This is Online Learning's Moment. For Universities, It's a Total Mess (wired.co.uk) 56
Universities are struggling with online learning. And with social distancing here for some time, there are no easy solutions. From a report: As thousands of students logged into their university's systems at the same time, poor connections and technical problems were the norm -- and for the most part, teachers were left alone to troubleshoot issues, fix poor audio and video quality, and follow up with students individually to make sure they could access any missed content. With no end to the pandemic in sight, virtual classes are here to stay. They solve the problem of packed lecture halls and hallways that aren't designed for social distancing -- and are also far cheaper to run. But not many people want to pay almost $12,500 a year for the privilege of attending Zoom calls. Many UK universities are bracing for a gaping hole in their budgets as they expect fewer students to turn up in the autumn. A survey found that one in five people were willing to delay their undergraduate degrees if universities were not operating as normal due to the coronavirus pandemic. With 120,000 fewer students starting in September, UK universities could face a $950 million loss of income in tuition fees.
The University of Manchester, which has announced plans to keep lectures online-only in the autumn term, is already preparing for the worst. On April 23, vice-chancellor Dame Nancy Rothwell told staff that redundancies and pay cuts may be necessary if 80 per cent of students from outside the EU and 20 per cent of UK and EU students decided to stay defer or drop out. In the worst-case scenario, the university could lose up to $338 in a single year -- a 15 to 25 per cent deficit. Unlike schools, universities are privately-run institutions free to develop their own roadmaps for getting out of lockdown. The University of Cambridge has become the first university in the country to say it will offer courses online for the entire 2020-21 academic year. With social distancing measures likely to stay in place for the foreseeable future, other universities are expected to follow suit with a "blended" mix of online lecturers and small group teaching -- for seminars, practical and laboratory work, and supervisions -- on campus. Start and break times will be staggered to avoid overcrowding and universities will redesign study areas and cafeterias to make them "Covid secure." But that will only work if universities can be dragged out of their traditional format and forced to use technology that works.
The University of Manchester, which has announced plans to keep lectures online-only in the autumn term, is already preparing for the worst. On April 23, vice-chancellor Dame Nancy Rothwell told staff that redundancies and pay cuts may be necessary if 80 per cent of students from outside the EU and 20 per cent of UK and EU students decided to stay defer or drop out. In the worst-case scenario, the university could lose up to $338 in a single year -- a 15 to 25 per cent deficit. Unlike schools, universities are privately-run institutions free to develop their own roadmaps for getting out of lockdown. The University of Cambridge has become the first university in the country to say it will offer courses online for the entire 2020-21 academic year. With social distancing measures likely to stay in place for the foreseeable future, other universities are expected to follow suit with a "blended" mix of online lecturers and small group teaching -- for seminars, practical and laboratory work, and supervisions -- on campus. Start and break times will be staggered to avoid overcrowding and universities will redesign study areas and cafeterias to make them "Covid secure." But that will only work if universities can be dragged out of their traditional format and forced to use technology that works.
Good for them! (Score:1)
Still better for us!
Typo (Score:2)
...the university could lose up to $338 in a single year ....
They wish.
I think the conversion meant to say $338M.
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They'll save power not having to keep the whole campus electrified due to being closed.
They won't need near the maintenance and janitorial work done with campus closed....no food service (labor or food)....etc.
I wonder how much it costs just to keep campus itself open?
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Well, seems there should be some really easy ways to start saving $$.
They'll save power not having to keep the whole campus electrified due to being closed.
There's some things:
1. Most appliances have very limited vampire loads(power they consume when soft off) these days. Just unplugging stuff will save a bit more. Just be sure to keep some stuff like UPS units plugged in - they degrade if not.
2. You shut power off to the campus completely for more than a couple months, you'll find damage when you go to turn it back on.
3. Power is, relatively speaking, normally quite cheap.
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Those are mostly low-cost items. You can defer some maintenance, but unless the buildings will be mothballed for years you end up not saving much. To actually mothball a building you need to remove things that could be breeding grounds or food for pests, drain and inert water lines, seal sewers, etc.
My alma mattar has an issue where they financed a new building under the most optimistic of revenue expectations, and Trump’s visa restrictions were already breaking their budget. COVID will likely force t
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They'll save power not having to keep the whole campus electrified due to being closed.
