Why Colleges are Giving Up on Remote Education (salon.com) 111
The president emeritus of the Great Lakes College Association writes that "nearly all colleges have re-adopted in-person education this fall, in spite of delta variant risks...
"As it turns out, student enthusiasm for remote learning is mixed at best, and in some cases students have sued their colleges for refunds. But it is not simply student opinion that has driven this reversion to face-to-face education." Indeed, students are far better off with in-person learning than with online approaches. Recent research indicates that the effects of remote learning have been negative. As the Brookings Institution Stephanie Riegg reports, "bachelor's degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures — including math, reading, writing, and English — relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs...."
[R]esearch on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning. Think of a teacher who had a great impact on you — the one who made you excited, interested, intrigued, and motivated to learn. Was this teacher a calm and cool transmitter of facts, or a person who was passionate about the subject and excited to talk about it...? Research tells us the most effective teachers — those who are most successful in having their students learn — are those who establish an emotional relationship with their students in an environment of care and trust. As former teacher and now neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang tells us, emotion is necessary for learning to occur: "Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don't care about.... Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts...."
Today we have the benefit of extensive research documenting the short-term and long-term importance of these social-educational practices. Research based on the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) consistently finds that having meaningful outside-of-class relationships with faculty and advisors increases not only learning but graduation from college and employment after graduation. It is also worth noting that Gallup-Purdue University public opinion research affirms the idea that people believe these personal relationships in college matter. A study of 30,000 graduates reports that they believe "what students are doing in college and how they are experiencing it... has a profound relationship to life and career." Specifically, "if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being."
Since empirical research documents the powerful impact of meaningful human relationships on learning while in college as well as on graduate's adult lives, and people believe it matters, do we dare replace it with technology?
"As it turns out, student enthusiasm for remote learning is mixed at best, and in some cases students have sued their colleges for refunds. But it is not simply student opinion that has driven this reversion to face-to-face education." Indeed, students are far better off with in-person learning than with online approaches. Recent research indicates that the effects of remote learning have been negative. As the Brookings Institution Stephanie Riegg reports, "bachelor's degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures — including math, reading, writing, and English — relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs...."
[R]esearch on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning. Think of a teacher who had a great impact on you — the one who made you excited, interested, intrigued, and motivated to learn. Was this teacher a calm and cool transmitter of facts, or a person who was passionate about the subject and excited to talk about it...? Research tells us the most effective teachers — those who are most successful in having their students learn — are those who establish an emotional relationship with their students in an environment of care and trust. As former teacher and now neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang tells us, emotion is necessary for learning to occur: "Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don't care about.... Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts...."
Today we have the benefit of extensive research documenting the short-term and long-term importance of these social-educational practices. Research based on the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) consistently finds that having meaningful outside-of-class relationships with faculty and advisors increases not only learning but graduation from college and employment after graduation. It is also worth noting that Gallup-Purdue University public opinion research affirms the idea that people believe these personal relationships in college matter. A study of 30,000 graduates reports that they believe "what students are doing in college and how they are experiencing it... has a profound relationship to life and career." Specifically, "if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being."
Since empirical research documents the powerful impact of meaningful human relationships on learning while in college as well as on graduate's adult lives, and people believe it matters, do we dare replace it with technology?
Because it is harder to extract (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you under the impression that remote learning _reduces_ ivory tower mentality?
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Organisations that offer distance learning are sometimes (but not by any means always) also organisations that are relatively accessible. In contexts in which that is true, yeah, I would say that it can somewhat counteract the ivory tower mentality. Also, this can make it more likely that people can study the subjects they are interested in despite not being in the obvious demographics or, sometimes, being able to scrape up the fees for bricks&mortar education. This at least means that preconceptions of
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I was thinking more of the lack of interaction with non-academically-employed human beings. the "town and gown" separation is a very real one, and a very dangerous one for fiscally and socially elite schools. The harsh lessons about simple household upkeep, finances, and nutrition learned by many freshmen are a testement to the segregation of many academic denizens and employees from the "real world".
I'd agree that opening up opportunities to students who may not be able to afford to live on campus is a won
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Yeah, there is a fair chance that DL shortchanges some students, especially students with strong social skills and a tendency to value joint study, and especially in subject areas that really benefit from regular interaction (modern languages come to mind) or f2f access to specialist hardware (e.g. physics labs). Similarly one could argue that f2f sometimes overly privileges social interaction at the cost of individual attainment - various dreadful obligatory team-based coursework experiences come to mind!
