is Not-A-Good-Thing (tm). Specialization is important and obviously useful but there are plenty of cases where a generalist is more useful. You need people who can see how parts of a business fit together and can fill in roles that may don't justify hiring a dedicated specialist. The bigger or more specialized the company, the greater the need for specialists but he need for generalists never goes away, particularly if you want good managers. Technical specialists as a crude rule of thumb tend to run into their Peter Principle limit a lot sooner.
I'm not an IT guy per-se but I often am asked to fill that role. I'm have the skill set of a generalist. You can find better IT guys than me but you aren't likely to find IT guys that are also certified accountants or non-IT engineers of which I am both. In my company our IT needs are relatively modest so hiring a dedicated IT guy doesn't make sense right now. As we grow that will (hopefully) change. On a weekly basis I handle work in IT, HR, engineering, accounting and purchasing. Someone who only is an IT guy would undoubtedly do a great job with the IT stuff but might struggle with stuff outside his/her specialty. The important thing for a generalist to understand is where his limits are and to not exceed them. I know a lot about IT but the most important thing for me to know is to know what I don't know.
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... let's see. The English classes I took help me write on a daily basis. Accounting came in handy when I worked for a non-profit that had to do fund raising; I use Psychology, Sociology, and Political Science daily; the art classes I look help me judge the usability of web sites, I took Differential Equations which came in handy when I worked for an Environmental Engineering firm, foreign languages gave me a better grasp of grammar and and foreign cultures, my Physics classes give be a better grasp on electrical and electronics concepts (which is handy if you want to work with hardware), Statistics comes in handy when I have to prepare quantitative reports, and Chemistry was also good to have when I worked for an Environmental Engineering firm.
None of those were 'core' classes but the fulfilled part of my graduation requirements. You had to have a certain amount of hours in Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Arts, and Literature at my Uni. I would probably not have studied them unless I had been told to. A well rounded education is priceless.
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I was talking with a friend who recently went back to school. He has a degree which doesn't remotely relate to anything he wants to do, and decided that he wanted a computer science degree. But then he shifted gears - he was saying "I could stop after getting the minor, and save all the extra money from the additional year I'd have to go". His logic is that all the interviews he's gone to have asked him whether he's had SQL, Unix, etc. experience. Now that he's been exposed to those, he figures that's
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your ignorance. It's not to teach you everything about the subject, it's to tell you everything that you may want to learn within a subject so that you can then pick the bits to study in more detail yourself. If you let students pick the modules that they want, then you may as well just say 'here's a library, go and learn some stuff' and you'll get more or less the same results.
But then you actually arrive at college, and as part of your degree in comsci, you're required to take an accounting class. During that 12 week class you spend about a week learning a couple of formulas that you realize will be very helpful when coding accounting software, but just as you're getting into it they switch topics and start teaching you about business management and then spend 4 weeks on "How to use Excel"...
Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession? ...and that's the point...
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession?
You do understand the idea of a liberal arts education, right? There's a very good argument to look at coding as a trade [wsj.com], but that's not what universities are for. If you want to be educated like a plumber, go to a trade school.
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Sadly, a lot of people seem to want colleges and universities to be turned into half-assed trade schools, rather than just going to an actual trade school. I don't know why. But that's exactly what's going to happen with all this "Everybody's gotta go to college so they can get a job!" nonsense that's been going around.
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Schools can, and do, have courses and course requirements that just aren't very good at delivering what they are supposed to. I suspect that dithering about whether they want to be trade schools or not can help cause this; but complaining about it isn't reall
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Because the companies hiring requires a college or university degree.
Obviously. But then we end up with a bunch of people who expect colleges and universities to be like trade schools, making it more difficult for people who care about education to get one from those places.
The companies are too greedy and lazy to be expected to train their own employers or even test people properly, so we need to stop handing out loans and grants to people who simply should not go to college or university, or come up with some scheme that will help with that.
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What's the quote; specialization is for insects.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, you as a mild-mannered undergraduate are able to leap tall theories, run faster than a locomotive, and who, disguised as beguiling innocent, are able to use your Super-XRay vision to totally predict your future life. Let no man in the organizations you work for attempt to get you to contribute to areas not in your chosen field of tunnel vision. There hasn't been a subject yet devised that could aid your future self in ways you cannot predict.
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The intro to accounting class I took comes in handy understanding loans, taxes, and my household budget.
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Exactly my thoughts. Students do not know what to pick and certainly not on a detail level. That they (well, some of them) will be able to do so after graduation is one of the central aims of a university program.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
That is entirely not the point of a university degree, especially at lower levels.
