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The author's comment on access to a mediocre/unknown university instructor for a high fee vs free access to a very good set of lectures (Khan) is one of the dou

The author's comment on access to a mediocre/unknown university instructor for a high fee vs free access to a very good set of lectures (Khan) is one of the doubts that led me to quit my job as a college instructor. I had kind of the existential "what are we doing here?" question -- why are students coming here and paying us money when better instruction is available for free online? Combined with a couple of education futurists predicting the imminent demise of in-person college (to be replaced by canned lectures from the best speakers and an army of automated or mechanical-turk graders), I decided to be first out rather than forced out and quit. That was five years ago and the landscape hasn't changed much. The school I taught at, a community college issued associate's degrees in computer programming, is still going strong largely as it was back then. I still don't have an answer to my question, though: why are students paying for that?

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Because it gives them a piece of paper that some people care about. That is, compared to learning more but not having the paper, it improves the odds on them being hired. How do we fix that? We need somebody to become credentialed (or some institution that already is credentialed) as an institution of higher learning, that will curate a list of online classes (not necessarily their own), provide some way of grading those classes (online testing), and issue a diploma that is recognized by the offline world.
noonespecial 10y ago
People are still paying because the sheep-skin still opens doors that Kahn doesn't. Until that reality (or perception) changes its still the way to go. Note that the author had a degree (and a fairly prestigious one at that), it just happened not to be a CS degree.
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  Don't confuse accreditation with education. John Bear wrote a few books about the subject that I highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bear
YZF 10y ago
There's a big difference between having an instructor and learning things from a book or video lectures. An instructor can correct your mistakes and give you feedback. A book or a video can't do that. Some people presumably don't have a right kind of discipline to study on their own. This is why remote study programs can be a lot more difficult to complete vs. on-site programs. EDIT: There's a known effect, discussed in the Coursera "Learning How to Learn" course, where you read through the material/watch a video and think that you've actually mastered or learnt it while in fact you have not. If you're aware of this and test your knowledge you can fix that but it's another reason why a structured program with an instructor can have an advantage...
- hackerboos 10y ago
  The Open University in the UK has a dropout rate of 87% [1] I'd imagine that's even higher for online courses. I can only speak for myself but I would not have been self-disciplined enough to complete the courses that I did during my undergraduate CS degree. The added bonus was the degree allowed me to emigrate fairly easily. [1] - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-university-ou-needs-to-make-it-personal#survey-answer https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-univer...
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - yarper 10y ago
    Wow! I did not know the dropout rate was so high for the OU
  - FLGMwt 10y ago
    If the dropout rate is 87% with 100,000 enrollees, but if a university is 90% with 5,000 enrollees, the Open University still wins. And then you take into account the number of people who enroll for OU who enrolled because of the lower barrier to entry vs their level of commitment.
  - dorfsmay 10y ago
    As an OU graduate (late 90s), my first thought was that a lot of people just try the OU, others just like to take some classes without sticking to a program and with no intention of getting a degree... > the cost for an equivalent course for a resident of England is £2,786 The OU used to be about giving a chance to education to everybody. This is sad...
deleted 10y ago
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bdamm 10y ago
Meeting a new and somewhat like-minded group of peers is an element of college that I could not have attained with online coursework. Also, I personally can not stomach day after day, year after year, of staring at a monitor with talking heads. I just can't do it. Computers are great, but they are only one element of a learning environment.
overcast 10y ago
Because the majority of people in this world, are not the type to proactively self learn things on their own. They require structure, teachers, and environments to force them into learning, and then being told what to do. Hacker News is a very small slice of proactive individuals, who are what I would consider the exact opposite. A lot of us are constantly trying new things, building new applications, doing whatever to progress. Most of the people that fall into this category, were probably ALREADY programmers, and went to school just to have the special piece of paper. But would do very well without it regardless. While everyone else is completely content, with going to an office, being told what to do, doing it, coming home, and not doing anything related to computers / software until 830am the next morning. These people went to school to learn to be programmers, so they could get a job, and get paid. That's it. It's a completely different mentality, and that is why formal education exists. It's the difference between a job, and a passion. I don't learn very well sitting in a class, and listening to someone yap. I prefer jumping into something, and learning as I go. One project, building upon another.
- bobbington 10y ago
  I was shocked when I went to college about how crazily obsessed the school was about "getting a job". Nobody ever talked about the amazing things we were going to be able to do with the knowledge we learned! I dropped out when I started making enough money in my own programming deal, and am glad I got out of that hellhole where u work like a dog and get treated like one too. I'd rather get paid to do work (my company) vs pay to do it (school) I was also shocked when I met somebody who was just happy to go to work... This is why my kids will be homeschooled. School is more about daycare and prepping people to be good employees than real learning. There is a reason why Elon musk started a new, different school without grades for his kids
- mtreis86 10y ago
  "I got up at 4am to be here working on my passions" vs "I'll get to the office when I am supposed to, to do the work they tell me to do"
austenallred 10y ago
