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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 t

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
    This stat is pretty much always just a direct comparison between grads, right? I wonder how different it would be if you took into account confounders like economic class. I assume much of the widening is college becoming standard, and therefore the only people who don't attend are those who either can't and are disadvantaged in general or those who don't feel particularly ambitious about their career
saagarjha 6y ago
> 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. For some large classes in certain universities, yes. In the rest it's a regular professor giving a live lecture who is now doing it over Zoom. > Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. Students aren't the only people on campus.
- MengerSponge 6y ago
  When someone says "The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students" they mean this: "There will be more openings than usual for tenure-track jobs in a year"
  - Animats 6y ago
    Er, yes. The CDC is now predicting 100,000 US deaths for June.[1] The trend is upward. [1] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6926-mayhhsbriefing/af7319f4a55fd0ce5dc9/optimized/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6926-mayhhsbriefing/...
0az 6y ago
One of my classes (mandatory writing GenEd) had an online version, so we get the videos from last quarter, and Zoom discussion sections. So no, we're getting lectures over Zoom at the UCs, at least. If my group of friends had the inclination to talk about serious school stuff, and not literally anything else that keeps our minds off of the state of the world, I could ask people about the situation from anywhere from Rice to Stanford to Princeton. But we don't talk about this, because it's heavy, and if we can shrug that burden off for the time we have together, then that's enough. [0] Going to back to UCSD in particular, the Chancellor's name is particularly acrimonious in connotation. A couple days ago, I wrote a post here on the state of UCSD's much touted dining [1]. Spoiler: it's not pretty. If you look at the privately shared memes, there's a lot of negative sentiment. [0] Last night's OST: https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4 https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  n.b. your phone corrected `id` to `I'd` in your link.
ksml 6y ago
I'm at Stanford, and at least within the CS department, the online classes are nothing like you describe. Some professors are using video recordings from previous quarters, while in many other cases, it _is_ some off-the-cuff Zoom meeting. As a lecturer, it's been difficult to transition. I have my doubts that students will be back in the fall. The contagiousness of this virus is not going away, and students (particularly undergraduates, almost all of which live in dorms at Stanford) are far too densely connected for social distancing to be effective.
gregnbanks 6y ago
Hey 0d9eooo, with respect you have no idea what's actually happening. My wife attends one of the colleges mentioned in TFA, and at that college everything that you imagine cannot be the case, is actually the case. > major universities doing online stuff have video production crews Yes, but those crews don't have the bandwidth to suddenly help every professor transition to online teaching in the space of two weeks. Also, the online versions of courses which those professionally produced videos are part of, are priced lower than the in-person courses which are currently being taught on Zoom. However at my wife’s college the price has not come down, no partial refunds are being given, no deferments are being allowed, and no transitions to part-time are being allowed. In other words, students get to choose between leaving the course or paying the same vast amount of money for a reduced level of service. > It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you No, that's precisely what it is. One week all classes were in person, then the college cancelled all classes for two weeks to transition, then all classes resumed on Zoom. Neither the professors nor the students had any more warning than that. The college did pay for a Zoom Enterprise subscription so that classes aren’t time-limited by Zoom’s free tier, but that was the extent of the help given to professors. Many professors have never used video conferencing before, or have poor WiFi. Many students have no private quiet spaces to join chats because they’re sharing accommodation in a very expensive city. There was inadequate time and no training or help for professors to adjust lesson plans or teaching resources, and library and printing facilities were closed to students. The college’s entire response was very ad-hoc. This is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, all of us are making it up as we go along. The problem is that this institution is still charging the same sky-high tuition (six figures for a course) to students who are pouring into it their life savings, or going into lifelong debt. Meanwhile the college is delivering less value and sitting on an enormous multi-billion dollar endowment. We’re not involved in the lawsuit, but we certainly understand where it’s coming from.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  I think maybe you misunderstood what I was saying / I wasn't being clear. I agree with you actually... what I'm suggesting is that the current situation with online teaching isn't really generalizable to long-term experiences of it, or the situation where something is planned with online teaching in mind. I know things will vary by institution for sure, but for a lot of schools going forward they're going to try to avoid the problems you're mentioning. My guess is even when students return, there will be things like substituting large lectures with online material, etc. Colleagues of mine at other institutions are being told that going forward training and skills in online instruction is being expected of everyone. This sounds obvious but what it means in practice is that the university probably won't find what happened this past semester acceptable. There's a lot of issues for sure, but I don't think that the long-term experiences of online instructions can be generalized from this past semester.