Bachelors -- are you able to learn and apply basic concepts
Masters -- are you able to learn and apply advanced concepts
PhD -- are you able to discover novel, interesting concepts
And (of course) modules would have prerequisites (just like courses do now) to ensure that an adequate understanding of necessary basic concepts has been obtained.
Finally, some of the most influential people in history were thrown in a library and self-educated. Leibniz, for one. I'm more concerned with their motives; education has been commercialized in the US and this could be a way to allow indecisive students to register for fewer courses, taking longer to complete a degree and adding wealth to the university's coffers.
The idea seems foolish to me, personally, because students already have this ability. It's called attendance.
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and the higher levels are about going up the iry tower and not really skills needed for most jobs.
we have PhDs on Food Stamps you know
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Re:Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
.
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Exactly. College shouldn't just teach you what you know you don't know. It's also supposed to teach you what you don't know you don't know.
Well, that really happened for me. I had no clue something like NP-Complete or the Chomsky Hierarchy of grammars (and how it relates to programming) could even exist, or even how to go about discovering its existence. College introduced me to those things (and more).
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Exactly this. When I went into college, I was convinced that I'd major in physics and minor in math. There was no question in my mind. I took a computer science course because it seemed like the best option on the list of required courses. My second semester in college, I hit into Quantum Mechanics and found myself struggling. As much as I liked physics, I couldn't wrap my head around the equations and was NOT enjoying it at all. Meanwhile, in my computer science course, I was barely paying attention
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"...you'll get more or less the same results..."
You won't be $60,000/year poorer, however.
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You know what? I'm not going to take seriously a post, from someone I've never met, who calls MIT professors collectively "idiots".
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I heartily disagree. The "point" of a degree is subjective. Each student can have a different reason for pursuing a degree, each professor a different reason for teaching, each parent a different reason for paying for it, etc.
So any argument premised on there being just one "point" for a degree seems flawed from the start.
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Personally I took the here's a library, then went and learned some stuff method.
Then perhaps you might understand why somebody shelling out a hundred thousand dollars might have slightly higher expectations.
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There are some people that can do this successfully, but it is rare. Even for those that can, things do often not work out so well with larger gaps in areas that they never got around to looking at or missing basic stuff. Still, for some this is the best way to do things.
Personally, I went to courses, checked whether the lectures added value and if not, I learned the material by myself and only attended the exam. For about 80% of the courses, being there physically was worthwhile.
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For about 80% of the courses, being there physically was worthwhile.
sounds suspiciously like life in general.
"80% of life is just showing up" - woody allen
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Personally I took the here's a library, then went and learned some stuff method.
It has worked out for me.
You're not typical. The typical college student (even at MIT), when presented with a completed unstructured program, will get lost in the mire. And you're not going to become very educated if you spend all your days smoking weed, playing Xbox, and working on some vague project for Maker Faire that you're never going to actually finish. Making kids take structured classes may not be cool or hip, but it's necessary.
This sounds to me exactly like one of those dumbass marketing meetings where some idiot gives a
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So what happened prior to those 10 years? If I did not have my current background I would not recognize how many bad ideas under new names are constantly being recycled and see enough parallels between "ground breaking paradigm shifting!" new tech and the basics I learned in school, about things invented in the 60's and 70's, to rarely even crack a manual. Usually I only read manuals and forums when I think a feature is broken to ensure I have a good idea of its capabilities.
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"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his speech "The American Scholar"
Oh yes (Score:2)
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TL;DR
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Well, with the cretinization of IT that has been going on, sure. Whether a Java programmer has no clue after a conventional university college/program or a after this thing does not really matter. The "no clue" is what matters and the market seems to be going for that.
MOOCs, not degree work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Context is everything. For MOOCs. This makes perfect sense. For degree work? Not so much.
It is already being done elsewhere (Score:2)
Ah, how sensible... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Being able to mix and match partial-semester courses doesn't mean every course needs to be mix and match. Certainly required sequential core su
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The puff about 'like an itunes playlist! Who reads things where you have to turn pages?' was just so insufferable, though, that I couldn't help but unhinge my mandibles and spit acidic bile at it. Such a painful analogy.
Great idea - forget it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds superficially appealing, letting people choose what interests them or what they think they need to learn. But there's a couple of problems.
Firstly, if we stick with the music analogy, how many artists or tracks have you discovered by random, and in doing so expanded your listening choices?
Also, if you follow a well-structured course, you're getting what a subject-matter expert knows from experience you need to learn. Case in point, I would not have studied stats by choice, but now I'm damn glad it was hammered into me.
The poor courses I've seen were not so much hampered by the format, more either by sub-par lecturers and/or poor, outdated materials.
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Firstly, if we stick with the music analogy, how many artists or tracks have you discovered by random, and in doing so expanded your listening choices?