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Surely the lessons about household upkeep, finances and nutrition learnt by freshers are a testament to the fact that when they were living with their parents they didn't have to be independent adults. What does that have to do with the ivory tower?
Re: Because it is harder to extract (Score:3)
Re:Because it is harder to extract (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just give me my paper and get out of my way
Sure, remote is no hindrance to certificate mills.
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Ivory tower mentality? Is that how elephant poachers think?
Re:Because it is harder to extract (Score:5, Insightful)
Remote learning isn't new. DeVry University has offered online degrees for 20 years. They have always delivered a poorer education.
So you can complain about an ivory tower, but they still offer a superior education. Until you have a solution to place online classes at the same academic level is in-person classes, then maybe stop complaining about the old ways. It's a bit hard to take your "close dysfunctional" critique seriously when they're better at delivering education.
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Remote learning isn't new. DeVry University has offered online degrees for 20 years. They have always delivered a poorer education.
So you can complain about an ivory tower, but they still offer a superior education
So what? For most non-specialized jobs, the degree itself is the goal and what is looked at, not what you learned.
Unless you want to figure out a way to remove the education requirement at jobs where it isn't needed, college degrees are nothing more than expensive tickets to promotions - not knowledge.
Re:Because it is harder to extract (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's the takeaway one is left with after 4 years of undergrad, then "education" is a lost cause for them.
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In the tech field, most employers will say "or comparable experience" in their job listings. I'm sure there are many employers who aren't considering experience, but I'd be surprised if that were the norm. There are a lot of people who think they're qualified, but actually aren't.
The problem is that anyone can apply for a job and say they can do it. Yet those same people are googling "interview questions" and then studying the answers in hopes that this is what's asked, presumably because they don't know th
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In most fields, you'll see the "or comparable experience" line. In practice, it's not true or weighted far less than someone with no experience but with a degree. At least for the initial screening. Once you get to the interview stage, the experience factor really kicks in.
It eliminates all value from a college (Score:5, Informative)
If you are going to learn remote then why not do so from experts at companies like Udemy?
Those are companies that have carefully figured out what to teach remotely, how to present course materials and evaluate progress, and have teachers trained and used to remote education.
Compare that any any teacher at even the best of colleges. They have been teaching in person, in a classroom, their whole lives. Can you expect them to be all that great at remote learning? Absolutely not!
Then on top of that, the true value of going to college is hanging around other students, all doing unrelated things but generally interested in learning. That breath of exposure to other people from all over is really where the core of value in going to any college really lies, to the point where it should be a primary determinant of what school you go to (if any).
If I were going to college and that college opted to go remote, there is no way I would pay a cent for that, I'd pause or skip a year or drop out altogether rather than pay cent for that experience that is almost worse than just watching YouTube videos related to your major.
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Does Udemy offer recognized qualifications?
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Is this a joke? Hard to tell because literally anyone can make a Udemy class. I can be one of you "experts" on Udemy if I wanted to.
And people mostly teach very specific things. Udemy does not offer a curriculum, which is important because that's how you know all of the skills and information are needed in a specific field. You'd have to research that yourself and hope you did a good job at it. Besides, online classes offer poorer education even if the material is sound - due to how people generally learn a
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I'm back at University of Texas now that I can do remote learning. The sole purpose is to get a generic business degree to meet promotion requirements as well as to get past application screening software if I am ever looking for employment again.
Once my wife graduates, she gets an automatic 10,000 annual bump in pay even though none of her responsibilities will change and the degree has very limited relevance to what she does.
And you're right, I'm paying a huge amount of money for that piece of paper. I
Because it sucks? (Score:2)
Fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars/year to sit though 9 months of zoom classes is a horrible investment, the instruction isn't effective, and employers know it..
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That's twice as much even as the average private school.
Is it though (Score:1)
That's twice as much even as the average private school.
I don't think it's twice as much as the average of any school that would be valuable to go to. There are a lot of garbage colleges pulling down that average. For anyone serious about college 50k/year seems about right.
I have some friends with a daughter who just started going to college for engineering last year, all of the schools she was looking at were around that much and the one she ended up going to is around $49k/year currently. It was one of
Re: Is it though (Score:2)
This might be true in the USA but not in many other countries with excellent universities.
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This is an international website.. see beyond your own navel.
