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>I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal. It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your s

>I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal. It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your social background. I absolutely can't understand why would any country require its citizens to pay for education in state-funded schools and universities. Educated people are the best and the biggest national asset. Anything that creates a barrier (monetary or not) to education harms the country directly.

onecommentman 5y ago
Thesis: We are 20 years behind where we should be in online university education, and the only reason we are where we are now is a pandemic. The universities were at the bleeding edge of new networked IT solutions even into the 1980s. As low-cost portable devices became available that could display high-quality real-time video on demand, it was clear that such a solution would soon be faster, cheaper and better than passively sitting in a lecture hall. And little, if anything, happened on the University side for years and years. The occasional academician might try something, but it was spotty at best. A few years ago, there were professors who were still banning laptops from lecture rooms. Faculty Senates stuck their collective heads in the sand. They couldn’t figure out a business case where they could make money in a video future, so they ignored it. Meanwhile, students got a slower, worse, more expensive education than they could and should have. We should be in the third or fourth generation of online university courses by now. Professionally produced and vetted lectures, hyperlinks to past and supplemental materials synced to video, diverse actors presenting material that engage various population of students more effectively. Objective measures of student learning improvements to support process quality improvements. From service courses through grad seminars. The best courses offered to not one university, but all universities (potentially). Simulators of lab equipments so students get training on the newest equipment, and aren’t learning outdated inefficient lab practices. Online networking with mentors in the real world. Effective controls on cheating on exams. These all should be mature, fully deployed technologies by now. And they aren’t. That is the mortal sin of Higher Education in the 21st Century. They just didn’t care. I consider a lot of the political turmoil on campuses as just a smokescreen by academic leadership to distract the digital native students from asking the inconvenient questions of why is education so…clunky. Rant mode off.
- hnfong 5y ago
  Ironically people these days get most of their extra-curricula learning from random (i.e. non-academic/non-teachers) people on Youtube. I do too, and I don't think it's "worse" in quality than what they teach in university.

onecommentman 5y ago

Thesis: We are 20 years behind where we should be in online university education, and the only reason we are where we are now is a pandemic. The universities were at the bleeding edge of new networked IT solutions even into the 1980s. As low-cost portable devices became available that could display high-quality real-time video on demand, it was clear that such a solution would soon be faster, cheaper and better than passively sitting in a lecture hall. And little, if anything, happened on the University side for years and years. The occasional academician might try something, but it was spotty at best. A few years ago, there were professors who were still banning laptops from lecture rooms. Faculty Senates stuck their collective heads in the sand. They couldn’t figure out a business case where they could make money in a video future, so they ignored it. Meanwhile, students got a slower, worse, more expensive education than they could and should have. We should be in the third or fourth generation of online university courses by now. Professionally produced and vetted lectures, hyperlinks to past and supplemental materials synced to video, diverse actors presenting material that engage various population of students more effectively. Objective measures of student learning improvements to support process quality improvements. From service courses through grad seminars. The best courses offered to not one university, but all universities (potentially). Simulators of lab equipments so students get training on the newest equipment, and aren’t learning outdated inefficient lab practices. Online networking with mentors in the real world. Effective controls on cheating on exams. These all should be mature, fully deployed technologies by now. And they aren’t. That is the mortal sin of Higher Education in the 21st Century. They just didn’t care. I consider a lot of the political turmoil on campuses as just a smokescreen by academic leadership to distract the digital native students from asking the inconvenient questions of why is education so…clunky. Rant mode off.

hnfong 5y ago
Ironically people these days get most of their extra-curricula learning from random (i.e. non-academic/non-teachers) people on Youtube. I do too, and I don't think it's "worse" in quality than what they teach in university.