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>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't w

by basch 7y ago

>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too." tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.

DataDaoDe 7y ago
I've spent a fair amount of time and energy working and researching in this area. I'd agree with most of what you are saying. To point #1 I worked on a project that had almost the exact same design you mention (collaborate, git versioned edits of learning modules, etc.) - the biggest problem is the mounds and mounds of red tape and regulation that stifle any truly innovative solution. There are some movements for high school materials that are tackling parts of the problem (see: https://www.ck12.org/student/ https://www.ck12.org/student/, https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/), but it definitely needs to be on a much larger and national scale and extended to universities. I think, most all undergraduate courses could be done this way. If someone with enough leverage could ever push it through it would virtually completely remove textbook, materials, and lecture costs from the system and if done right, provide a treasure store of knowledge. To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out. Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.
- basch 7y ago
  with regard to 2, thats why i used the word flip. i dont think my 1 or 2 are that unique, a lot of it is dreaming of a khan+git+wikipedia. with regard to 3, i think the larger question is, is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc.
  - DataDaoDe 7y ago
    > is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc. I don't know if finding ways to expand someone's network and connections necessarily means we have to create elite clubs - having networks is vital to success in any way, especially in a system based on merit. So maybe I was one step ahead of what you were saying. I read it as more along the lines of given the entire set of X people in our education systems, how do we ensure a system that is fair and allows for the maximal human flourishing of each individual member while taking into account our psychology and the negative externalities / side-effects of emergent system dynamics. (Of course this last point, is something we sorely need in many fields - not just education).
- elliekelly 7y ago
  Could you describe some of the regulations you found burdensome? I work in regulatory compliance (in an unrelated field) and I’m wholly unfamiliar with the requirements for education. A few months ago I saw a Lambda School tweet with a giant stack of regulatory filings and I’ve been wondering ever since why I don’t hear much about higher ed compliance. It isn’t one of the areas that immediately comes to mind when I think of “highly regulated industries” (banking, insurance, healthcare, etc) but perhaps it should be.
mywittyname 7y ago
I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for freshman-level courses. I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Could you supply some examples? I know of Western Governors University, but it only has limited majors. In particular, do you know of any online degree programs in materials science?
  - N1H1L 7y ago
    Not really. There is an online MS in Computers Science from Georgia Tech, that's really well regarded and will cost you approximately $8,000 for the whole degree. A lot of materials science is highly experimental, so it's not super easy to teach advanced skills. I went to a top 10 materials science school for my PhD, and the absolute vast majority of what I learnt was self-taught. However there is a caveat - I self-learnt by doing, and failing multiple times. The advantage of a high ranked school is that the research facilities are top notch and professors bring in external grants, so the research facilities are always maintained at a high standard through overhead costs.
    - ska 7y ago
      There is also a lot of value in the conversations you have with other students and faculty something that is really hard to reproduce remotely. It's also something where quality matters, I suspect.
Retric 7y ago
Collage is not expensive due to lectures because they don’t actually cost that much. Let’s say your average class size is 20 people at a good school and a professor costs the school 200k including benefits per year. Assuming a student takes 18 credit hours and a teacher teaches 12 credit hours that balances out to ~15k per year. But, more than 2/3 of what a teacher spends their time on is outside the lecture such as grading assignments etc. So, removing lectures only saves ~5k per year. Sure the physical room adds a little, but the average teacher is also far less expensive at most schools.
- basch 7y ago
  I am not saying the lecture itself is expensive. I am saying the artificial scarcity of everything around higher education keeps people from receiving a certified education that is recognized by the employment marketplace, when at least for undergrad classes, the lecture and the textbook is largely what you need to receive a functioning education.
  - Retric 7y ago
    I think the number of people graduating with a collage degree significantly outstrips the demand for collage degrees. Otherwise you would not see people with collage degrees working retail etc.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      For some degrees. I don't see many CS degrees working retail. I don't see many EE degrees doing so.
      - Retric 7y ago
        It’s a fair point, but colleges also adjust program sizes based on what students chose to study. Just compare CS graduates in 1990 and how fast that grew and shrunk over time.
        7y ago
Yhippa 7y ago
> Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.
- basch 7y ago
  And part of the problem with asking "what's the best lecture on x" is that the replies often come from people who have seen one prestigious lecture, and recommend the one they are familiar with. Popularity breeds popularity. There's a much smaller sample of people who sat through 20-30 of the same lecture series, for the same course, from different professors, and know which parts are the best from which person.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls. But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking. I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me. --- † College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.
- lowbloodsugar 7y ago
  OTOH, being able to hit rewind is invaluable. Or hitting rewind, googling a bit, and then continuing. My first online course was Andrew Ngs when he at Stanford, and being able to rewind and google whatever he just said was fantastic. It also meant I could play it at 1.5x speed for the bits I had no trouble with. If we wanted to make it better to support interactive questions, one could imagine an online system with videos plus "Push now for live help". Or facetime your peers.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  I was just about to post something similar. I attended a large state U and I got the most out of smaller lectures/discussions than the large classes with 300 students. FWIW, only the most introductory classes had large head counts. Everything 200 level and above was somewhere between 20-50 students (and most had an associated discussion with 10-15 students, usually led by a grad student, but sometimes the professor). That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.

