4 ms·

As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to incre

by gibolt 6y ago

As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to increase access. Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only. Tools are being built and the experience will improve thanks to this global reset. Education is a space that hasn't really been disrupted ever. Definitely isn't happening within a few weeks.

swiley 6y ago
Why was this downvoted? I failed a class and took the online version once so I got to see both sides. The online version had: 1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?) 2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it. 3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now. 4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.) The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.
- watwut 6y ago
  It was downvoted, because many people here want in person classes to be useless waste of time. They don't want to hear they are better then online. That is mostly due to high price of price of us college. But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common. What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.
  - sfj 6y ago
    I think that if just the classes were live, no/few exceptions, and the student to teacher ratio was kept low, that would be a big step.
- geomark 6y ago
  Did you say that you took an online class once? And based on that one experience you have seen both sides? Just askin'
- gbrown 6y ago
  Surely you realize that this is not a universal experience...
- grumple 6y ago
  Online courses I've taken have been much better than in-person courses. Online courses have several advantages: 1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added. 2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses). 3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material. 4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures. 5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class. 6) You learn at your own rate. Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.
  - swiley 6y ago
    That doesn’t sound like an undergrad online course. Universities could make courses with all of those features but IME and looking at what my friends have seen in theirs they don’t. I’m not sure if it’s an institutional requirement or if it’s because they know they can get away without it and don’t bother.
    - hollandheese 6y ago
      Most of that is because those are hard requirements to fulfill for most professors. Video production is pretty difficult to do well. The university I teach for basically offered no help in that realm in our transition. They basically just told us we had to transition to online in two days, gave us some bullcrap professional development on how to use Canvas, and then fed us to the wolves. Make sure to blame the university, not the professors. We're trying our best with almost no help.
intended 6y ago
Education has been disrupted. The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying. Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while. The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal. Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education. Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content. Yet We know that with this world class information and self selected motivated students (!!) only a tiny fraction of the class will finish. In contrast, most people who get in, finish college. In person education beats online education hollow. Matter of fact even the work from home enthusiasm will wane and return to office work. There are too many things people do by being in proximity to each other which may have nothing to do with the “mission”, but make the mission possible.
- jimhefferon 6y ago
  I went from lurking on HN to joining during the "MOOC rush" exactly because people did not seem to get that for the broad student population, online is nowhere near as useful as in person. While there are some percentage of people who have the motivation and skills to get out of online systems everything they would get out of in-class, the percentage is small. For example, when I am teaching a class, it is a dynamic process. I am responding to people's questions, they are responding to my response, etc. Most of that goes away online. There are some attempts to recreate it, but most students just do not find it is the same. You put your finger on it exactly: "most people who get in, finish." But that doesn't address the article. I am not a lawyer, but the suit seems foolish to me. Colleges were ordered to close. That seems relevant to me.
  - intended 6y ago
    Yes, this doesn't address the article. Conversations here usually shift from the article to some variant of "disrupt education" and college is signalling. I find Bloom's 2 Sigma problem to be illustrative of the extent to which online learning is a loss to students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem Studying in person has significantly different results. The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
gbrown 6y ago
> Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person Generally, professors are not trained to teach at all. They’re trained to research. That being said, I was already teaching a hybrid online and in person course, so the transition was (at least from my perspective) pretty seamless. We’ll see how the students feel after we receive evaluations.
newsclues 6y ago
Professors don’t get much training on how to educate. Schools could run a month long course, aimed at online learning, to match their current IRL teaching training

by gibolt 6y ago

swiley 6y ago

Why was this downvoted? I failed a class and took the online version once so I got to see both sides. The online version had: 1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?) 2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it. 3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now. 4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.) The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.

watwut 6y ago
It was downvoted, because many people here want in person classes to be useless waste of time. They don't want to hear they are better then online. That is mostly due to high price of price of us college. But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common. What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.
- sfj 6y ago
  I think that if just the classes were live, no/few exceptions, and the student to teacher ratio was kept low, that would be a big step.
geomark 6y ago
Did you say that you took an online class once? And based on that one experience you have seen both sides? Just askin'
gbrown 6y ago
Surely you realize that this is not a universal experience...
grumple 6y ago
Online courses I've taken have been much better than in-person courses. Online courses have several advantages: 1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added. 2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses). 3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material. 4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures. 5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class. 6) You learn at your own rate. Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.
- swiley 6y ago
  That doesn’t sound like an undergrad online course. Universities could make courses with all of those features but IME and looking at what my friends have seen in theirs they don’t. I’m not sure if it’s an institutional requirement or if it’s because they know they can get away without it and don’t bother.
  - hollandheese 6y ago
    Most of that is because those are hard requirements to fulfill for most professors. Video production is pretty difficult to do well. The university I teach for basically offered no help in that realm in our transition. They basically just told us we had to transition to online in two days, gave us some bullcrap professional development on how to use Canvas, and then fed us to the wolves. Make sure to blame the university, not the professors. We're trying our best with almost no help.

intended 6y ago

Education has been disrupted. The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying. Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while. The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal. Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education. Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content. Yet We know that with this world class information and self selected motivated students (!!) only a tiny fraction of the class will finish. In contrast, most people who get in, finish college. In person education beats online education hollow. Matter of fact even the work from home enthusiasm will wane and return to office work. There are too many things people do by being in proximity to each other which may have nothing to do with the “mission”, but make the mission possible.

jimhefferon 6y ago
I went from lurking on HN to joining during the "MOOC rush" exactly because people did not seem to get that for the broad student population, online is nowhere near as useful as in person. While there are some percentage of people who have the motivation and skills to get out of online systems everything they would get out of in-class, the percentage is small. For example, when I am teaching a class, it is a dynamic process. I am responding to people's questions, they are responding to my response, etc. Most of that goes away online. There are some attempts to recreate it, but most students just do not find it is the same. You put your finger on it exactly: "most people who get in, finish." But that doesn't address the article. I am not a lawyer, but the suit seems foolish to me. Colleges were ordered to close. That seems relevant to me.
- intended 6y ago
  Yes, this doesn't address the article. Conversations here usually shift from the article to some variant of "disrupt education" and college is signalling. I find Bloom's 2 Sigma problem to be illustrative of the extent to which online learning is a loss to students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem Studying in person has significantly different results. The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.

gbrown 6y ago

> Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person Generally, professors are not trained to teach at all. They’re trained to research. That being said, I was already teaching a hybrid online and in person course, so the transition was (at least from my perspective) pretty seamless. We’ll see how the students feel after we receive evaluations.

newsclues 6y ago

Professors don’t get much training on how to educate. Schools could run a month long course, aimed at online learning, to match their current IRL teaching training