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Back when I was at University, a lot of the lectures (and more generally courses) felt like advertising platforms for the lecturers. We would follow bland Power

Back when I was at University, a lot of the lectures (and more generally courses) felt like advertising platforms for the lecturers. We would follow bland Powerpoint slides which would regularly point to particular chapters of books, more often than not written by the lecturers themselves. The slides would often be years old and would fail to adapt to common trends. As for the books, the few updates they received each year seemed to be a way for lecturers to force students to buy the new editions (e.g. page 10 becomes page 20), rather than actual research updates. This, to me, just feels like lecturers trying to get their money's worth. The students have become secondary to the whole "education thing". I'm aware that higher education systems are largely at fault, not just the lecturers, but one would think integrity would have gotten the better of this odd machinery. Unfortunately the problem seems even larger to me, we assume Education is this linear, step-by-step thing, when in fact people learn different things at different speeds, in very different ways. Lectures are only a symptom of trying (and failing miserably) to normalize Education. It's the quote by Einstein in all its glory: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid".

Jormundir 12y ago
I'm actually very optimistic for education in the near future. After taking some Coursera classes, I'm confident a more personalized education is completely attainable. There are a lot of weaknesses to point at with the online education platforms popping up, but I think those weaknesses minuscule compared to our standardized brick and mortar structure we have today. Really the only thing I find particularly lacking is a mentor. I don't need a person to lecture me in person everyday for an hour, I just need someone to check in to make sure I'm staying on track, or to point out a different area I might find interesting if I'm bored with what I'm working on. We really only need a few expert lecturers to build high quality online classes. The 40 students to one teacher can be slightly modified by 40 students to one mentor, whose job is simply to make sure everyone is staying relatively engaged. I don't think a teacher can effectively instruct a class of 40 students, and it's wildly ineffective and inefficient. A trained mentor, however, can make sure a group of 40 students are progressing on their own. (The 1:40 certainly needs to be up for experimentation, but the point is I feel online education can be a close fit to the general infrastructure of our system today).
zacinbusiness 12y ago
It sounds like you took awful courses. The majority of my professors were extremely engaging and very rarely acted like they had all of the answers or knew everything. In several cases we were actually encouraged to find fault with their work and some of my classmates actually did just that. Then again, I didn't go to uni for CS because it's such a boring subject.

Jormundir 12y ago

I'm actually very optimistic for education in the near future. After taking some Coursera classes, I'm confident a more personalized education is completely attainable. There are a lot of weaknesses to point at with the online education platforms popping up, but I think those weaknesses minuscule compared to our standardized brick and mortar structure we have today. Really the only thing I find particularly lacking is a mentor. I don't need a person to lecture me in person everyday for an hour, I just need someone to check in to make sure I'm staying on track, or to point out a different area I might find interesting if I'm bored with what I'm working on. We really only need a few expert lecturers to build high quality online classes. The 40 students to one teacher can be slightly modified by 40 students to one mentor, whose job is simply to make sure everyone is staying relatively engaged. I don't think a teacher can effectively instruct a class of 40 students, and it's wildly ineffective and inefficient. A trained mentor, however, can make sure a group of 40 students are progressing on their own. (The 1:40 certainly needs to be up for experimentation, but the point is I feel online education can be a close fit to the general infrastructure of our system today).

zacinbusiness 12y ago

It sounds like you took awful courses. The majority of my professors were extremely engaging and very rarely acted like they had all of the answers or knew everything. In several cases we were actually encouraged to find fault with their work and some of my classmates actually did just that. Then again, I didn't go to uni for CS because it's such a boring subject.