I have been teaching a free live code bootcamp on YouTube over the past couple of days (https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp). I've noticed a couple things: 1. People get stuck. A lot. Especially in the beginning. Perhaps the biggest difficulty of learning on your own is the "I'm stuck" problem. I learned by hassling people in IRC, but man they were saints and I feel bad for constantly bothering them with my stupid questions. We use Slack to connect the students, and it's a constant flow of people getting stuck and getting help (about 4,000 people in there now). 2. Credentials and requirements have been drilled into students' mind far past a rational level. I probably get asked 20x/day if we offer a certificate for graduates. I eventually started saying "yes" because so many people would be shaken up if I said "no." I can create a certificate and put your name on it, sure. It's not worth anything, but it's almost a compulsive need people have now. Along those lines I probably get asked 20x a day if something is "required." I don't understand the mentality of joining a free code bootcamp and asking if something is required, but maybe that's just me. 3. Material isn't the hard part anymore. I'm sure there are better teachers than us out there, but I'm convinced the number of people who can learn that way are a small fraction of the population. Most people aren't motivated and/or disciplined enough to go through that on their own. I personally dropped out of college, but if I think back to my Shakespeare class, for example, would I have worked that hard if I were self-educating? Even though I think a lot of the assignments were relatively worthless, there is something about the forcing function of deadlines, social pressure, and working at the same time as peers that really does a lot for human psychology. I can't imagine the other students in any of my classes working that hard to learn anything on their own. I look at the completion rates of MOOCs and other online programs, and it's tiny. Sure, you might say, some people are just sampling, but I would guess than this doesn't tell the whole story. There's something that's missing from the "here's a book teach yourself" method for most people. My personal thesis for a high-quality, low-cost education for the masses includes material, but material isn't the point. The point is incentivizing people to do things they normally wouldn't do by "forcing" them to do so somehow.
- mdpopescu 10y ago
  I agree with all your points. I can't help but wonder though: is it a GOOD idea to force people to do something that ultimately helps them, instead of letting them filter out? That is, is it better for society to have two layers, successful self-made people and unsuccessful people who were incapable of improving without being forced? Or is it better to force the second type to learn something, at the expense of this degree inflation? I haven't decided for myself, and in fact am struggling with this as the parent of two under-achieving daughters :)
jotux 10y ago
The actual education part of a university is really a small part of what students leave with. What you're really getting is a network of professors (with ties to employers) and other students that become your friends. Once everyone leaves the university you now have a large network of people that can vouch for your technical knowledge and personality. What you don't get with an online education is the proximity to other students and professors that facilitate strong relationships.
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  you also dont get a peice of paper at the end that employers give a shit about.
- sdflkd 10y ago
  Getting employment opportunities through professors (outside of research) doesn't really apply where I am from.
- luck_fenovo 10y ago
  Well I feel cheated, as an introvert that never stayed in touch with anyone from college and who went into a wildly divergent field from my major. I didn't experience either of the major benefits you're touting; the education was everything. I still think it was worth it, but I absolutely think it could have been done better and cheaper online.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    I also didn't get any networking opportunities through professors, and not a lot through friends. I think my undergrad degree was worth it just as a signal to employers, but I would gladly trade back my graduate education and the right to say I ever attended in return for cancelling all the student loans I (stupidly) took out to fund it.
  - megablast 10y ago
    You know how they tell you, you get out of it what you put into it. You didn't put anything into it.
lutorm 10y ago
I can think of a few reasons. First, because personalized instruction and discussion makes a big difference in actually gaining real understanding. Second, because most people won't push themselves as hard on their own. Third, because having someone with personal knowledge of you and your capabilities means something, especially with online things when cheating is trivial.
mikekchar 10y ago
I spent 5 years teaching English as a foreign language in a Japanese high school. In Japan, the school system is keen to hire foreigners who are fluent in English because they recognise that their students lack fluency. They think the problem lies in the instructor. However, the teachers at the school I taught in were almost all very accomplished English speakers. Yes, they had an accent. Yes, they made mistakes. But they were all fluent and proficient to a very high level. One of the things I asked the teachers was, "How did you get to be fluent in English?" As I expected, not one replied that they became fluent at school. Then I asked, "Where did you learn most of your English?" Again, not one replied that they learned most of their English at school. In reality, it is impossible to learn English in a classroom. The subject is too big. There are about 1500 common grammar rules in the language, so it is common to ask the students to memorise that grammar. It's achievable in 3-5 years. But you won't get fluency. Neither will you get proficiency with the 20,000 word families that you need to achieve adult level proficiency. In the end you get students who can tell you what a subjunctive clause is (well, they can tell you in Japanese, anyway), but who can't order a drink at MacDonald's. This is not really a failure of the system because while we can teach fluency, you still won't get students who are proficient to any degree at the end of 3-5 years of classroom study. There just aren't enough hours. The students do not have enough desire or even need to learn the language. Only those who study independently will learn English.... and they would have learned English anyway. Or would they? At the end of my tenure, I decided to change tracks. Luckily I was given free reign at my school. Instead of teaching English, per se, I taught my students how to learn English on their own. For a 50 minute class I kept my instruction time down to 5 minutes (which was hellishly difficult, I can tell you). The rest of the class was a series of explorations in things like, "If I don't know, how can I find out?", "How do I read a book to get information out of it?", "How do a read a book for pleasure?", "How do I watch TV and understand what's going on?", "How can I improve my pronunciation without paying someone to train me?", etc, etc. My hope was not that my students could speak English at the end of the class. That was impossible. My hope was that my students would feel, "I can learn English if I want to. I know how to do it." It's now about 5 years since I left teaching and many of my students can speak English very well. Several of them got jobs where speaking English was the key component of their job. I like to think that my classes helped them out, but of course the reality is that the thousands of hours they put in after my course is what taught them English. I hope I was able to nudge them into a place where those thousands of hours were possible for them.