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Even if you were right (which I dispute), an "American point of view" does not mean "pretend that the rest of the World does not exist". I know many citizens of the USA who are aware that the USA are just a part of a much larger world.
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I know many citizens of the USA who are aware that the USA are just a part of a much larger world.
[Citation needed]
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I have some friends with a daughter who
You're aliterate. Instead of looking something up to find out what the number is, you just repeat shit.
As a functional literate, let me fill you in on a little "secret:" everything your friends tell you is spun. Spun to make them look Virtuous. When people relay their experiences to you, they don't accurately tell you what the correct numbers are, they don't include the relevant details, and they're often giving you a ridiculously bogus characterization of whatever happened. They're telling you a story; the
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A couple of things wrong about that. Many public universities are worth going to, and in-state tuition is certainly going to be much less than that. Also, for the private schools I'm aware of, the advertised price is near twice the average student pays, since almost every student gets financial aid.
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For-profit education rarely works. The incentives are too perverted all around.
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Much like medicine, or government..
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Indeed. Like quite a few other things that only work well when the people doing it are at it with genuine passion.
Okay, a few thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
- The "Great Lakes Colleges Association [glca.org]" is mostly a bunch of no-name local colleges.
- Any existing studies regarding "bachelor's degree students in online programs" is almost certainly NOT looking at what's happened with the programs major universities put together due to COVID - it's looking at people who've enrolled in historically online-only / remote-only schools like DeVry and ITT. You're not working with the same caliber of student.
- I would expect that many upper-division courses, which typically have small class sizes, may very well work better in person... But I have my doubts that you're learning any more in person than online for the typical 250-person English Lit course.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I am in complete agreement with you on all points. The social experiences I had in college were valuable and important - heck, it’s where I met my wife. It seems like many people tend to discount such things in today’s transactional world, though; which might be why some people felt the need to construct an argument in support of in-person collegiate classes.
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There is literally no value in attending a no-name local college. If it doesn't have an ivy league name it will won't yield an income that is worth the debt necessary to fund it.
That's not entirely correct. If you were going to stop with a bachelor's degree, then maybe. If you're going to grad school, then nobody is going to care where you went to undergrad. I have two kids who went to Grand Valley in MI (actually a pretty good school for the money) and one if now a medical student and the other one a lawyer. You think anybody is going to care about their undergrad?
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I think it can be an advantage to attend the "no-name" college as an undergrad. My experience is in .au, but I found that at a more "elite" university (ANU) the academics often seemed far too busy to talk to an undergrad. At a lower-tier university (CSU) teaching seemed like a higher priority for the academics and they made more of an effort to engage with the students.
As always though, your experience may vary.... but any notion that "price" or "name recognition" is an indicator of undergraduate educationa
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I think it can be an advantage to attend the "no-name" college as an undergrad. My experience is in .au, but I found that at a more "elite" university (ANU) the academics often seemed far too busy to talk to an undergrad. At a lower-tier university (CSU) teaching seemed like a higher priority for the academics and they made more of an effort to engage with the students.
As always though, your experience may vary.... but any notion that "price" or "name recognition" is an indicator of undergraduate educational quality is usually very flawed.
This is very much the case in elite American private universities, and large state universities. At a place like Harvard or U. of Chicago or the University of Texas, it's not uncommon to see freshman classes of 100 or more students, taught by a grad assistant in rote learning style straight from the textbook. At more prestigious school, real PhD's often don't bother themselves with teaching until the "interesting" upper level classes come along. Some don't like teaching at all and try to do as much researc
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> There is literally no value in attending a no-name local college. If it doesn't have an ivy league name it will won't yield an income that is worth the debt necessary to fund it.
Now do majors. Are there any majors that "won't yield an income that is worth the debt necessary to fund it"? And can you name 5 of them for fun.
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a bunch of no-name local colleges
There is literally no value in attending a no-name local college. If it doesn't have an ivy league name it will won't yield an income that is worth the debt necessary to fund it.
Funny, I went to a no-name local college, then to grad school, and I'm pulling above average salaries (*above average in the 6-figure bracket).
This whole notion of yours is ridiculous. Unless you are completely incompetent, if you graduate from CS from pretty much any no-name local university, you will get a job. More importantly, even if the job is crappy, statistically speaking, it will bring you an above average salary among college-educated people, opening a path into one of the most financially rewa
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Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
I call bullshit on this article. The author doesn't know what they're talking about. Ask yourselves, what are they actually comparing & with what data?