A gazillion.
But the analogy is incorrect. Music is entertainment and nothing more. Science is much, much more than that.
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Case in point, I would not have studied stats by choice, but now I'm damn glad it was hammered into me.
I would not have studied stats by choice, either. I'm damn glad I passed, but I core dumped 99.99% of it after passing. I haven't had a need for it since, so it was a complete waste of time and money.
I also wouldn't have studied much math, either, while in college. That was hammered into me, though, and it has proved itself to be completely useless to me as a software developer. That is, until I decided that I wanted to learn 3D game programming. Then I bought some books on 3D math, learned Linear Alge
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I would not have studied stats by choice, either. I'm damn glad I passed, but I core dumped 99.99% of it after passing. I haven't had a need for it since, so it was a complete waste of time and money.
"Complete waste"? I assume you at least retain some of the basic concepts, like knowing the difference between a mean and median, understanding the kind of stuff that goes into measuring whether something is significant, calculating a trend, etc. (even if you don't remember the specific methodologies for doing it). If the course was taught well, you presumably came away with at least some idea of how statistics and graphs can be misinterpreted and/or deliberately used to manipulate people -- which (to my
Invoking Betteridge's law in 3... 2... 1... (Score:3)
Courses serve a purpose that customized "modules" do not, will not, and can not - They force you to learn the less "fun" parts required to properly understand the material you want to learn. If you allow students to only eat ham cubes, they'll never touch the broccoli. If you don't take five ranks in metallurgy, you can't open the "intelligent liquid metal" skill tree.
Realistically, this would mean they'll just require a long chain of prerequisite "modules" for anything students actually want to take. Almost like structuring "modules" in to a "course" - Imagine that! Except, without the advantage of having a single professor aware of your progress through each step. You think the current semester-long course structure has a lot of duplication? Wait until each module needs to basically spend the first half making sure you actually know the half a dozen prerequisites, and still remember it enough to apply to the present topic. "Oh, yeah, I took module X two years ago to get into module Z. Something about derivatives, IIRC... Don't worry, I have it!"
Re:Invoking Betteridge's law in 3... 2... 1... (Score:4, Insightful)
And there is room to tinker with granularity, some schools already run on quarters rather than semesters without apparent incident(at least in my experience quarters are nice for 'niche' things that you want to take a look at, because you get three per academic year rather than two and the proximity of midterms and finals did focus one's attentions a bit; but what you did in three sequential courses for, say, 'a year of calculus' was pretty much identical to what you would take in two sequential courses at a semester school); but the idea that online attention spans prove that knowledge is fundamentally fine-grained...not as much.
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Very much this. I personally delayed learning some things that are important for over 20 years because they were not fun. Fortunately only minor things, but in retrospect I shudder to think what I would probably have skipped if everything had been elective in small bits.
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This is about MOOCs, not degree work.
So if you're taking a history MOOC and you want to learn about the Mongols, then the module is there for you.
Bro, do you even RTFA?
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Bro, do you even RTFA?
Bro, this is slashdot - do you even have to ask?
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Tu quoque?
FTA: But the professors on the MIT committee that drafted the report argue that the numbers show that larger percentages explored significant parts of courses, which may be all they wanted or needed. "This in many ways mirrors the preferences of students on campus," they wrote. "In a survey of students, approximately 40 percent of respondents report that they have taken MIT classes that they feel would benefit from modularizati
courses are outdated, of course (Score:2)
OB xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
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I actually did know a guy in college who majored in "science". Specifically, he was crazy intense and managed to swing a double major in physics and biochem, but we all just joked that he was majoring in "science".
education is a business... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it applies in education too: "The first generation builds the business, the second makes it a success, and the third wrecks it”
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Hehehehehe ;-)
Sorry, no mod points or they would be yours.
Yes! (Score:2)
'Cause depth is the enemy of progress.
Or at least marketing.
Yeah, maybe considering it for the plebs online... (Score:2)
Listen, for the rest of MIT's history, the experience for the core students on campus will remain the same: Dorms, semesters, course sequences, grades/evaluations, professors in classrooms, papers, projects, parties, etc.. Why am I so sure? Because MIT is an elite school, and elites will want their kids to get the classical education which made them elite. It's just as much about soaking in the culture, encountering other people, putting together a study crew, a party crew, having a shared experience that i
We're only talkin' two Red Line subway stops (Score:3)
Not to discredit, but to clarify TFA:
We're talking two subway stops [google.nl]. Or they can rent a bike, which are all over the place and very well maintained: http://www.thehubway.com/stati... [thehubway.com]
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We're talking two subway stops [google.nl]. Or they can rent a bike
We're not talking about the Netherlands, we're talking about the United States of FUCK NO I WON'T BE SEEN ON A BIKE OR IN PUBLIC TRANSIT.