fizixer 10y ago
Automated homework/exam creation and cheat-proof (or cheat-resistant) grading needs to catch up. In my opinion, it is making progress but isn't quite there yet. Once that is done, it's over!
- fizixer 10y ago
  Correction: not just grading but testing as well. (cheat-resistant testing and grading).
neurocroc 10y ago
I am quite excited about my project that I have been working on. Do you think presenting all the knowledge of the world in this visual way (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map) can be of benefit?
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
>Combined with a couple of education futurists predicting the imminent demise of in-person college (to be replaced by canned lectures from the best speakers and an army of automated or mechanical-turk graders), I decided to be first out rather than forced out and quit. How do you get students in fields without easy lab set ups to get lab experience? CompSci/Software? We can build entire networks with a single script that were managed by dozens of people 10-20 years ago. We have millions of programs and scripts available to us freely through public code hosting providers. Structure Engineering and Architecture could conceivably simulate a lot of things. Chemistry? Doing this at home without people qualified for safety is a recipe for disaster. Same for microbiology, medicine, nursing, and psychiatry. Also for many trade skills. You can study a lot, but the practical, hands-on knowledge is essential because it is muscle memory or social practice too. Colleges could become hubs of hands-on and bespoke learning and trip-taking lectures while the classroom material and tests are sourced elsewhere. I would be completely fine with that evolution because you are right -- there's certain reasons I go into work, but it's not because I can only do my work at my workplace.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
The error you make in your reasoning is that all learning is equivalent for all students. This is clearly not the case given the various surveys of the effectiveness of MOOCs, Universities, and 'trade' schools. I think it is great that the author was able to make this work for their learning style and their goals. Some people require the 'deadline' aspects of turning in assignments getting graded. Others learn best by exploring a topic and experimenting with it to test its limits and to test their understanding. Still more learn best by working with an expert and watching their work and asking questions to understand their process. None of these are 'best' or 'worst' or even moderately comparable. It can help a person to be more successful if they can identify what environment is most effective for them to learn something and then optimizing around creating that environment. So to answer your question, the teacher/lecture/lab/homework environment works well for some learners. They can readily exchange money for additional knowledge which they can then turn into more money by applying it to a job.
foota 10y ago
As someone who's in school now, I feel one of the advantages of being in a physical class is that lectures are interactive. There are also the motivational advantages mentioned other places. There also also advantages to being surrounded by people that are also learning new things, you can study together, help each other, and encourage each other. To be frank, it's also probably in part a social thing.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Although my understanding is that, at a number of large schools that routinely video their big lectures, a lot of students just watch the videos. My recollection of 100+ person lectures is that the interaction was pretty limited. The other points you make are certainly true. Whether or not you attend the lectures in person you're still in an overall environment that can help learning.
  - foota 10y ago
    This is true, class sizes at some schools are just ridiculous. I attend a smaller state school, it's a great environment. Largest CS class I've had after the intro was 30-40 people.
bobbington 10y ago
You were probably a great teacher!
rezashirazian 10y ago
A college degree, in my opinion, has little to do with the degree or the technical material you learn. the value of attending college and completing a four-year degree at an accredited university comes from the environment you're ingrained in for that time. The people you meet, the conversations you have and experiences you expose yourself supersedes the raw material in the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, the stuff in the textbox are important but I think you get your real value from the experiences and the relationships you make with your peers and instructors. Is it worth going into debt? I'm not sure, I'm Canadian and was able to get a CS degree for 50K (Not that crippling of a debt). For me, it was worth the time and money.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  the value of attending college and completing a four-year degree at an accredited university comes from the environment you're ingrained in for that time. The people you meet, the conversations you have and experiences you expose yourself supersedes the raw material in the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, the stuff in the textbox are important but I think you get your real value from the experiences and the relationships you make with your peers and instructors. This is an extremely romanticised view of university, IMO. Maybe you went to a particularly good one. I studied computer science. My experience was nothing like that at all. The vast majority of the people I met had no real interest or passion about the subject. They took no interest in anything outside of the course work, and certainly weren't up for any interesting discussions about our field. The motivations seemed to be purely financial - jump through these hoops and get a job. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just hope people considering attending university consider that their experience may match mine. You may walk into a lecture full of shy people, who have divided themselves along ethnic lines, who are not interested in the subject, or stimulating discussion, or being friends, or anything outside their grades. The lecturer will pick up on it and be appropriately unmotivated. YMMV, but for me it was literally just getting a piece of paper that stopped recruiters and HR deleting my CV. I learned far more chatting in IRC than I did in my courses. I'm 3 years out from university and no longer speak to anyone I met there.