I wonder if that's true. I work in a STEM department at a university which is currently fully remote. In our building, I'm sure most of the lights are off... but we've also had to add extra server capacity to cover several hundred students, faculty, and staff all working remotely 100% of the time - so figure higher costs for the operation of the servers themselves, plus the additional cooling needed.
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They'll save power not having to keep the whole campus electrified due to being closed.
UK universities don't necessarily have a "campus" in that sense.
For example, Cambridge is mentioned in TFS. At Cambridge, undergraduates belong to a college, which deals with most of your basic accommodation and catering needs, provides a social centre, and is often responsible for organising small group tuition in whatever forms apply for your subject. So colleges will all need to be open, and probably taking social distancing steps and the like that will incur extra costs.
In many subjects, the only provis
Well, plut the budget holes (Score:4)
Pay your management the equivalent of fed salaries.
And fire the multi-million-dollar/year coaches.
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Well, the coaches that get paid the millions of $'s....also are coaching programs that bring in FAR more millions of $'s to the campus.
In the US, major schools fund their programs themselves and also the extra $$ goes to help programs that do not generate income for the college.
Of course, we'll have to see what happens if they still play or not and if they cannot have filled stadiums.
Even with that, you have a LOT of alumni and other groups that donate to c
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You can both be right. The NCAA analysis includes the entire athletics programs of the schools, which at most large universities include a lot of sports that make no revenue.
It is fairly likely that a coach making millions of dollars -- especially a football coach -- is heading a program that makes an overall profit, even if the full school's athletics program doesn't make money.
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1) Your article is out of date. a study of 2014 numbers from an article written in 2015.
2) This is not including the real big numbers: TV revenue. No way those numbers included those.
3) What about private donations to the university? Also not included.
Yes, at major universities, Mens Football and Mens Basketball pay for most of the other sports. Saying one of the top 24 BCS schools make less than $10 million dollars is laughable. Maybe just ticket sales directly.
Do your self a favor and look up the
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Citation? I read a few years ago that only about 10 universities got a net benefit from the athletic programs. The rest lost money.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
http://www.ncaa.org/about/reso... [ncaa.org]
We should not lose sight of the fact that the athletic programs devalue the academic programs.
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While I agree most athletics departments lose universities money, I would really like to see more well thought out analysis than the ones you link to. They ignore any intangible benefits such as marketing the university to prospective students and perhaps increased alumni donations. All incomplete analysis like this does is give people an excuse for why the analysis is wrong.
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Well, the coaches that get paid the millions of $'s....also are coaching programs that bring in FAR more millions of $'s to the campus.
This is easily overlooked. The idea that college football would even attacked a TV crew is laughable in other countries, yet in the USA this is a *BIG* thing. And big things are usually big things because they are highly profitable.
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This article is about universities in the UK.
UK universities don't have athletic coaches earning millions.
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Rock star university president and coach salaries are really more the the effect of economic changes at universities than they are the causes.
People who can bring in lots of donations command eye-popping salaries in the non-profit world. Many non-profit managers command salaries in the million dollars-per-year. But since they command these salaries because of their fundraising prowess, astonishing college presidential salaries aren't likely to be a major driver of tuition costs. And if you go just a litt
online learning (Score:2)
I did my BS and my MBA at a University that was online only (WGU) I never felt that their online systems hindered my learning experience. I enjoyed the process.
Last fall I started my PhD at a school that offers an online program to supplement their on-campus school. The school uses Blackboard to run their online school. I have grown to hate Blackboard with a passion. I find it un-intuitive and mess to deal with. I feel it hinders my learning experience.
Agreed - a few years to build good online courses (Score:2)
At one point I was studying at WGU and the same year I was deploying a new online campus (Learning Management System, LMS) for an agency within the Texas A&M system.
You mentioned you hate Blackboard - I was switching over to a competing open source LMS, Moodle. While we already had online courses in ine LMS, doing a great job switching to a new LMS was a year-long project. I wrote modules to suit the needs of our courses, such as new types of exam questions and statistics about exam questions so we knew
Blackboard isn't actually that bad (Score:2)
I agree that blackboard is a hot mess, but I was helping my nephew out with his schoolwork. He's in middle school, by the way.
Blackboard, in comparison, isn't bad.
The system his school is using, well, we missed multiple assignments because of the way it is arranged. You have to go into three different sections, select the class and class section, etc...
