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Not too surprising that the experience wasn’t good. Having taught in-person and online before, I can guarantee that these students ended up with a sub-optimal e

by hysan 6y ago

Not too surprising that the experience wasn’t good. Having taught in-person and online before, I can guarantee that these students ended up with a sub-optimal experience at best. Teaching online is drastically different than in-person and is not something you can easily pick-up in short notice. Made worse is that they were in the middle of a syllabus designed for in-person instruction. How material is delivered, what type of assignments to give, how to even grade those assignments, etc. - all of that needs to be tailored to an online environment in order to have a good experience. You can’t just “adapt” it like driving on the opposite side of the road. And this is also ignoring tooling needed to make the online experience productive. I believe the colleges when they say that their professors are doing their best. That they are delivering the same high level material. However, that is willfully ignoring the fact that content is a very small part of the college education experience. The delivery, environment, and people are what gives college its value. Lose that and the cost, especially for these high ranking colleges, is not worth it.

0d9eooo 6y ago
I've not taught online, but I have a close colleague who was doing it for years pre-pandemic, and another colleague who did a bit of it and my impressions are the same. My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured. It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you, while you're uprooted like a minor refugee and living who knows where that you didn't plan to. Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. This is especially true that universities will be prepared this fall, and were not in late winter/early spring. My sense is that a lot of the schadenfreude and resentment here on HN and elsewhere is due to a general sense that something is really very wrong with higher education at the moment, at least in the US, and wanting to see it radically reformed. I agree, but I think the problems are not really related to the value of in-person degree education vs what you can get online. The real issues have to do with the cost of the education in general, how degrees are viewed in vocational settings, and costs and spending within higher educational institutions. Until those things change, it will take a lot more than SARS-CoV-2 to change things.
- hysan 6y ago
  I know Columbia, way back when I attended, had some classes with the lectures online that way. However, your response is showing a lack of understanding of what I mean by teaching online is different. If you go with the heavily edited lecture video style, that is likely not done real time. Instead, it becomes a watch offline experience in which case my gut reaction would be to flip the classroom. If the instructor wasn’t already using that technique, they would likely have to redo their entire syllabus and teaching style.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  Its not so much that anything is wrong with college, it is that the cost isn't commiserate with the expected payout (for most). Yet we, as a society, push people who are barely adults into a lifetime of debt slavery like sheep to the slaughter.
  - softawre 6y ago
    This is definitely changing now. It was like this when I went to college 15 years ago but the tides are changing.
    - peterwoerner 6y ago
      I hope that is true. I graduated from undergraduate 10 years ago. My alma mater used to be very good bang for your buck, arguably the best traditional engineering and nursing school in the state, less than 5000 a year, accept almost everyone and fail the ones who won't make it early so they can do other things. But pressure from the state government shifted funding to retention rates so that model of education was dying.
  - pwthornton 6y ago
    The expected payout for the average bachelors is huge over a high school diploma. The gap is widening.
    - pochamago 6y ago
Mirioron 6y ago
Are universities prepared for something like this though? Do they have some kind of pandemic insurance that will cover the costs of the entire student body if the government shuts the university down? Because I can see that being a very costly insurance.
- throwawayoverhe 6y ago
  They have endowments. The colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use those endowments to hedge exactly this sort of risk. There were a lot of articles over the past few years about various teeny tiny colleges investing their entire endowment in funds and yelling from the rooftops that they out-performed Harvard's endowment. The bill is going to come due. Over the next two years, a lot of small colleges that were investing for annual returns instead of for ensuring institutional survival are going to collapse under the quadruple whammy of refunds, lawsuits, decreased enrollment, and decimated endowment.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    >> They have endowments. A small minority of colleges have endowments worth discussing.
  - thomaslord 6y ago
    The best way to treat an endowment is like a retirement fund, except the goal is for the institution to never die and therefore to never exhaust the endowment. If the endowment is invested and makes gains, the institution can grow the endowment (which is necessary for it not to be devalued by inflation over time) and also spend some of the returns. While I wouldn't argue leaving endowments completely untouched in this situation is necessary, I think saying that "the colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use these endowments to hedge exactly this rot of risk" and criticizing them for investing their endowments is a dramatic oversimplification of the situation.
  - ksml 6y ago
    In addition to the other replies to this comment, I'd add that the value of endowments has shrunk significantly due to collapses in economic markets.
fluidcruft 6y ago
What resources did you find helpful for learning about teaching online?
- hysan 6y ago
  Sorry, I don't have specific resources to point to although I guess I could eventually take the time to do a write-up. I used to be an in-person instructor at a development bootcamp (also taught prior to this). While there, I was also trained on how to do instruction online for the rare instances where it had to happen. This is where I learned most of it. I'm also an avid educational content watcher, so I've seen and tried to learn from the best educational content creators over the past decade or so. I've also followed the EdTech space, as a hobby, since before the MOOC acronym even came into existence. Combine all of that with tangentially related hobbies like: * watching and reading about game design and how to incorporate it into traditional learning styles, * listening to how podcasts and online content is created/delivered, and that's where I learned about teaching online effectively. I wish I could continue working in this space, but well... that's a story for another time.
- 3minus1 6y ago
  The best online class I ever took had this thing called "muddy buddies." Basically each week we were required to post questions about something we "didn't understand" from the assigned reading, and your assigned muddy buddy is supposed to answer. The genius thing about it is I would be reading the textbook and trying to find something I "didn't understand," but I didn't want to post a question that was too easy. So any potentially confusing part of the reading I would think about more closely until it was no longer confusing. Basically I was motivated to read everything closely because I was trying to find something that was actually hard to understand.
deevolution 6y ago
Online class is suitable for a range of courses, but not all. Specifically lab classes where equipment is required. You can't have a remote lab class, it's impossible. Students should absolutely be reimbursed for such cases.
noetic_techy 6y ago
Do you think this could be alleviated with something like VR? Even cheap VR with just your phone in a VR headset holder. To me, it feels like a technical problem. Staring at a small screen in a browser window vs being immersed. Even being able to "see" your classmates or an avatar for them might help.