  - rezashirazian 10y ago
awesomepantsm 10y ago
>when better instruction is available for free online? Have you watched khan academy videos? Or online lectures in general? 90% of it is complete garbage. You can listen to Sal repeat every sentence 5 times if you really want to, but are you actually learning?
2_listerine_pls 10y ago
It's fairly obvious: The experience, meeting people, etc...
segmondy 10y ago
For every one student who is very driven and motivated to self-study, there are 99 who are not and need the coercion of a teacher and threat of a bad grade to study.
- mdpopescu 10y ago
  See my other comment - is it a good idea to force them to get a degree? Doesn't it make the degree worthless? Instead of signalling "this person was able to learn something important" it says "this person has been forced to spend X years in a place where he was bored to death". (I think there was an Army joke saying something like "private X is able to work when cornered and closely supervised", or something like that.)
discombobulate 10y ago
A degree is mostly signalling. See Michael Spence's work (if you really want to understand why).
jboggan 10y ago
Because the current post-secondary education system is for social filtering and conferring status, not teaching anything in particular.
jacquesm 10y ago
I suspect that to have structure in your life imposed is a big factor in that. I know some very clever people that could not learn even the simplest things on their own with a book or a network connection. But put them in a classroom and they shine.
digitalzombie 10y ago
> why are students coming here and paying us money when better instruction is available for free online I'm paying for it. Cause I can get government assisted loans and go full time. Also I get classmates that I can study together. The environment of school, at least to me, enable to me to study and concentrate instead at home distracted. Also I network with tons of people and all but one of my professors is my friend now. I have connection, hook up, network, etc... In fact I getting an internship through one of them working with the gov. I could study online and continue as a programmer. But I rather go full time. Also paying for a university via online degree I feel cheated. I want to see my professor face to face during office hours and ask for help and such.
zerr 10y ago
In many cases mediocrity is assigned because of the lack of "pedigree". But if the student cares more about the actual learning and content rather than elite badge, it makes sense to come to such universities.
zamalek 10y ago
Ultimately its for a piece of paper that opens doors. It may not be a job, it could be a visa. That being said, after my incomplete stint at college I came away entirely unimpressed. The model for teaching medicine (for example) is completely unsuitable for CS - yet that is how it is done. Tertiary CS could really use a renaissance.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> why are students paying for that? Because it's a LOT better than online courses are at the moment. I've used Coursera/iTunes U/Udemy etc. a lot since they came out and only ever finished a couple of things. Motivation is a big issue. Also very little of the knowledge I gained through it has stuck because it is not very engaging. I recently started University (mature student) and the things I'm learning stick much easier as you are constantly forced to pair with people to debate problems and work as teams to answer questions. This repetition and group debate is invaluable. Despite participating on the forums when doing online courses they don't come close. Previously, as a self-taught programmer I couldn't see the value in 90% of university courses and thought they were going to start struggling thanks to MOOC's. Now, as a student, I can see that they do offer quite a lot of value (by value I mean increasing my knowledge, not salary after degree). They are certainly very inefficient, but I would certainly consider my program value for money (although I am a student in the UK so fees are lower than a lot of places).
- garysieling 10y ago
  It sounds like my experience with school is similar to yours - I also felt that being self-taught it was helpful to have a program of courses, to round out deficiencies in my own knowledge. Among the things you can get for free online, I think conference talks can be a better value for the time than some of the online classes. They are more self-contained, so you don't have to worry about finishing an entire course, and generally more focused on real-world use cases. I've also found that browsing at random, and watching things that sound interesting works well for increasing what I remember. I'm currently building a search engine around this idea- https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology&type1=Conference https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology&type1=Co...
s_dev 10y ago
>"what are we doing here?" Assessment. A university standard of assessment is better than anyones standard of self assessment.
- digler999 10y ago
  Generally yes. My gripes in assessment were mainly with science classes that asked subtly different questions on exams than what was covered in class, and english/humanities teachers who had broad reign to judge your performance based on whether you found some highly subjective moral or nugget of wisdom in the literature material. Both cases to me felt more like Three Card Monte [1] than a straightforward "Here's some information, learn it, we'll test you on it." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte
zengid 10y ago
I'm going back for a masters in IT. For me: Job fairs, Internships, and the 'stamp of approval' that a degree translates to for hiring managers. Basically its a way to get my foot in the door. Also If I weren't getting a spouse-discount I probably would do the Khan academy thing.
tastythrowaway2 10y ago
People are paying for that because employers are demanding it. Sure a few are begrudgingly realizing that an alma mater is irrelevant pedigree (the fact they can pay qualified people less without a degree surely helps), but the lion's share still filter for those with undergraduate degrees or higher. I have no idea how to change this, although personally I have two degrees and believe I would be orders of magnitude better at my profession had I simply worked on my own for the duration of my studies.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