The author of this article has cobbled together findings from areas of educational research that are unrelated, given equal weight to survey data, & conflated the emergency remote teaching, that faculty engaged in during COVID surges, with carefully designed & developed online degree & post-graduate course & programmes. I read this research. It's part of my job. The findings are context specific & often mixed. There are pros & cons to both face to face & online learning & neither is a general winner; sometimes face to face is better, sometimes online. We see bigger differences depending on the quality of the course content & tutor support than the medium it's administered in.
A very important point to mention here is that universities generally don't gather data on students' learning gains, i.e. pre-, post- & delayed post-testing to see how much they've learned during a course or programme, so, even though it would be foolish to aggregate that data, it doesn't exist & so it's impossible to say which is generally better than the other in terms of academic performance.
As far as I understand, the most challenging thing about online learning is that students are required to be much more self-disciplined & organised than on face to face programmes (This would mean that elite universities with very high enrollment criteria & therefore more disciplined & skilled students are likely to fare much better in online learning than community colleges which have to take a more diverse range of abilities). However, a lot of face to face programmes these days also include online components &/or entire courses that are online, simply because sometimes it works just as well or better than face to face.
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The other issue would be trying to adapt to online learning there are universities that have geared a lot of courses for online, People who shove their lecture notes online or try reading a live lecture online often fall fla
Discipline seems about the same (Score:2)
As far as I understand, the most challenging thing about online learning is that students are required to be much more self-disciplined & organised than on face to face programmes
I don't think that's really the case, as when in college I noticed a lot of people that would fail to show up for classes. I think the level of discipline required is about the same since either way you are on your own to actually put in the effort to learn the material and attend/review classes.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
I call bullshit on this article. The author doesn't know what they're talking about. Ask yourselves, what are they actually comparing & with what data?
The author of this article has cobbled together findings from areas of educational research that are unrelated, given equal weight to survey data, & conflated the emergency remote teaching, that faculty engaged in during COVID surges, with carefully designed & developed online degree & post-graduate course & programmes. I read this research. It's part of my job. The findings are context specific & often mixed. There are pros & cons to both face to face & online learning & neither is a general winner; sometimes face to face is better, sometimes online. We see bigger differences depending on the quality of the course content & tutor support than the medium it's administered in.
A very important point to mention here is that universities generally don't gather data on students' learning gains, i.e. pre-, post- & delayed post-testing to see how much they've learned during a course or programme, so, even though it would be foolish to aggregate that data, it doesn't exist & so it's impossible to say which is generally better than the other in terms of academic performance.
As far as I understand, the most challenging thing about online learning is that students are required to be much more self-disciplined & organised than on face to face programmes (This would mean that elite universities with very high enrollment criteria & therefore more disciplined & skilled students are likely to fare much better in online learning than community colleges which have to take a more diverse range of abilities). However, a lot of face to face programmes these days also include online components &/or entire courses that are online, simply because sometimes it works just as well or better than face to face.
Agreed. Had there been this option when I went to college (after spending time in the US Navy), I would likely have graduated. All the coursework I did in my Electronics 'A' Schools in the Navy was done as individualized Self-Study (granted, we were in classrooms, but we weren't talking to each other and everyone worked at their own pace)--with the notable exception of Submarine School, but that's a slightly different animal. My 'C' Schools had 10 or fewer students in them and were instructor led. When I got home after my stint and went to college, it was the 200 student Psych and English courses, and 700 student Freshman Calculus classes that soured my experience and I quit after 1 year. Granted, my Navy Experience ultimately led me to a decent full-time career in IT, but everything I learned about networking and the ultimate path I settled on was nothing but pure OJT and self-study for certification exams. No classes, no degree, and I make a decent middle-class salary.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
A very important point to mention here is that universities generally don't gather data on students' learning gains, i.e. pre-, post- & delayed post-testing to see how much they've learned during a course or programme ...
That is really bad. Companies or governments that give out student loans should require that colleges publish data as to how many of their graduates in a particular major get jobs and what their earnings are 1, 5, and 10 years after obtaining the degree/qualification. Too many students get into useless majors and then suffer greatly to pay their loans back.
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GP was talking about a very particular type of measurement of learning gain called pre-test, post-test.
