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Why shouldn't it be? For most of my college career, I was taught in a non-interactive lecture (from 15 to 300 students at a time). Sometimes the lectures were
by ja27 16y ago
Why shouldn't it be?
For most of my college career, I was taught in a non-interactive lecture (from 15 to 300 students at a time). Sometimes the lectures were even being recorded or simulcast to remote locations. The lecturer often had no idea who I was. In graduate school, I got a good look at the "sausage factory" of how many core computer science class lectures are really developed. Unless it's an area of research and publication for the professor, they do a minimal amount of work on their lecture notes and exams. In some cases, the same professor taught the same subject year after year. Sometimes this resulted in progressively better notes, but sometimes not. In other cases, the class rotated among professors. They often took each other's lecture notes and used them with varying degrees of revision. Only when a course was a true passion of the professor was the lecture anything much more than what could be gleaned from a couple of textbooks on the topic.
Beyond the lectures, most of the labs and assignments were handled by grad student teaching assistants. I also got to see many of my friends go through the TA machine in grad school. The rare lucky ones got to TA a course related to their research, but most TAs were assigned to courses where they only knew as much as they'd learned in their own undergrad experience in that course. A few TAs would scramble to get up to speed. The smart ones would do the bare minimum for the course and focus on their research.
Then there are the textbooks. I look at the dead tree debris that on my bookshelves from my nearly dozen years of higher education and very few books contain anything beyond what's on Wikipedia today.
I can look back at a topic like "operating systems" and cringe. This was a undergraduate course that rotated amongst professors. At the time I took it, I'd already been on a dozen operating systems including VMS, NeXTStep and Dynix, played with Minix code, read Bach and Tanenbaum, etc. The PhD student assigned to teach my class had an undergrad in linguistics. I believe he'd never even logged into any unix system, much less had an operating systems course himself. He even dropped out late in the semester and disappeared. I damn near asked for a refund, but I took my grade and moved on.
There's no reason that a few passionate people on the web couldn't top that.
- pjscott 16y agoMy operating systems class devoted a whole lecture to how OSes deal with tape drives. Meanwhile, I don't think we covered networking. This was three years ago, and the course material was essentially unchanged from the 1970s. When it comes to computers, the internet has been better than most undergraduate programs for a while now. And it's only getting better.
- joegaudet 16y agoWhat school did you go to? We did piles on networking, dcom, everything in the OSI stack actually. (I went to a canadian university, UNB). While I agree undergrad uni isn't going to be on the cutting edge, I think that learning the basics, and the ideas behind why decisions are/were made is extremely valuable. In short, you can't move forward without learning where you've been.
- ja27 16y agoI've always thought computer science could be taught in the opposite order. Instead of starting with "Pascal/Java 101" and finishing with CPU design / architecture, what if you started at the hardware and worked up to high level languages? That's actually more of the course I followed, but only by chance.
- rick_2047 16y agoThe problem with this is that not everyone will be able to handle Machine level things in the beginning. Even in the best universities students will be intimidated if there first programming class would be in assembly. They barely get by on lisp
- fleitz 16y agoThe key is starting where people are interested. If they are interested in web, start with HTML/JS. If they want to make blinky lights, start with low level hardware. Once they know how to do something and are still interested they will move on to other areas. Thats the crux of why the web will deliver better education because they will follow their own path. Education is only meaningful and relevant if it enables a person to do what they want to do and could not before. Arguably, the issue is that the educational system is trending towards becoming more standardized where as society is trending towards becoming more individual and specialized.
- rbanffy 16y agoComputer Science is closer to a branch of Math, it's relation to physical computers is a historical accident. I believe you are talking about a branch of Engineering. I followed more like this, but I had programming in the first semester - probably because we were supposed to be able to use the machines we were being trained to design... I'm not a computer scientist and I seldom think like one, but I am an engineer - and I think like one all the time.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoAgreed. One of the best aspects of sites like HN and Progit are that over the years I've been able to figure out which CS/Software Engineering books are the really good ones. From SICP to Date's database books, if you take the time to do that you can give yourself a foundation of knowledge as good or better than probably 90% of the schools out there.
- ScotterC 16y agoI feel the complete opposite for my courses in mechanical engineering. The teachers really worked at it and I still use the text books to this day. It wasn't all about the lectures themselves but how they taught us to think which has become invaluable. For me college wasn't about the courses, but the curriculum which was really the value added experience. Something like computer science may be learned strictly from reading but this isn't universal. Gates argument is course specific.
- mitjak 16y agoI like to daydream about a scenario like yours, but by and large it's an exception to the rule, and one that is even most frustrating in light of high education costs.
- jseliger 16y agoIt really depends on where you go and what you do. At most big public schools, I suspect the "TAs do everything / uninterested faculty" is the norm, chiefly because the faculty are rewarded for research, not teaching. If you go to liberal arts colleges (I went to Clark University: http://www.clarku.edu http://www.clarku.edu) and engineering schools like Harvey Mudd, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, etc., then undergrads are the focus, professors are rewarded for teaching, and you're more likely to have a better and in-depth experience.
- ja27 16y agoYes, I should have made that clear. Almost all of my academic career was at large research schools. A number of my fellow grad students instead went on to smaller schools where they are fairly happy teaching more and researching / publishing less. Without very many (or any) grad students to be TAs, they end up covering all the bases on their classes. In smaller departments, they tend to own all their classes year after year rather than rotating. The classes are also smaller, which helps tremendously. At one point, I actually took a differential equations class at a junior college. We had 5 students. It was a great setting in an unexpected place.
- dagw 16y agoExcept Mr Gates said "the best education", and what you describe is far from the best. I don't doubt that the web can give an experience better than many bad to mediocre university eduction experiences. However I'm very skeptical that the Web can compete with the best. The interaction between teacher and students necessary for that would be hard to simulate (or stimulate) without placing everybody in the same room.
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- WalterBright 16y agoIn my college experience, I did the most learning when working my way through the problem sets with my fellow students. It would have been an awful lot harder without that (and a lot less fun). One would have to be fairly motivated to succeed alone in a room watching a video over the internet.