Because it gives them a piece of paper that some people care about. That is, compared to learning more but not having the paper, it improves the odds on them being hired. How do we fix that? We need somebody to become credentialed (or some institution that already is credentialed) as an institution of higher learning, that will curate a list of online classes (not necessarily their own), provide some way of grading those classes (online testing), and issue a diploma that is recognized by the offline world.

noonespecial 10y ago

People are still paying because the sheep-skin still opens doors that Kahn doesn't. Until that reality (or perception) changes its still the way to go. Note that the author had a degree (and a fairly prestigious one at that), it just happened not to be a CS degree.

dorfsmay 10y ago
Don't confuse accreditation with education. John Bear wrote a few books about the subject that I highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bear

YZF 10y ago

There's a big difference between having an instructor and learning things from a book or video lectures. An instructor can correct your mistakes and give you feedback. A book or a video can't do that. Some people presumably don't have a right kind of discipline to study on their own. This is why remote study programs can be a lot more difficult to complete vs. on-site programs. EDIT: There's a known effect, discussed in the Coursera "Learning How to Learn" course, where you read through the material/watch a video and think that you've actually mastered or learnt it while in fact you have not. If you're aware of this and test your knowledge you can fix that but it's another reason why a structured program with an instructor can have an advantage...

hackerboos 10y ago
The Open University in the UK has a dropout rate of 87% [1] I'd imagine that's even higher for online courses. I can only speak for myself but I would not have been self-disciplined enough to complete the courses that I did during my undergraduate CS degree. The added bonus was the degree allowed me to emigrate fairly easily. [1] - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-university-ou-needs-to-make-it-personal#survey-answer https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-univer...
- deleted 10y ago
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- yarper 10y ago
  Wow! I did not know the dropout rate was so high for the OU
- FLGMwt 10y ago
  If the dropout rate is 87% with 100,000 enrollees, but if a university is 90% with 5,000 enrollees, the Open University still wins. And then you take into account the number of people who enroll for OU who enrolled because of the lower barrier to entry vs their level of commitment.
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  As an OU graduate (late 90s), my first thought was that a lot of people just try the OU, others just like to take some classes without sticking to a program and with no intention of getting a degree... > the cost for an equivalent course for a resident of England is £2,786 The OU used to be about giving a chance to education to everybody. This is sad...

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bdamm 10y ago

Meeting a new and somewhat like-minded group of peers is an element of college that I could not have attained with online coursework. Also, I personally can not stomach day after day, year after year, of staring at a monitor with talking heads. I just can't do it. Computers are great, but they are only one element of a learning environment.

overcast 10y ago

Because the majority of people in this world, are not the type to proactively self learn things on their own. They require structure, teachers, and environments to force them into learning, and then being told what to do. Hacker News is a very small slice of proactive individuals, who are what I would consider the exact opposite. A lot of us are constantly trying new things, building new applications, doing whatever to progress. Most of the people that fall into this category, were probably ALREADY programmers, and went to school just to have the special piece of paper. But would do very well without it regardless. While everyone else is completely content, with going to an office, being told what to do, doing it, coming home, and not doing anything related to computers / software until 830am the next morning. These people went to school to learn to be programmers, so they could get a job, and get paid. That's it. It's a completely different mentality, and that is why formal education exists. It's the difference between a job, and a passion. I don't learn very well sitting in a class, and listening to someone yap. I prefer jumping into something, and learning as I go. One project, building upon another.

bobbington 10y ago
I was shocked when I went to college about how crazily obsessed the school was about "getting a job". Nobody ever talked about the amazing things we were going to be able to do with the knowledge we learned! I dropped out when I started making enough money in my own programming deal, and am glad I got out of that hellhole where u work like a dog and get treated like one too. I'd rather get paid to do work (my company) vs pay to do it (school) I was also shocked when I met somebody who was just happy to go to work... This is why my kids will be homeschooled. School is more about daycare and prepping people to be good employees than real learning. There is a reason why Elon musk started a new, different school without grades for his kids
mtreis86 10y ago
"I got up at 4am to be here working on my passions" vs "I'll get to the office when I am supposed to, to do the work they tell me to do"