This type of measurement is not done very often outside of an education research context. pre-test/post-test is expensive to do (not necessarilly in $$$ but in time of the instructor and time of the students), the test need to be very carefully constructed, administered, and graded. It is a very fine sensitive measure instrument. So it is only used when it is necessary.
Though all public institutions in the
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A very important point to mention here is that universities generally don't gather data on students' learning gains, i.e. pre-, post- & delayed post-testing to see how much they've learned during a course or programme, so, even though it would be foolish to aggregate that data, it doesn't exist & so it's impossible to say which is generally better than the other in terms of academic performance.
Dude, I don't need pre test/post test to tell in this case.
pre-test/post-test is great when you are trying to measure small differences. At my university, we did everything we could in the time imparted. But it was still such a shit show that I don't need tests to tell me the learning did not happen as well.
In one of my class I had to cut about 30% of the content of the class out compared to what I normally do. Just the interactions in office hours tell me that students are not learning as well, because I g
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Unis gather data on students constantly. All kinds of studies on learning gains.
No they don't. They gather tonnes of data about LMS usage & various surveys that are little more than customer satisfaction exit polls. The moment you start looking for data from which it would be possible to calculate meaningful performance stats, unis typically stonewall & come up with 'ethical' objections to using student data in this way. It's understandable - they don't want anyone comparing or evaluating their actual teaching/instructional performance, i.e. How good a deal students are actuall
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I earned both my BS and MS degrees online while on active duty in the Navy. Earned my BS while on submarines and got the MS on shore duty.
It does come down to student discipline. I had friends who changed schools because they couldn't handle remote education and wanted in-class learning. And this was when online learning was physical books w/ emailed assignments (or snail-mail while on submarine) or, for my MS degree, reading online books or websites and submitting assignments. No Zoom-like teleconferences,
Did my master's thesis on this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Did my master's thesis on this. (Score:4, Interesting)
I used the online-only time during the pandemic to convert the classes I teach to a "flipped classroom" approach. I recorded video lectures and then held work sessions on Zoom during class time. Now that the online-only restriction is ended, I still provide students with the videos while doing shorter bits of lecturing in class and spending most of the class time helping students get their work done. Students love the videos; the ability to pause, rewind, and watch at any playback speed is great for them.
It took some iteration, because I had no idea what I was doing when I started. The university provided very little support for the sudden online jump. As a result, a lot of the video content that came out of the last year is pretty poor in both technical and educational quality. I spent the time to figure out what I was doing and learn at least some best practices, get some decent recording equipment, and redo videos that weren't good enough. A lot of other people didn't have either the time or commitment for that.
So one reason I think colleges are retreating somewhat from video content is that our recent foray was unplanned, unresourced, and unsupported by technological and pedagogical expertise -- leading to poor quality, student dissatisfaction, and poor academic experience and performance. It doesn't mean it can't be done, just that it needs to be purposeful, and, as you said, done in a hybrid approach.
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Excellent approach;thank you for making the effort (Score:2)
The point about students loving the ability to 'rewind' is crucial.
However the question it does leave unaddressed is why the video format is preferable to a book. My experience of 1st year Physical Chemistry included a lecturer - in a class of over 100 with no interaction - essentially regurgitating the content of the book he had written on the subject.
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I can only say that some students mostly learn better from lecture and some mostly learn better from books and that sometimes it depends on the situation. When I took a particular mathematical statistics course, the book at first was very hard for me to understand. As the professor lectured on the material, I was able to understand the jargon and the mathematical approach to the material better, and gradually became able to follow the text.
If the lecture doesn't help with that, or is just a professor essent
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* larger lectures are hit and miss, depending on the lecturer.
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I was in college in the 1980s. I had a course called interdisciplinary history. I needed the history and it was the only one open. I took it. Turned out the teacher was there every day. Attendance was optional. The tests were not optional though we could take them up to 3 times. He didn't care if we took every test the first or last day. Totally up to us. He had a suggested pace. American history up through the Carter years.
So there was no reason to not get an A in this course. I was done in 6 weeks I remem
the social context of learning is critical (Score:2, Insightful)
Remote learning was a nationwide disaster (Score:1)
If there's one good thing that's come out of the pandemic, it's
Let's see (Score:2)
So a hastily slapped together packet of poorly made videos and a hodge-podge of a web page all thrown together with practically no notice at the last minute bolstered by barely functional video calls were less effective than a well rehearsed for years series of in-person lectures and office hours? You DON'T say!