by basch 7y ago

DataDaoDe 7y ago

I've spent a fair amount of time and energy working and researching in this area. I'd agree with most of what you are saying. To point #1 I worked on a project that had almost the exact same design you mention (collaborate, git versioned edits of learning modules, etc.) - the biggest problem is the mounds and mounds of red tape and regulation that stifle any truly innovative solution. There are some movements for high school materials that are tackling parts of the problem (see: https://www.ck12.org/student/ https://www.ck12.org/student/, https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/), but it definitely needs to be on a much larger and national scale and extended to universities. I think, most all undergraduate courses could be done this way. If someone with enough leverage could ever push it through it would virtually completely remove textbook, materials, and lecture costs from the system and if done right, provide a treasure store of knowledge. To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out. Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.

basch 7y ago
with regard to 2, thats why i used the word flip. i dont think my 1 or 2 are that unique, a lot of it is dreaming of a khan+git+wikipedia. with regard to 3, i think the larger question is, is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc.
- DataDaoDe 7y ago
  > is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc. I don't know if finding ways to expand someone's network and connections necessarily means we have to create elite clubs - having networks is vital to success in any way, especially in a system based on merit. So maybe I was one step ahead of what you were saying. I read it as more along the lines of given the entire set of X people in our education systems, how do we ensure a system that is fair and allows for the maximal human flourishing of each individual member while taking into account our psychology and the negative externalities / side-effects of emergent system dynamics. (Of course this last point, is something we sorely need in many fields - not just education).
elliekelly 7y ago
Could you describe some of the regulations you found burdensome? I work in regulatory compliance (in an unrelated field) and I’m wholly unfamiliar with the requirements for education. A few months ago I saw a Lambda School tweet with a giant stack of regulatory filings and I’ve been wondering ever since why I don’t hear much about higher ed compliance. It isn’t one of the areas that immediately comes to mind when I think of “highly regulated industries” (banking, insurance, healthcare, etc) but perhaps it should be.

mywittyname 7y ago

I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for freshman-level courses. I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Could you supply some examples? I know of Western Governors University, but it only has limited majors. In particular, do you know of any online degree programs in materials science?
- N1H1L 7y ago
  Not really. There is an online MS in Computers Science from Georgia Tech, that's really well regarded and will cost you approximately $8,000 for the whole degree. A lot of materials science is highly experimental, so it's not super easy to teach advanced skills. I went to a top 10 materials science school for my PhD, and the absolute vast majority of what I learnt was self-taught. However there is a caveat - I self-learnt by doing, and failing multiple times. The advantage of a high ranked school is that the research facilities are top notch and professors bring in external grants, so the research facilities are always maintained at a high standard through overhead costs.
  - ska 7y ago
    There is also a lot of value in the conversations you have with other students and faculty something that is really hard to reproduce remotely. It's also something where quality matters, I suspect.

Retric 7y ago

Collage is not expensive due to lectures because they don’t actually cost that much. Let’s say your average class size is 20 people at a good school and a professor costs the school 200k including benefits per year. Assuming a student takes 18 credit hours and a teacher teaches 12 credit hours that balances out to ~15k per year. But, more than 2/3 of what a teacher spends their time on is outside the lecture such as grading assignments etc. So, removing lectures only saves ~5k per year. Sure the physical room adds a little, but the average teacher is also far less expensive at most schools.

basch 7y ago
I am not saying the lecture itself is expensive. I am saying the artificial scarcity of everything around higher education keeps people from receiving a certified education that is recognized by the employment marketplace, when at least for undergrad classes, the lecture and the textbook is largely what you need to receive a functioning education.
- Retric 7y ago
  I think the number of people graduating with a collage degree significantly outstrips the demand for collage degrees. Otherwise you would not see people with collage degrees working retail etc.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    For some degrees. I don't see many CS degrees working retail. I don't see many EE degrees doing so.
    - Retric 7y ago
      It’s a fair point, but colleges also adjust program sizes based on what students chose to study. Just compare CS graduates in 1990 and how fast that grew and shrunk over time.
      - 7y ago

Yhippa 7y ago

> Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.

basch 7y ago
And part of the problem with asking "what's the best lecture on x" is that the replies often come from people who have seen one prestigious lecture, and recommend the one they are familiar with. Popularity breeds popularity. There's a much smaller sample of people who sat through 20-30 of the same lecture series, for the same course, from different professors, and know which parts are the best from which person.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> Charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls. But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking. I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me. --- † College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.

lowbloodsugar 7y ago
OTOH, being able to hit rewind is invaluable. Or hitting rewind, googling a bit, and then continuing. My first online course was Andrew Ngs when he at Stanford, and being able to rewind and google whatever he just said was fantastic. It also meant I could play it at 1.5x speed for the bits I had no trouble with. If we wanted to make it better to support interactive questions, one could imagine an online system with videos plus "Push now for live help". Or facetime your peers.
alistairSH 7y ago
I was just about to post something similar. I attended a large state U and I got the most out of smaller lectures/discussions than the large classes with 300 students. FWIW, only the most introductory classes had large head counts. Everything 200 level and above was somewhere between 20-50 students (and most had an associated discussion with 10-15 students, usually led by a grad student, but sometimes the professor). That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.