austenallred 10y ago

I have been teaching a free live code bootcamp on YouTube over the past couple of days (https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp). I've noticed a couple things: 1. People get stuck. A lot. Especially in the beginning. Perhaps the biggest difficulty of learning on your own is the "I'm stuck" problem. I learned by hassling people in IRC, but man they were saints and I feel bad for constantly bothering them with my stupid questions. We use Slack to connect the students, and it's a constant flow of people getting stuck and getting help (about 4,000 people in there now). 2. Credentials and requirements have been drilled into students' mind far past a rational level. I probably get asked 20x/day if we offer a certificate for graduates. I eventually started saying "yes" because so many people would be shaken up if I said "no." I can create a certificate and put your name on it, sure. It's not worth anything, but it's almost a compulsive need people have now. Along those lines I probably get asked 20x a day if something is "required." I don't understand the mentality of joining a free code bootcamp and asking if something is required, but maybe that's just me. 3. Material isn't the hard part anymore. I'm sure there are better teachers than us out there, but I'm convinced the number of people who can learn that way are a small fraction of the population. Most people aren't motivated and/or disciplined enough to go through that on their own. I personally dropped out of college, but if I think back to my Shakespeare class, for example, would I have worked that hard if I were self-educating? Even though I think a lot of the assignments were relatively worthless, there is something about the forcing function of deadlines, social pressure, and working at the same time as peers that really does a lot for human psychology. I can't imagine the other students in any of my classes working that hard to learn anything on their own. I look at the completion rates of MOOCs and other online programs, and it's tiny. Sure, you might say, some people are just sampling, but I would guess than this doesn't tell the whole story. There's something that's missing from the "here's a book teach yourself" method for most people. My personal thesis for a high-quality, low-cost education for the masses includes material, but material isn't the point. The point is incentivizing people to do things they normally wouldn't do by "forcing" them to do so somehow.

mdpopescu 10y ago
I agree with all your points. I can't help but wonder though: is it a GOOD idea to force people to do something that ultimately helps them, instead of letting them filter out? That is, is it better for society to have two layers, successful self-made people and unsuccessful people who were incapable of improving without being forced? Or is it better to force the second type to learn something, at the expense of this degree inflation? I haven't decided for myself, and in fact am struggling with this as the parent of two under-achieving daughters :)

jotux 10y ago

The actual education part of a university is really a small part of what students leave with. What you're really getting is a network of professors (with ties to employers) and other students that become your friends. Once everyone leaves the university you now have a large network of people that can vouch for your technical knowledge and personality. What you don't get with an online education is the proximity to other students and professors that facilitate strong relationships.

throwaway2048 10y ago
you also dont get a peice of paper at the end that employers give a shit about.
sdflkd 10y ago
Getting employment opportunities through professors (outside of research) doesn't really apply where I am from.
luck_fenovo 10y ago
Well I feel cheated, as an introvert that never stayed in touch with anyone from college and who went into a wildly divergent field from my major. I didn't experience either of the major benefits you're touting; the education was everything. I still think it was worth it, but I absolutely think it could have been done better and cheaper online.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  I also didn't get any networking opportunities through professors, and not a lot through friends. I think my undergrad degree was worth it just as a signal to employers, but I would gladly trade back my graduate education and the right to say I ever attended in return for cancelling all the student loans I (stupidly) took out to fund it.
- megablast 10y ago
  You know how they tell you, you get out of it what you put into it. You didn't put anything into it.

lutorm 10y ago

I can think of a few reasons. First, because personalized instruction and discussion makes a big difference in actually gaining real understanding. Second, because most people won't push themselves as hard on their own. Third, because having someone with personal knowledge of you and your capabilities means something, especially with online things when cheating is trivial.

mikekchar 10y ago

I spent 5 years teaching English as a foreign language in a Japanese high school. In Japan, the school system is keen to hire foreigners who are fluent in English because they recognise that their students lack fluency. They think the problem lies in the instructor. However, the teachers at the school I taught in were almost all very accomplished English speakers. Yes, they had an accent. Yes, they made mistakes. But they were all fluent and proficient to a very high level. One of the things I asked the teachers was, "How did you get to be fluent in English?" As I expected, not one replied that they became fluent at school. Then I asked, "Where did you learn most of your English?" Again, not one replied that they learned most of their English at school. In reality, it is impossible to learn English in a classroom. The subject is too big. There are about 1500 common grammar rules in the language, so it is common to ask the students to memorise that grammar. It's achievable in 3-5 years. But you won't get fluency. Neither will you get proficiency with the 20,000 word families that you need to achieve adult level proficiency. In the end you get students who can tell you what a subjunctive clause is (well, they can tell you in Japanese, anyway), but who can't order a drink at MacDonald's. This is not really a failure of the system because while we can teach fluency, you still won't get students who are proficient to any degree at the end of 3-5 years of classroom study. There just aren't enough hours. The students do not have enough desire or even need to learn the language. Only those who study independently will learn English.... and they would have learned English anyway. Or would they? At the end of my tenure, I decided to change tracks. Luckily I was given free reign at my school. Instead of teaching English, per se, I taught my students how to learn English on their own. For a 50 minute class I kept my instruction time down to 5 minutes (which was hellishly difficult, I can tell you). The rest of the class was a series of explorations in things like, "If I don't know, how can I find out?", "How do I read a book to get information out of it?", "How do a read a book for pleasure?", "How do I watch TV and understand what's going on?", "How can I improve my pronunciation without paying someone to train me?", etc, etc. My hope was not that my students could speak English at the end of the class. That was impossible. My hope was that my students would feel, "I can learn English if I want to. I know how to do it." It's now about 5 years since I left teaching and many of my students can speak English very well. Several of them got jobs where speaking English was the key component of their job. I like to think that my classes helped them out, but of course the reality is that the thousands of hours they put in after my course is what taught them English. I hope I was able to nudge them into a place where those thousands of hours were possible for them.