Spoke Corona (Score:2)
Oopsie Poopsie!
Self motivation (Score:2)
The thing college does is force you to study things that do not interest you. It forces you to learn things you would have skipped over. Things that will open you to new ideas and ways of thinking. I mean, think of the channels you skip over or videos you would not normally watch. Sometimes there is something interesting and useful in it.
because dorm and meal plan money (Score:2)
nt
What I have learned teaching online (Score:2)
Because of COVID, I was forced to teach online in a pinch. I teach computer science at both undergraduate and graduate level; either systems courses or algorithm courses.
What I have learned teaching online (synchronous and asynchronous) is that teaching online is goddamn hard. It is VERY different and I was not prepared for the transition.
Like all of my colleagues, we transition to remote instruction almost instantly. We took some emergency online teaching training which helped. But really we would need to
This one is going down fast (Score:5, Informative)
People aren't going to want to hear this, but this article is spot on. Absolutely on the mark. Here are some hard truths about remote education at the university level:
1. It's been tried for decades. Before COVID, people were using other platforms to try every iteration of remote learning they could think of. Before the age of cheap webcams, there were classrooms outfitted with 10s of thousands of dollars worth of cameras, high speed internet, and recording. Before the internet, there were video-tape-based correspondence courses.
2. Remote learning is better for about 10% of the students, about 40% of the students could take it or leave it, and 50% of the students do worse compared to in-person. To my knowledge nobody reputable has EVER shown that remote is better than in-person, at the population level.
3. The fundamental reason for this is that we are social creatures, with the exception of small numbers of people who are naturally solitary or massive socially anxious.
4. Thousands of professors have tried every single version of remote learning they could think of. While you might point to a single Harvard CS class that's wildly popular, that doesn't make a degree and it doesn't make the sort of training necessary to prepare 45 out of 50 students in a class to land a decent job (the bottom five almost always do badly no matter what).
5. You might think professors are hostile to remote learning and want to protect their ez jobs. Honestly, it's true that some are like that. But for most of us, nothing could be further from the truth. At least in STEM. I love my field. I could make more $$$ in industry. Easily. Why would I limit myself to training 50 engineers at a time when I could be training 500?
6. If you think you can do better, I absolutely welcome you to try. That isn't passive agressive. Maybe there's some secret formula to making remote learning work as well, or better, than in-person. literally thousands of PhDs have tried and failed, but maybe you can do better. I mean that. If you know something I don't, by all means please school me. The world would be a better place if we can make remote learning as good as in-person.
Yes, universities have become overpriced. Yes, they act as gatekeepers and that can be absolutely infuriating sometimes. Yes, some of my colleagues have extremely overinflated egos. But the bottom line is this: you need to hire a mechanical engineer to design aircraft wing components. Some applicants are competent, and some will kill a LOT of people if you're dumb enough to give them the job. How do you tell the difference? The best bet isto hire someone with a degree from an accredited 4 year engineering school and a GPA somewhere in the 3.2+ range. Yes, a bunch of your applicants are "self-taught engineers". Are you going to spend 20 hours getting to know each candidate in detail. You have 400 applicants. You won't. You can't.
If you don't like this, you need to come up with a better system. I would welcome it.
Down mod in 3..2...1..
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Post university qualifications (Score:2)
In the UK we have a system of accrediting our engineers with a professional body now usually after their graduation from university. This provides an objective, outside test of their ability; the fact that those bodies have been forced to stop accepting a degree as sufficient to avoid needing to be tested on some areas is a measure of the decline in standards in our universities.
Maybe it's not the remote learning per se ... (Score:3)
... maybe it's that 50% of students really get their learning from networking with other students?
Maybe university is actually hard and professors by and large don't deliver well except to a small subset of the students. But the students who don't 'get' it from the professor network ie. approach other students who just understand better what other students might be missing.
And networking with fellow students is actually hard to do remotely especially since you're deprived of really meeting different people
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That'a bold set of asertions. Citation please.
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As a result, we will end up with three tiers of higher education
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I'm curious, what do you think of the inverted model of students watching video lectures on their own and coming together for discussion and working problems (as opposed to traditional in-person lectures and homework on their own)? It seems promising to me, but not something I have any direct experience with.