Keep in mind that they expect not just middle school students to use this, but elementary kids.
I'll give them something of a pass in that I think that it w
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The difference is that you studied at a school that is totally invested in online learning. The problem right now is school's that have had little to no online learning capabilities having to move everything to online learning. Basically students will be paying these schools for the right to be a guinea pig while the school tries to figure all this shit out.
Its over (Score:1, Flamebait)
Apart from the dem controlled states that want to control you forever, we are opening up and way past the curve. I'm also not seeing much social distancing going on in those same states with all the rioting and such.
Glad to see the schools in trouble though. These days, most of them are money rackets and Marxist brain washing centers anyways. Its about time to online most of this and opensource the material. Maybe folks wouldn't
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Its about time to online most of this and opensource the material.
Let me reply to this comment because I see it often. Disclaimer: I teach computer science at a state university.
Universities have never been the only place materials are available. There have been free textbooks or very cheap textbooks out there for virtually anything you want. It is particularly true in computer science.
But there is a big difference between having the material available to you. Even reading the materials and actually understanding the materials and be able to apply it to different contexts
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"Note that there are efforts towards automated adaptive learning which are systems meant to con
A particle accelerator in your garage? (Score:3)
it will offer courses online for the entire 2020-21 academic year
Probably OK for arts and humanities courses. But how do they plan to offer laboratory and workshop facilities?
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Please see my comment below; Cambridge's plan has been very wrongly reported. They agree with you that they can't do all learning online.
Also, this is a serious problem for arts and humanities courses.
Arts people often need equipment at their university - things like specialist printing equipment, pottery kilns, other fabrication equipment, photographic studios, etc. A fine arts student can spend as much time in the studio as a science student spends in the lab, and equipping a print studio at home is as ea
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Those majoring in physical sciences or most areas of engineering are expected to be somewhat insane, evil, have plenty of ill-gotten gains, and therefore are expected to build a giant underground laboratory / command center from which to conduct experiments and take over the world (to pay off the student loan) and to finally capture that pesky James Bond and/or Austin Powers.
Capture either, you've got a Master's degree. Capture both, you get a PhD!
Remember to laugh like a maniac and to brag about your evil
not online learning (Score:3)
"not many people want to pay almost $12,500 a year for the privilege of attending Zoom calls"
I'm sorry, but that's not online learning, at least in the technical sense. That's trying to move a face-to-face model to distance learning—we called it remote instruction—and doing so rather poorly. It is not the same as an asynchronous learning experience typically used in online courses and it's important to make that distinction.
While I cannot speak for all institutions, many have pretty rigorous expectations for the design of fully online courses—expectations that were largely curtailed during COVID-19 as face-to-face courses were forced to switch to remote instruction—and while there are many models, some well known ones are Quality Matters, OLC, and QOLT. My university uses a mix of all three and require instructors to complete hours of training and have their courses reviewed before they can teach online. Because of this, the student satisfaction of our online courses rivals—and sometimes exceeds—that of their face-to-face analogs.
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University of Phoenix (Score:3)
My friend's wife got her masters degree in engineering online from the University of Phoenix a few years ago. Other than adjusting to doing everything yourself on your own time (her bachelor's is from a large state university) she said it was great. Ditto my boss who got his bachelors in MIS from there. I also know people who tried online higher ed from Phoenix, and other sites, and have failed miserably, but I think that was more of an issue with them than with the program.
No Excuse (Score:2)
In my opinion, there is no excuse for delivering poor online course material. I watch farmers on Youtube that put together an immersive show milking cows (10th Generation Dairyman or SaskDutchKid) and colleges are making excuses for poor video or audio? Colleges and K12 schools typically have the best internet connections of any entity in the state. Teachers already know the material and, if the few colleges lectures I attended were any sort of example, all the teacher has to do is stand there and deliver t
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If that's what you think it takes to deliver a university level lecture, then you've clearly never done it. It typically takes 5-6 times as long to prepare my online material as my in person presentations. We're getting no extra prep time, no extra support, and we're having to do it from our own homes with no specialized equipment.