fizixer 10y ago

Automated homework/exam creation and cheat-proof (or cheat-resistant) grading needs to catch up. In my opinion, it is making progress but isn't quite there yet. Once that is done, it's over!

fizixer 10y ago
Correction: not just grading but testing as well. (cheat-resistant testing and grading).

neurocroc 10y ago

I am quite excited about my project that I have been working on. Do you think presenting all the knowledge of the world in this visual way (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map) can be of benefit?

FLUX-YOU 10y ago

>Combined with a couple of education futurists predicting the imminent demise of in-person college (to be replaced by canned lectures from the best speakers and an army of automated or mechanical-turk graders), I decided to be first out rather than forced out and quit. How do you get students in fields without easy lab set ups to get lab experience? CompSci/Software? We can build entire networks with a single script that were managed by dozens of people 10-20 years ago. We have millions of programs and scripts available to us freely through public code hosting providers. Structure Engineering and Architecture could conceivably simulate a lot of things. Chemistry? Doing this at home without people qualified for safety is a recipe for disaster. Same for microbiology, medicine, nursing, and psychiatry. Also for many trade skills. You can study a lot, but the practical, hands-on knowledge is essential because it is muscle memory or social practice too. Colleges could become hubs of hands-on and bespoke learning and trip-taking lectures while the classroom material and tests are sourced elsewhere. I would be completely fine with that evolution because you are right -- there's certain reasons I go into work, but it's not because I can only do my work at my workplace.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

The error you make in your reasoning is that all learning is equivalent for all students. This is clearly not the case given the various surveys of the effectiveness of MOOCs, Universities, and 'trade' schools. I think it is great that the author was able to make this work for their learning style and their goals. Some people require the 'deadline' aspects of turning in assignments getting graded. Others learn best by exploring a topic and experimenting with it to test its limits and to test their understanding. Still more learn best by working with an expert and watching their work and asking questions to understand their process. None of these are 'best' or 'worst' or even moderately comparable. It can help a person to be more successful if they can identify what environment is most effective for them to learn something and then optimizing around creating that environment. So to answer your question, the teacher/lecture/lab/homework environment works well for some learners. They can readily exchange money for additional knowledge which they can then turn into more money by applying it to a job.

foota 10y ago

As someone who's in school now, I feel one of the advantages of being in a physical class is that lectures are interactive. There are also the motivational advantages mentioned other places. There also also advantages to being surrounded by people that are also learning new things, you can study together, help each other, and encourage each other. To be frank, it's also probably in part a social thing.

ghaff 10y ago
Although my understanding is that, at a number of large schools that routinely video their big lectures, a lot of students just watch the videos. My recollection of 100+ person lectures is that the interaction was pretty limited. The other points you make are certainly true. Whether or not you attend the lectures in person you're still in an overall environment that can help learning.
- foota 10y ago
  This is true, class sizes at some schools are just ridiculous. I attend a smaller state school, it's a great environment. Largest CS class I've had after the intro was 30-40 people.

bobbington 10y ago

You were probably a great teacher!

rezashirazian 10y ago

A college degree, in my opinion, has little to do with the degree or the technical material you learn. the value of attending college and completing a four-year degree at an accredited university comes from the environment you're ingrained in for that time. The people you meet, the conversations you have and experiences you expose yourself supersedes the raw material in the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, the stuff in the textbox are important but I think you get your real value from the experiences and the relationships you make with your peers and instructors. Is it worth going into debt? I'm not sure, I'm Canadian and was able to get a CS degree for 50K (Not that crippling of a debt). For me, it was worth the time and money.

lacampbell 10y ago
the value of attending college and completing a four-year degree at an accredited university comes from the environment you're ingrained in for that time. The people you meet, the conversations you have and experiences you expose yourself supersedes the raw material in the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, the stuff in the textbox are important but I think you get your real value from the experiences and the relationships you make with your peers and instructors. This is an extremely romanticised view of university, IMO. Maybe you went to a particularly good one. I studied computer science. My experience was nothing like that at all. The vast majority of the people I met had no real interest or passion about the subject. They took no interest in anything outside of the course work, and certainly weren't up for any interesting discussions about our field. The motivations seemed to be purely financial - jump through these hoops and get a job. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just hope people considering attending university consider that their experience may match mine. You may walk into a lecture full of shy people, who have divided themselves along ethnic lines, who are not interested in the subject, or stimulating discussion, or being friends, or anything outside their grades. The lecturer will pick up on it and be appropriately unmotivated. YMMV, but for me it was literally just getting a piece of paper that stopped recruiters and HR deleting my CV. I learned far more chatting in IRC than I did in my courses. I'm 3 years out from university and no longer speak to anyone I met there.
- rezashirazian 10y ago

awesomepantsm 10y ago

>when better instruction is available for free online? Have you watched khan academy videos? Or online lectures in general? 90% of it is complete garbage. You can listen to Sal repeat every sentence 5 times if you really want to, but are you actually learning?

