6 ms·

Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class.

sodality2 4y ago
Many of my college classes are (and even high school classes! though I was coming out of HS in the tail end of covid) like this. High school: Watch ~1hr lecture every night for next day's class, in which we did worksheets and the teacher would work through problems, but we were generally expected to have learned the material (teacher would not re-teach it). College: Last semester I had a Data Structures class with a similar structure, but with 2-3 lectures a week. Same idea, we worked on practice sheets in class and had far more time to ask questions instead of having the entire concept taught to us. I much preferred this because some concepts covered, I had a very solid understanding of, so not wasting time in class was great.
kimburgess 4y ago
That approach to education is quite common. There’s been more of a push over the past decade or so under the “flipped classroom” moniker, but it’s the same principle as reading at home, then working with that knowledge in a group where different ways of thinking may be discussed.
chefandy 4y ago
I currently have a class where the professor does a hybrid of that. Instead of a four-and-a-quarter hour class, he makes a one hour video the day before with the rote part of the lecture and tries to address anything that came up among students since the previous week's class. Then we have a three-and-a-quarter hour class which is mostly work and there's a minimal lecture to warm everybody up. While the medium is largely technical, it is a studio art class however so it was a bit different from most classes, anyway.
p-e-w 4y ago
No, schools (and employers, and scientists, and everyone else) are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they will rapidly become irrelevant, and cannot possibly hope to continue operating in anything resembling their traditional role.
- astrange 4y ago
  There are approximately zero economic indicators showing this.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    "Economic indicators" are entirely irrelevant for that discussion. This isn't going to be a gradual change either. At some point, GPT-n is going to be available with super-human capabilities in all tasks that matter, and then it's simply over, from one day to the next. Nobody will continue paying people to do things that AI can do better, faster, and more reliably, at lower cost.
    - astrange 4y ago
      No, that's not how jobs work. Comparative advantage means it's worth paying people to do a job even if you're better at it than they are, because you have more important things to do. Hiring AIs to do something is extremely expensive. You're basically setting a warehouse of GPUs on fire. Anyway, if it was true total factor productivity would be exploding, but it's actually kinda underperforming. (And automation almost always causes increased employment.)
      - hpen 4y ago
        Maybe in training but presumably you buy the trained AI service or whatever and run on cpu. AWS machines with GPUs don’t even surpass roughly $25 an hour. That’s the low end for a desk worker.
        hpen 4y ago
        Admitting my last comment is a bit false. Turns out ChatGPT is running on GPUs.
        astrange 4y ago
        It is, but especially high memory ones, and presumably it's loaded on a bunch of them since it supports simultaneous queries.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class This model (“flipped classroom”) has been recommended by many for quite a long time (at least since internet video delivery for the purpose became practical, but ISTR the first suggestions actually predate even that) and the reasons just seem to keep growing.
- Breza 4y ago
  I'm a huge supporter of this model. I used to think I was terrible at math. Once Khan Academy and other online resources were available, it all started to click for me. Turns out my problem was that I could never keep up with the lectures. Being able to pause and replay a lecture and then ask for help when I got stuck in my homework would have been amazing.
- o_____________o 4y ago
  Thanks, I was trying to remember what this was called! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
nibbleshifter 4y ago
The nearby university already does this. It... It sometimes works. It depends a LOT on the instructor. Should also note: it only really works when all your lecturers share some information about workloads...

Many of my college classes are (and even high school classes! though I was coming out of HS in the tail end of covid) like this. High school: Watch ~1hr lecture every night for next day's class, in which we did worksheets and the teacher would work through problems, but we were generally expected to have learned the material (teacher would not re-teach it). College: Last semester I had a Data Structures class with a similar structure, but with 2-3 lectures a week. Same idea, we worked on practice sheets in class and had far more time to ask questions instead of having the entire concept taught to us. I much preferred this because some concepts covered, I had a very solid understanding of, so not wasting time in class was great.

kimburgess 4y ago

That approach to education is quite common. There’s been more of a push over the past decade or so under the “flipped classroom” moniker, but it’s the same principle as reading at home, then working with that knowledge in a group where different ways of thinking may be discussed.

chefandy 4y ago

I currently have a class where the professor does a hybrid of that. Instead of a four-and-a-quarter hour class, he makes a one hour video the day before with the rote part of the lecture and tries to address anything that came up among students since the previous week's class. Then we have a three-and-a-quarter hour class which is mostly work and there's a minimal lecture to warm everybody up. While the medium is largely technical, it is a studio art class however so it was a bit different from most classes, anyway.

p-e-w 4y ago

No, schools (and employers, and scientists, and everyone else) are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they will rapidly become irrelevant, and cannot possibly hope to continue operating in anything resembling their traditional role.

astrange 4y ago
There are approximately zero economic indicators showing this.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  "Economic indicators" are entirely irrelevant for that discussion. This isn't going to be a gradual change either. At some point, GPT-n is going to be available with super-human capabilities in all tasks that matter, and then it's simply over, from one day to the next. Nobody will continue paying people to do things that AI can do better, faster, and more reliably, at lower cost.
  - astrange 4y ago
    No, that's not how jobs work. Comparative advantage means it's worth paying people to do a job even if you're better at it than they are, because you have more important things to do. Hiring AIs to do something is extremely expensive. You're basically setting a warehouse of GPUs on fire. Anyway, if it was true total factor productivity would be exploding, but it's actually kinda underperforming. (And automation almost always causes increased employment.)
    - hpen 4y ago
      Maybe in training but presumably you buy the trained AI service or whatever and run on cpu. AWS machines with GPUs don’t even surpass roughly $25 an hour. That’s the low end for a desk worker.
      - hpen 4y ago
        Admitting my last comment is a bit false. Turns out ChatGPT is running on GPUs.
        astrange 4y ago
        It is, but especially high memory ones, and presumably it's loaded on a bunch of them since it supports simultaneous queries.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class This model (“flipped classroom”) has been recommended by many for quite a long time (at least since internet video delivery for the purpose became practical, but ISTR the first suggestions actually predate even that) and the reasons just seem to keep growing.

Breza 4y ago
I'm a huge supporter of this model. I used to think I was terrible at math. Once Khan Academy and other online resources were available, it all started to click for me. Turns out my problem was that I could never keep up with the lectures. Being able to pause and replay a lecture and then ask for help when I got stuck in my homework would have been amazing.
o_____________o 4y ago
Thanks, I was trying to remember what this was called! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

nibbleshifter 4y ago

The nearby university already does this. It... It sometimes works. It depends a LOT on the instructor. Should also note: it only really works when all your lecturers share some information about workloads...