Here's an exercise - prepare an hour long lecture on the geographical significance of the Basque region during the spanish civil war, fit for a university audience of mixed abilit
I've worked in online learning for a long time (Score:2)
If only staff redundancies were based on merit (Score:2)
You want Lucas wiring? (Score:2)
Not at my school... (Score:3)
I'm working on a Master's degree and we went to online format smack dab in the middle of the spring semester. They took one week to prepare and after that we where totally online. It wasn't that bad. Now in summer session we are 100% online and it's working just fine. My classes are currently half live (where we are online with the instructor and can interact), and half pre-recorded.
I'd prefer to meet in person, but given the situation, online is working out just fine.
The only real difference is the use of online testing. At the Graduate level, it's difficult to proctor tests and difficult to format tests for an online format. How do you keep folks from cheating with "closed book, closed notes" tests online? That is kind of hard.
Maybe it is that my school is just a few blocks away from my house, that we are a technical school and have really advanced network connectivity? I don't know, but we are not having too many issues.
My son is attending the local CC and he's not having issues with the online format either. They have the same problems with online test formats for some of his subjects (like how do you test advanced Math subjects online?) but they are making it work.
Universities and the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
The internet is having the same effect on the universities that the printing press had on the medieval church. For centuries, the universities were the gatekeepers to a middle class lifestyle, and now that college is more expensive than ever, and knowledge more accessible than its ever been in human history, people are starting to realize that they don't need college to acquire the skills necessary for a good career. Today, the appeal of a university education is largely in becoming a member of an elitist club. The problem is, with outsourcing, feminism, and good ole fashioned capitalism depressing wages, membership in the elitist club isn't worth as much as it once was. For the average person today, club membership is a waste of money, especially compared to the cost of an internet connection.
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Without knowing anything about the topic, I assume it is similar to any office business: paying for the office, upkeep, office supplies and salaries of administration and teachers.
Is there anything I am missing about why they are so expensive? (other than 'because they can')
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This, exactly this. I did some research on the possibilities of online education for universities at the National Council of Innovation of Chile, back in 2013. We talked to university chancellors, professors, and they did not see it as remotely relevant. By then, Georgia Tech had already started offering an online Master in Computer Science degree for USD 7.000, and the math was pretty clear, for example for a CS major living far away from a major university en Chile. It was already cheaper for him/her to g
Re: Universities and the internet (Score:2)
Education Should Not Be Sold to Highest Bidder (Score:2)
COVID has shown the weakness of online education (Score:3)
Universities are @ their (Score:3)
The idea of an individuals standing at the front of a room dispensing learning to the privileged few is an obsolete overtly expensive and closed model.
Today if your not educating yourself each day your going broke/losing your job soon.
Just my 2 cents
Undergraduate Tuition Doesn't Pay the Bills (Score:2)
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I also did engineering (at a Canadian university) back in the misty reaches of time. Your school was certainly full of crap about graduate work funding undergraduate. The equipment needed for undergraduates is relatively primitive and cheap, and doesn't get much attention. Grad students need much higher-quality equipment and hands-on time with a faculty supervisor.
One of our profs was a world-renowned researcher. Wonderful, right? No, because a lot of his lectures consisted of a grad student coming into the
Open University? (Score:1)
They were founded in 1969, doing distance learning pretty much all the time. Of course no Internet as such then, so education was done via TV and radio (and mail).
They're also the UK's biggest university in terms of enrolled students. They had 50 years to get distance learning right.
Should probably still enroll (Score:2)
University of American Samoa Law (Score:3)
For my kids... online is not an option (Score:2)
I have two kids: One is a sophomore in college this spring, the other is graduating high school this spring and was originally going to college in the fall. Both of my kids are smart, but have struggled to learn in on-line learning environments. I don't think they are alone.
My son won't be starting traditional college this fall due to the risk of on-line courses (he is currently signed up for a semester long "outdoor learning" program that is planning to operate more or less normally this fall.. We are
It's a mess (Score:3)
Online teaching is a mess. Let's face it: if you succeed with online courses, then you didn't need them to begin with. You are sufficiently resourceful that a few trip to the library is all you need to learn. However, for those that need a teacher, online is the worst.
Or at least that's my perception after having to take my lectures online due to covid-19. This year was my worst experience in over 15 years. I didn't realize how I rely so much on non verbal cues with my students to set the pace of the lecture until I couldn't rely on them. Each passing week I discovered how little was actually understood from the previous session through the exercises, because the lack of interaction forbids measuring it in real time. Truly awful.