2_listerine_pls 10y ago

It's fairly obvious: The experience, meeting people, etc...

segmondy 10y ago

For every one student who is very driven and motivated to self-study, there are 99 who are not and need the coercion of a teacher and threat of a bad grade to study.

mdpopescu 10y ago
See my other comment - is it a good idea to force them to get a degree? Doesn't it make the degree worthless? Instead of signalling "this person was able to learn something important" it says "this person has been forced to spend X years in a place where he was bored to death". (I think there was an Army joke saying something like "private X is able to work when cornered and closely supervised", or something like that.)

discombobulate 10y ago

A degree is mostly signalling. See Michael Spence's work (if you really want to understand why).

jboggan 10y ago

Because the current post-secondary education system is for social filtering and conferring status, not teaching anything in particular.

jacquesm 10y ago

I suspect that to have structure in your life imposed is a big factor in that. I know some very clever people that could not learn even the simplest things on their own with a book or a network connection. But put them in a classroom and they shine.

digitalzombie 10y ago

> why are students coming here and paying us money when better instruction is available for free online I'm paying for it. Cause I can get government assisted loans and go full time. Also I get classmates that I can study together. The environment of school, at least to me, enable to me to study and concentrate instead at home distracted. Also I network with tons of people and all but one of my professors is my friend now. I have connection, hook up, network, etc... In fact I getting an internship through one of them working with the gov. I could study online and continue as a programmer. But I rather go full time. Also paying for a university via online degree I feel cheated. I want to see my professor face to face during office hours and ask for help and such.

zerr 10y ago

In many cases mediocrity is assigned because of the lack of "pedigree". But if the student cares more about the actual learning and content rather than elite badge, it makes sense to come to such universities.

zamalek 10y ago

Ultimately its for a piece of paper that opens doors. It may not be a job, it could be a visa. That being said, after my incomplete stint at college I came away entirely unimpressed. The model for teaching medicine (for example) is completely unsuitable for CS - yet that is how it is done. Tertiary CS could really use a renaissance.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

>> why are students paying for that? Because it's a LOT better than online courses are at the moment. I've used Coursera/iTunes U/Udemy etc. a lot since they came out and only ever finished a couple of things. Motivation is a big issue. Also very little of the knowledge I gained through it has stuck because it is not very engaging. I recently started University (mature student) and the things I'm learning stick much easier as you are constantly forced to pair with people to debate problems and work as teams to answer questions. This repetition and group debate is invaluable. Despite participating on the forums when doing online courses they don't come close. Previously, as a self-taught programmer I couldn't see the value in 90% of university courses and thought they were going to start struggling thanks to MOOC's. Now, as a student, I can see that they do offer quite a lot of value (by value I mean increasing my knowledge, not salary after degree). They are certainly very inefficient, but I would certainly consider my program value for money (although I am a student in the UK so fees are lower than a lot of places).

garysieling 10y ago
It sounds like my experience with school is similar to yours - I also felt that being self-taught it was helpful to have a program of courses, to round out deficiencies in my own knowledge. Among the things you can get for free online, I think conference talks can be a better value for the time than some of the online classes. They are more self-contained, so you don't have to worry about finishing an entire course, and generally more focused on real-world use cases. I've also found that browsing at random, and watching things that sound interesting works well for increasing what I remember. I'm currently building a search engine around this idea- https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology&type1=Conference https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology&type1=Co...

s_dev 10y ago

>"what are we doing here?" Assessment. A university standard of assessment is better than anyones standard of self assessment.

digler999 10y ago
Generally yes. My gripes in assessment were mainly with science classes that asked subtly different questions on exams than what was covered in class, and english/humanities teachers who had broad reign to judge your performance based on whether you found some highly subjective moral or nugget of wisdom in the literature material. Both cases to me felt more like Three Card Monte [1] than a straightforward "Here's some information, learn it, we'll test you on it." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte

zengid 10y ago

I'm going back for a masters in IT. For me: Job fairs, Internships, and the 'stamp of approval' that a degree translates to for hiring managers. Basically its a way to get my foot in the door. Also If I weren't getting a spouse-discount I probably would do the Khan academy thing.

tastythrowaway2 10y ago

People are paying for that because employers are demanding it. Sure a few are begrudgingly realizing that an alma mater is irrelevant pedigree (the fact they can pay qualified people less without a degree surely helps), but the lion's share still filter for those with undergraduate degrees or higher. I have no idea how to change this, although personally I have two degrees and believe I would be orders of magnitude better at my profession had I simply worked on my own for the duration of my studies.