3 ms·

That's a terrible idea. You want to cut educational standards to save money ? You'll save money in the short-term but in the long term you'll destroy your econ

by ig1 14y ago

That's a terrible idea. You want to cut educational standards to save money ? You'll save money in the short-term but in the long term you'll destroy your economy as you won't have the highly educated workforce that will be required to be a competitive economy in the future. We should focus on high quality education first, whether that uses technology or not.

kiba 14y ago
What about GP's post that implies cutting down educational standards?
- Steko 14y ago
  Recorded lectures instead of live people who can answer questions?
  - Tycho 14y ago
    Recorded lectures are better. Students/pupils can rewind things they missed or didn't immediately understand, can pause to refer to source material or look things up, watch the whole thing again, even rewatch previous lectures. They can still submit questions (forum, classroom, whatever) except now they wont be holding up the whole lecture. And logistically, what happens with 'live people' is that some people ask their own questions, which the lecturer will make some attempt to answer. It's not like a lecture format somehow provides the interactive benefits of a 1-to-1 tutorial for every student in the audience simultaneously.
    - Steko 14y ago
      "Recorded lectures are better." Cite? You can't just base this huge claim on some hand waving about how you can rewind and pause things. You need a study showing how wildly successful a school based on recorded lectures is compared to traditional lectures before you start leading all of society down these paths.
- ig1 14y ago
  "use of out-of-copyright reading material" rather than the best material. "homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand" implying that we should only test (and thus only teach) skills that can be tested by computer rather than the skills that we want students to learn. Basically you'd be wiping out essay type questions (which test depth on knowledge) in favour of multiple-choice (which test breadth).
- ajdecon 14y ago
  The objection was probably the post's implication that those technologies could manage all or most courses. > switch to ereaders Unless they're seeing different ereaders than me, that kills most detailed and colored diagrams in science textbooks. Also makes the experience worse in many geography, history, etc. courses. > abandon the practice of lecturers performing the exact same lecture term after term when a recording will do Recordings don't pause to answer questions mid-stream. A chat room or forum is probably good enough for upper-division courses where students have probably learned decent learning skills, but even freshman college courses probably need a human available at some point. Suppose they could be restricted to study sections... > move towards homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand... There go essays and critical thinking questions in every literature class, to start with. Also a lot of the more useful evaluations in my engineering and science courses probably couldn't be marked by a computer. To be clear: I think Coursera and similar efforts are awesome, and are an excellent supplement to college educations. I think they could also manage partial replacement of a minority of college courses. But especially with typical college students, who are not self-directed learners, I don't think it's the kind of replacement that will help budgets much.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    > Unless they're seeing different ereaders than me, that kills most detailed and colored diagrams in science textbooks. Also makes the experience worse in many geography, history, etc. courses. Agreed! Worse, in my mind, is that e-readers are good mainly for linear access of read-only text; textbooks are much better at random access and user modification. I love my Kindle, but I think it sucks for books I'm trying to study seriously. Flipping back and forth between diagrams and text, jumping back to look at previous pages, putting in bookmarks, notes in the margins: all stuff paper is much better at. And really, the price of textbooks isn't high because they're printed on paper. It's because textbooks are expensive to create, and many markets have a small number of suppliers, giving them crazy pricing power. And now that I think about it, textbooks are a tiny proportion of what schools spend, which is in turn a small portion of government costs. So I now regret that we've all been fooled into wasting time on a proposal that makes no sense.
  - pjscott 14y ago
Tycho 14y ago
Costs =/= Standards
bunderbunder 14y ago
I could get behind using old textbooks and putting them on eReaders, though. At least in a targeted manner. My math department in college kept a bookshelf full of copies of texts they had used back through the early 20th century. It's kind of amazing to see how much more clearly-written calculus textbooks were in the 1940s. And the ones of that vintage that are still in print can be had for cheap - the sticker says I bought my copy of "Vector and Tensor Analysis" by Borisenko and Tarapov (part of the Dover Books on Mathematics series) for $7. On the other hand, a biology book that old is going to be missing a whole lot of key stuff; probably even knowledge of the Krebs cycle was too new to be reliably appearing in school texts. Perhaps instead educators could band together to produce open source textbooks.
- Tycho 14y ago
  Exactly. The contentions that a) live lectures are crucial for the interactive element b) the best, modern textbooks are necessary for acceptable education sound reasonable but don't stand up to much scrutiny. > Perhaps instead educators could band together to produce open source textbooks. You would think there'd be more interest in 'spend once, solve forever' initiatives like that.

by ig1 14y ago

kiba 14y ago

What about GP's post that implies cutting down educational standards?

