3 ms·

The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else th

The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient. Many advanced topics require the student to actually sit down at some point and do the work, and that's where educators and peers come in. I think we are already in an unprecedented golden age for people who are able to self-educate, i.e. have the material and mental means (money & self discipline) to actually sit down and learn. Unfortunately, I don't have the impression that this is a viable path for the vast majority of people. That doesn't mean I find your scenario unlikely: administrators may find this an attractive way to cut costs, only to be surprised after a year when the learning outcomes have completely collapsed (except for the 5% mentioned above).

hedgedoops2 5y ago
> The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient. I tried to take extra credit from Udacity / MIT OCW once as a brick-and-mortar student. The main problem with MIT OCW is that it is incomplete. What you really need as a student is for all courses in a degree program to be available, and for every course to be complete. Scientific knowledge has a dependency tree, and every degree program tacitly relies on its students to have certain knowledge at certain times. Individual OCW Courses themselves are often incomplete. For example, in the problem set discussion sessions there is often a second lecture, which is critical to understand the main lecture, but this sort of thing is often missing from the OCW. In brick and mortar, students with partial attendance often fail, so it's unsuprising that OCW takers fail. Students actually going through a degree program is a form of testing. Asynchronous online courses generated during Coronavirus are probably more reliable than OCW/Udacity because these were actually used by degree seekers. A law should mandate perpetual open access to the complete content of all asynchronous online courses that were held during the pandemic. It's important that outsiders can access content, not only registered students. The main users would be students registered elsewhere, who want to compensate for their university having a bad course in some subject, or who want to take extra courses from a different department (often these can't be taken locally due to timing collision / travel distance). Switching everything to online while maintaining gatekeeping would be the worst-case scenario.

hedgedoops2 5y ago

> The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient. I tried to take extra credit from Udacity / MIT OCW once as a brick-and-mortar student. The main problem with MIT OCW is that it is incomplete. What you really need as a student is for all courses in a degree program to be available, and for every course to be complete. Scientific knowledge has a dependency tree, and every degree program tacitly relies on its students to have certain knowledge at certain times. Individual OCW Courses themselves are often incomplete. For example, in the problem set discussion sessions there is often a second lecture, which is critical to understand the main lecture, but this sort of thing is often missing from the OCW. In brick and mortar, students with partial attendance often fail, so it's unsuprising that OCW takers fail. Students actually going through a degree program is a form of testing. Asynchronous online courses generated during Coronavirus are probably more reliable than OCW/Udacity because these were actually used by degree seekers. A law should mandate perpetual open access to the complete content of all asynchronous online courses that were held during the pandemic. It's important that outsiders can access content, not only registered students. The main users would be students registered elsewhere, who want to compensate for their university having a bad course in some subject, or who want to take extra courses from a different department (often these can't be taken locally due to timing collision / travel distance). Switching everything to online while maintaining gatekeeping would be the worst-case scenario.