by hysan 6y ago

0d9eooo 6y ago

I've not taught online, but I have a close colleague who was doing it for years pre-pandemic, and another colleague who did a bit of it and my impressions are the same. My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured. It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you, while you're uprooted like a minor refugee and living who knows where that you didn't plan to. Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. This is especially true that universities will be prepared this fall, and were not in late winter/early spring. My sense is that a lot of the schadenfreude and resentment here on HN and elsewhere is due to a general sense that something is really very wrong with higher education at the moment, at least in the US, and wanting to see it radically reformed. I agree, but I think the problems are not really related to the value of in-person degree education vs what you can get online. The real issues have to do with the cost of the education in general, how degrees are viewed in vocational settings, and costs and spending within higher educational institutions. Until those things change, it will take a lot more than SARS-CoV-2 to change things.

hysan 6y ago
I know Columbia, way back when I attended, had some classes with the lectures online that way. However, your response is showing a lack of understanding of what I mean by teaching online is different. If you go with the heavily edited lecture video style, that is likely not done real time. Instead, it becomes a watch offline experience in which case my gut reaction would be to flip the classroom. If the instructor wasn’t already using that technique, they would likely have to redo their entire syllabus and teaching style.
peterwoerner 6y ago
Its not so much that anything is wrong with college, it is that the cost isn't commiserate with the expected payout (for most). Yet we, as a society, push people who are barely adults into a lifetime of debt slavery like sheep to the slaughter.
- softawre 6y ago
  This is definitely changing now. It was like this when I went to college 15 years ago but the tides are changing.
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    I hope that is true. I graduated from undergraduate 10 years ago. My alma mater used to be very good bang for your buck, arguably the best traditional engineering and nursing school in the state, less than 5000 a year, accept almost everyone and fail the ones who won't make it early so they can do other things. But pressure from the state government shifted funding to retention rates so that model of education was dying.
- pwthornton 6y ago
  The expected payout for the average bachelors is huge over a high school diploma. The gap is widening.
  - pochamago 6y ago

Mirioron 6y ago

Are universities prepared for something like this though? Do they have some kind of pandemic insurance that will cover the costs of the entire student body if the government shuts the university down? Because I can see that being a very costly insurance.

throwawayoverhe 6y ago
They have endowments. The colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use those endowments to hedge exactly this sort of risk. There were a lot of articles over the past few years about various teeny tiny colleges investing their entire endowment in funds and yelling from the rooftops that they out-performed Harvard's endowment. The bill is going to come due. Over the next two years, a lot of small colleges that were investing for annual returns instead of for ensuring institutional survival are going to collapse under the quadruple whammy of refunds, lawsuits, decreased enrollment, and decimated endowment.
- icelancer 6y ago
  >> They have endowments. A small minority of colleges have endowments worth discussing.
- thomaslord 6y ago
  The best way to treat an endowment is like a retirement fund, except the goal is for the institution to never die and therefore to never exhaust the endowment. If the endowment is invested and makes gains, the institution can grow the endowment (which is necessary for it not to be devalued by inflation over time) and also spend some of the returns. While I wouldn't argue leaving endowments completely untouched in this situation is necessary, I think saying that "the colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use these endowments to hedge exactly this rot of risk" and criticizing them for investing their endowments is a dramatic oversimplification of the situation.
- ksml 6y ago
  In addition to the other replies to this comment, I'd add that the value of endowments has shrunk significantly due to collapses in economic markets.

fluidcruft 6y ago

What resources did you find helpful for learning about teaching online?

hysan 6y ago
Sorry, I don't have specific resources to point to although I guess I could eventually take the time to do a write-up. I used to be an in-person instructor at a development bootcamp (also taught prior to this). While there, I was also trained on how to do instruction online for the rare instances where it had to happen. This is where I learned most of it. I'm also an avid educational content watcher, so I've seen and tried to learn from the best educational content creators over the past decade or so. I've also followed the EdTech space, as a hobby, since before the MOOC acronym even came into existence. Combine all of that with tangentially related hobbies like: * watching and reading about game design and how to incorporate it into traditional learning styles, * listening to how podcasts and online content is created/delivered, and that's where I learned about teaching online effectively. I wish I could continue working in this space, but well... that's a story for another time.
3minus1 6y ago
The best online class I ever took had this thing called "muddy buddies." Basically each week we were required to post questions about something we "didn't understand" from the assigned reading, and your assigned muddy buddy is supposed to answer. The genius thing about it is I would be reading the textbook and trying to find something I "didn't understand," but I didn't want to post a question that was too easy. So any potentially confusing part of the reading I would think about more closely until it was no longer confusing. Basically I was motivated to read everything closely because I was trying to find something that was actually hard to understand.

deevolution 6y ago

Online class is suitable for a range of courses, but not all. Specifically lab classes where equipment is required. You can't have a remote lab class, it's impossible. Students should absolutely be reimbursed for such cases.

noetic_techy 6y ago

Do you think this could be alleviated with something like VR? Even cheap VR with just your phone in a VR headset holder. To me, it feels like a technical problem. Staring at a small screen in a browser window vs being immersed. Even being able to "see" your classmates or an avatar for them might help.