Steko 14y ago
Recorded lectures instead of live people who can answer questions?
- Tycho 14y ago
  Recorded lectures are better. Students/pupils can rewind things they missed or didn't immediately understand, can pause to refer to source material or look things up, watch the whole thing again, even rewatch previous lectures. They can still submit questions (forum, classroom, whatever) except now they wont be holding up the whole lecture. And logistically, what happens with 'live people' is that some people ask their own questions, which the lecturer will make some attempt to answer. It's not like a lecture format somehow provides the interactive benefits of a 1-to-1 tutorial for every student in the audience simultaneously.
  - Steko 14y ago
    "Recorded lectures are better." Cite? You can't just base this huge claim on some hand waving about how you can rewind and pause things. You need a study showing how wildly successful a school based on recorded lectures is compared to traditional lectures before you start leading all of society down these paths.
ig1 14y ago
"use of out-of-copyright reading material" rather than the best material. "homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand" implying that we should only test (and thus only teach) skills that can be tested by computer rather than the skills that we want students to learn. Basically you'd be wiping out essay type questions (which test depth on knowledge) in favour of multiple-choice (which test breadth).
ajdecon 14y ago
The objection was probably the post's implication that those technologies could manage all or most courses. > switch to ereaders Unless they're seeing different ereaders than me, that kills most detailed and colored diagrams in science textbooks. Also makes the experience worse in many geography, history, etc. courses. > abandon the practice of lecturers performing the exact same lecture term after term when a recording will do Recordings don't pause to answer questions mid-stream. A chat room or forum is probably good enough for upper-division courses where students have probably learned decent learning skills, but even freshman college courses probably need a human available at some point. Suppose they could be restricted to study sections... > move towards homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand... There go essays and critical thinking questions in every literature class, to start with. Also a lot of the more useful evaluations in my engineering and science courses probably couldn't be marked by a computer. To be clear: I think Coursera and similar efforts are awesome, and are an excellent supplement to college educations. I think they could also manage partial replacement of a minority of college courses. But especially with typical college students, who are not self-directed learners, I don't think it's the kind of replacement that will help budgets much.
- wpietri 14y ago
  > Unless they're seeing different ereaders than me, that kills most detailed and colored diagrams in science textbooks. Also makes the experience worse in many geography, history, etc. courses. Agreed! Worse, in my mind, is that e-readers are good mainly for linear access of read-only text; textbooks are much better at random access and user modification. I love my Kindle, but I think it sucks for books I'm trying to study seriously. Flipping back and forth between diagrams and text, jumping back to look at previous pages, putting in bookmarks, notes in the margins: all stuff paper is much better at. And really, the price of textbooks isn't high because they're printed on paper. It's because textbooks are expensive to create, and many markets have a small number of suppliers, giving them crazy pricing power. And now that I think about it, textbooks are a tiny proportion of what schools spend, which is in turn a small portion of government costs. So I now regret that we've all been fooled into wasting time on a proposal that makes no sense.
- pjscott 14y ago

Tycho 14y ago

Costs =/= Standards

bunderbunder 14y ago

I could get behind using old textbooks and putting them on eReaders, though. At least in a targeted manner. My math department in college kept a bookshelf full of copies of texts they had used back through the early 20th century. It's kind of amazing to see how much more clearly-written calculus textbooks were in the 1940s. And the ones of that vintage that are still in print can be had for cheap - the sticker says I bought my copy of "Vector and Tensor Analysis" by Borisenko and Tarapov (part of the Dover Books on Mathematics series) for $7. On the other hand, a biology book that old is going to be missing a whole lot of key stuff; probably even knowledge of the Krebs cycle was too new to be reliably appearing in school texts. Perhaps instead educators could band together to produce open source textbooks.

Tycho 14y ago
Exactly. The contentions that a) live lectures are crucial for the interactive element b) the best, modern textbooks are necessary for acceptable education sound reasonable but don't stand up to much scrutiny. > Perhaps instead educators could band together to produce open source textbooks. You would think there'd be more interest in 'spend once, solve forever' initiatives like that.