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
  This stat is pretty much always just a direct comparison between grads, right? I wonder how different it would be if you took into account confounders like economic class. I assume much of the widening is college becoming standard, and therefore the only people who don't attend are those who either can't and are disadvantaged in general or those who don't feel particularly ambitious about their career

saagarjha 6y ago

> 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. For some large classes in certain universities, yes. In the rest it's a regular professor giving a live lecture who is now doing it over Zoom. > Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. Students aren't the only people on campus.

MengerSponge 6y ago
When someone says "The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students" they mean this: "There will be more openings than usual for tenure-track jobs in a year"
- Animats 6y ago
  Er, yes. The CDC is now predicting 100,000 US deaths for June.[1] The trend is upward. [1] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6926-mayhhsbriefing/af7319f4a55fd0ce5dc9/optimized/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6926-mayhhsbriefing/...

0az 6y ago

One of my classes (mandatory writing GenEd) had an online version, so we get the videos from last quarter, and Zoom discussion sections. So no, we're getting lectures over Zoom at the UCs, at least. If my group of friends had the inclination to talk about serious school stuff, and not literally anything else that keeps our minds off of the state of the world, I could ask people about the situation from anywhere from Rice to Stanford to Princeton. But we don't talk about this, because it's heavy, and if we can shrug that burden off for the time we have together, then that's enough. [0] Going to back to UCSD in particular, the Chancellor's name is particularly acrimonious in connotation. A couple days ago, I wrote a post here on the state of UCSD's much touted dining [1]. Spoiler: it's not pretty. If you look at the privately shared memes, there's a lot of negative sentiment. [0] Last night's OST: https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4 https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883

fennecfoxen 6y ago
n.b. your phone corrected `id` to `I'd` in your link.

ksml 6y ago

I'm at Stanford, and at least within the CS department, the online classes are nothing like you describe. Some professors are using video recordings from previous quarters, while in many other cases, it _is_ some off-the-cuff Zoom meeting. As a lecturer, it's been difficult to transition. I have my doubts that students will be back in the fall. The contagiousness of this virus is not going away, and students (particularly undergraduates, almost all of which live in dorms at Stanford) are far too densely connected for social distancing to be effective.

gregnbanks 6y ago

Hey 0d9eooo, with respect you have no idea what's actually happening. My wife attends one of the colleges mentioned in TFA, and at that college everything that you imagine cannot be the case, is actually the case. > major universities doing online stuff have video production crews Yes, but those crews don't have the bandwidth to suddenly help every professor transition to online teaching in the space of two weeks. Also, the online versions of courses which those professionally produced videos are part of, are priced lower than the in-person courses which are currently being taught on Zoom. However at my wife’s college the price has not come down, no partial refunds are being given, no deferments are being allowed, and no transitions to part-time are being allowed. In other words, students get to choose between leaving the course or paying the same vast amount of money for a reduced level of service. > It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you No, that's precisely what it is. One week all classes were in person, then the college cancelled all classes for two weeks to transition, then all classes resumed on Zoom. Neither the professors nor the students had any more warning than that. The college did pay for a Zoom Enterprise subscription so that classes aren’t time-limited by Zoom’s free tier, but that was the extent of the help given to professors. Many professors have never used video conferencing before, or have poor WiFi. Many students have no private quiet spaces to join chats because they’re sharing accommodation in a very expensive city. There was inadequate time and no training or help for professors to adjust lesson plans or teaching resources, and library and printing facilities were closed to students. The college’s entire response was very ad-hoc. This is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, all of us are making it up as we go along. The problem is that this institution is still charging the same sky-high tuition (six figures for a course) to students who are pouring into it their life savings, or going into lifelong debt. Meanwhile the college is delivering less value and sitting on an enormous multi-billion dollar endowment. We’re not involved in the lawsuit, but we certainly understand where it’s coming from.

0d9eooo 6y ago
I think maybe you misunderstood what I was saying / I wasn't being clear. I agree with you actually... what I'm suggesting is that the current situation with online teaching isn't really generalizable to long-term experiences of it, or the situation where something is planned with online teaching in mind. I know things will vary by institution for sure, but for a lot of schools going forward they're going to try to avoid the problems you're mentioning. My guess is even when students return, there will be things like substituting large lectures with online material, etc. Colleagues of mine at other institutions are being told that going forward training and skills in online instruction is being expected of everyone. This sounds obvious but what it means in practice is that the university probably won't find what happened this past semester acceptable. There's a lot of issues for sure, but I don't think that the long-term experiences of online instructions can be generalized from this past semester.