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Then you won't be saving time, or money, commuting between MIT and Harvard by using your own private car. My point had to do with the proximity of the two universities and what realistic, low cost, and frequent transportation options between classes exist, relative to the text of the article; and I provided citations for others.
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my experience with the NYC subway system tells me that if I'm relying on the subway to get me between classes, forget it. Bad enough on one campus if a teacher goes long or has to talk after class I might not have enough time to run across campus and make it to my next class.
So, it's not just, "I won't use public transport" it seems more like the case that juggling two disparate school schedules IS a logistical hassle. I mean, if you got lucky and a class at MIT starts an hour or two after a class you're t
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Not to discredit, but to clarify TFA:
We're talking two subway stops [google.nl]. Or they can rent a bike, which are all over the place and very well maintained: http://www.thehubway.com/stati... [thehubway.com]
Or, shorter than walking from one end of campus to the other end of several large universities....
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Yes, it is two subway stops. And about 30 minutes of transit time each way, once you factor in the time to walk to and from the subway stations, the unpredictability of the Red Line frequency (although I must admit it has gotten heapsload better in the last few years; and major kudos to that skunk works project that brought the T administration kicking and screaming into the 20th -- yes 20th -- century by implementing time-to-next-train displays). While not an insurmountable impediment, it does mean that
Flaw in the model (Score:3)
Even if you were to adopt this more modular structure (which just seems to me like you'd be picking 12 'things' a semester instead of 4-5), the business model breaks down if you use it universally. After all, the student might not have to waste two years taking all these classes they don't want to (that are irrelevant to their major). Mechanical Engineering major? Go take Accounting 101 with all the morons from the football team. Business major? You certainly need two semesters of chemistry. Unemployab^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Art history major? Go take Rocks for Jocks.
Learn the alphabet with us! (Score:3, Funny)
(Oh you need the alphabet to understand books? Well, sorry mate...)
I can see it in front of me (Score:2)
Hi, I'm matt and I've got a PhD in a-little-of-everything
univ. education (Score:2)
This is a thing already (Score:4, Interesting)
You pick courses that you want to take, take X amount of hours and are awarded a degree. In theory, students specialize in areas the school doesn't offer degrees in, to thereby personalize their education that much further.
In reality it is a junk degree awarded to D students and sports players who don't want to take anything above a 300 level course.
the NBA and NFL need Minor Leagues (Score:2)
the NBA and NFL need Minor Leagues.
So we can get rid of a lot of the players on the FOOTBALL team that at some schools get a free pass in classes.
But it's not there fault 100% when the team needs 40-60 hours a week you don't have time for class.
Administrators with too much time (Score:2)
on their hands. Trying to find some way to justify their astronomical pay and benefits.
Part of it is because (Score:2)
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90% of what they teach you in any University or College is useless drivel. I mean did I really NEED to take sociology? An a la carte option would have appealed to me way back then.
When a person is highly focused, and wishes to take only classes that are relevant, trade schools are a better option.
Another option might be to be an "Adult returning student". I did that at my University, and a lot of the courses required of normal students were not needed.
The bad part of the highly focused education is that do we know at 18 our entire career path? I went through many different "careers" - although mostly in one place - and was surprised how many things I didn't think had much relevan
Because (Score:2)
And they will always make the right decision.
Do they really know? (Score:3)
hasnt chanced too much since my 70s years (Score:2)
MIT introductory CS course uses LISP (Score:2)
Nearly all the languages used in my MIT courses decades ago are pretty much gone, save LISP. These include APL, PL/I, AS-360. You learn how to learn instead.
We already have modules (Score:2)
About time (Score:2)
Allow me
The arbitrariness of a "semester" (Score:2)
The duration of a semester *does* put some strange, artificial restrictions on classes. In the introductory physics classes I teach, we have two big units during the course of the year—mechanics, and electricity & magnetism—but there are also smaller topics which get shoehorned in wherever there's room in the schedule: waves, optics, thermodynamics. Then there's topics I never have time for, like relativity. If we had more flexibility in course length, we could set up those extra topics a
No More prof (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
cable thing is different the sports channels have high costs meny times more then the other channels we at least want ESPN / FS1 / NBCSN / ect's and other RSN's to get in there own pack and not in the basic pack. Most channels cost $0.20 or less per sub.
University classes cost the same and unlike cable they force to take stuff you really don't want vs having it but not tuning in to it. If schools still made you do the same time / hours but let say dump the filler / fluff classes and take more classes in you
Re: (Score:2)
How did that work out for you?