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One obstacle: as a population, students hate flipped classrooms with a white-hot passion. The student reviews for these classes have always been brutal, even for a teacher that's been trained in the method and has tried it several times. Some students love it, but 70% of the class feels cheated. Basi
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Learning Experience Design is often neglected (Score:2)
General conclusions such as this generally don't age well. Considering we've only had online learning for a little over 2 decades (compared to over a couple of millennia in what we know today as pedagogy and andragogy), I'd say it's too early to tell.
As an online learning professional with nearly two decades' combined work in instructional design and learning experience design, I've found that the most effective
From the no-shit-sherlock department (Score:1)
Pandemic improvisation (Score:2)
Clearly the quickly cobbled together pandemic response called "remote learning" doesn't compare to seriously planned remote learning programs that have had years to learn.
To compare a 1 year improvised experiment with 150 years of in-person class experience is just not a fair comparison.
To do this correctly one would need to compare a well established online program with well established in person programs.
The pandemic was not that.
Only 150 years? ;) (Score:2)
Universities have been teaching person since their foundation...
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This one, might care to disagree with you https://www.open.ac.uk/ [open.ac.uk].
I wish I could find the citation, but more British MD/CEOs have MBAs from The Open University than any other.
Humbug (Score:2)
Their foundation as a class of institutions, not specific instances... nice try though.
And, of course, the Open University model does indeed offer a prototype for what can be done remotely. A lot of those who charged into remote learning when the pandemic hit would have done well to have looked at the lessons the OU can offer.
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Even if you look at the best models for online education (and there are several).
You can't hope to implement it effectively in just a couple of months. As any organizational process it takes time and experience to do this right.
And if you have 1000 universities improvising at the same time the results are going to be less than ideal.
Therefore it's hard to make good conclusions based on pandemic experiences in terms of the utility of online learning.
At best, the professors broadened their horizons a bit and
if the Numbers at UW -Whitewater are to beleved (Score:2)
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Snow Days (Score:3)
When I was in college, you could tell who was paying their own way vs. getting a free ride by who got excited for snow days.
Covid is like a snow day that won't end.
Small wonder (Score:2)
It sucks even more than their on-site education.
Problem I haven't seen mentioned (Score:3)
My teenage son, pre-COVID, took in-person classes very successfully at a local community college, as well as online classes from a number of other institutions, also very successfully.
When mandatory "remote learning" was instituted, he had the misfortune of drawing a "professor" who gave confusing and ambiguous assignments and deadlines, and not only did not teach, but also chose to not be reachable by (a) e-mail, (b) phone/voice mail, (c) in person, or (d) any other means we could discern. Other college staff was only barely more accessible, and unable and/or unwilling to help.
In addition, the course material appeared to be a 201 level, but advertised as 101, and required some prerequisites our son had not taken, nor known about in advance. As far as we could tell, the mistake was also the professor's, but since we could not reach him, there was no way to correct it.
The only recourse we were given by the college, which was given weeks after we requested it, was that he could either drop the class, without any refund, or get a failing grade for somehow not managing to read this professor's mind. Further, the drop would show on his record at this point, a situation better than getting a failing grade, but far worse than if he could have been given timely and correct information from his professor, so that he could actually succeed in the course.
He spent weeks of 18 hour days, as did my wife plus as much of my time outside of work as I could give, trying vainly to catch up him with our best guess as to what would be required, with no assurance that it would even help, and no feedback from the professor nor anyone else at the college as to whether he was on the right track, or even where to go online to take the tests, etc.
It burned him out to the point where it took him the better part of a year to recover, to the point of making more than the bare-minimum-necessary effort to get by academically.
So we dropped, and he is no longer attending, and we have no intention to have him go back again, except in-person, when/if that becomes an option.
Admittedly this is a data point of one, and one that is hopefully not representative, but his budding college career as an extremely gifted adolescent was abruptly paused because of a "professor" who chose to use remote learning as an opportunity simply not to teach.
Learning how to socialize is not the only goal. (Score:2)
Research on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning.
That's great, but learning how to socialize has never been the primary focus of academia. It sounds like society needs some restructuring as the acquisition of knowledge and learning how to socialize are two separate goals that don't entirely overlap. Learning how to socialize is important, but trying to teach these concepts in an indirect manor only creates an arbitrary dividing line that excludes neurodivergent individuals from participating in both of these goals.
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I see no reason why you can't have both or a hybrid of them. We're all different, so there is no singular solution that will optimally meet everyone's needs, wants, and desires.
Charging too much for remote (Score:2)
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Your party is the one of anti intellectuals.
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