After going through a year (and counting) of remote and hybrid learning with my HS aged kids I’ve come to the opposite conclusion regarding the efficacy of on-line learning. As with all formats, on-line learning can work well for some students, but it doesn’t work well for all (and maybe not for a majority). For my kids, and most of their friends (all strong students), on-line learning has resulted in disengagement from the learning process - part of that is due to the fact that many teachers struggle to deliver quality content in this format, but another issue is that tuning into a screen for 60-90 minutes and maintaining focus is difficult. It’s too easy to be distracted by a multitude of other things. As a result, this year they will be hard pressed to cover the necessary content and many will not.
I agree it’s difficult. But I also remember saying 15 years ago that I much preferred to read a physical newspaper or magazine, compared to reading it on a screen. I still enjoy that experience, but it’s no longer a viable option most of the time.
But only for a small segment of the population. Lots of college students decades ago and today attend colleges that they commute to from where they lived before college. Before the post-WW2 growth in college attendance, going to college was something only a small segment of the population did.
You make valid points regarding your child’s HS experience, but I think there are some important differences between your children’s high school experience and the potential of future college remote learning.
First, a typical college course load is 15 hours per week of classes, compared to about 30+ hours per week in high school. College students have to have focus more intently but for a shorter period of time.
Second, public primary and secondary education has two important roles in addition to education. The first is socialization in terms of making friends and learning how to interact with others. The second is that public schools also function as a day care, allowing parents to work without worrying about what little Jane and Johnny are doing during most of the day.
Third, I don’t think we can compare the quality of education of provided by high school teachers that were forced to learn on the spot how to teach remotely vs. the opportunity of finding excellent college teachers who know how to create engaging classes in their areas of expertise. The quality of college teaching varies dramatically, and I doubt it is correlated with the quality of their research.
I don’t disagree with your assessment. I think for some people virtual learning with a great professor can work well. At the same time there are students who won’t learn well that way regardless of the quality of the teaching. My older kiddo is one of those and I don’t think he is unique. Part of the issue is the ability to block out extraneous stimuli in favor of what’s on the screen - especially once you go past an hour. As a working professional I find it tough to stay engaged in on-line meetings beyond a certain point so I shouldn’t be surprised a 17 year old finds it tough.
Seconding @Thorsmom66’s point: my junior at Emory took a semester off because he couldn’t stand online learning. I have no doubt that the profs are excellent and teaching well; my son’s grades remained high. But he felt he wasn’t learning and retaining the material.
Yes, and many kids don’t attend college at all so they “miss out” on the residential experience. We all have different experiences in life. Some probably feel like it’s a necessity but in reality it’s just a nice thing to have if you’re able. A want, not a need.
In Europe, residential colleges are very unusual.
This is a fascinating question and one I’ve been looking at for a long time. The smartphone is actually why I say that thing about user interface: it’s the nonpareil.
When the iPhone first came out in '07, people were immensely skeptical because it seemed so much more complex than your everyday flip phone, and so few people could think why you’d want to wander around with a pocket computer-phone with all these piccy things on it. The boom that Apple brought on, though, in intensely UI-designed apps essentially taught two entire generations – coming on for three – to use user interfaces. Again, very simple things with iterations. You’re highly constrained in what you can do and ask in these things (except for ones built for actual creative work, which are often still a bit fenced-in because of the UX push towards “simplify, limit”), and they do a giant amount of very complex work behind the scenes for you when you tap or speak a simple command.
What I’ve found, though, is that the same generations know almost nothing about how the machinery works. Coding is becoming a thing again, but through a weird K12 filter, so I don’t expect much from it. But if you’re a boomer or GenX person who had to do with computers, you know a lot about computers. You can probably program a bit (or a lot), you understand the logics, you know a bit (or a lot) about the electronics, you understand network architecture and know what a T1 line is and where to find one, you can take apart and mod a computer, you can get into the guts of an OS and do something with it, you probably fooled with Linux at some point and can recall putting aside your C prompt. And you know these things because computers were for a while for “hobbyists” and then you had to take care of them on your own at home if you wanted to get a lot done.
None of this is true of younger people with amazing facility with smartphones. Their command of video editing is very good – they’ve got a more visual everyday language than we do – but only if that’s something they do routinely. If they want to do a thing, and there’s no way to do it in an app, they’ll no more often try to figure out how to remake it or join it to something else than you’d try to hack your furniture. What they are is good consumers in tech, not good problem-solvers or even problem-identifiers. Most of them are not thinking in terms of systems, let alone in terms of working with teams to find things they want to change in systems and make that happen. When I say “most”, btw, I’m excluding the ones who’re interested now in serious political change – and they’re absolutely magnificent at it, but they’re still lacking everywhere but in the social organizing. When it comes to understanding the actual systems they want to change, I find they’re very easily overwhelmed and daunted. I mean forget the actual change part, I’m just talking about investigating and getting heads around very very large and complex systems.
And what I bet the ones who’re good at it will do with great facility is apply UX design to that complexity for the rest of them.
Anyway – yeah, on the whole, I think “fail miserably” is what we’re looking at, and unfortunately the technologists’ answer will be, already is, to remove people to some safe sidelines and put in robots wherever possible to run the other robots. Socially, of course, I don’t see this going all that well. Funny thing, actually, engineers failing to recognize people’s limits. But you’d have to imagine people as the primary element in the machine to bother with that.
Why blame the technologists when it is those in “elite society-defining jobs” (CEOs, politicians, Wall Street financiers, etc.) who are the ones actually making the decisions to remove people from work to cut costs that businesses have?
Again, a fine question, but a large part of why teaching is labor-intensive is that the students have to be taught how to learn. For a minority, that’s not true. But there’s good reason why online courses have been found to benefit primarily well-employed men who’ve already been to college and done well there (and have few responsibilities outside work). They’re already good at college and have few distractions, plus they have concrete reasons for taking the courses.
Most people, when the come to college, are not good at it, and in some ways that transition’s gotten harder. K12’s been set up over the last 20 years with its gutter-blockers built higher and higher, stronger and stronger, so that kids can’t fail and the stats go ever-higher. So even for the kids who do very well in high school, unless they’ve been trained at home to be quite independent and manage their own time and interests, college is a real shock. The first bad grade freshman year, you see breakdowns all over campus. Getting a C or D is a whole identity crisis, and students respond by getting the hell away from that subject, even if they’re really fascinated by it. For kids who don’t come in that thoroughbred, the struggle is time management and organization, and planning, which has always been true, but the stakes are much higher now: competition for necessary courses at state Us is intense, and many kids can’t afford a fifth year. You’d think advisors would fix this problem, but perversely, adding advisors doesn’t seem to help; instead you get churn, and advisors who don’t stick around long enough to understand the catalogue’s sprawl, so they steer kids wrong all the time. Often expensively wrong. It doesn’t help that the kids don’t know enough to ask the right questions or frame their interests in terms the advisors can respond to. Again, a complexity problem.
When people show up physically in a classroom, even if there are 35-40 of them, it’s not hard for a prof to see when something’s going wrong with a student and ask them to stay or come and meet. You still get students who just stop showing up, or who struggle and then apologize for leaving. But on screen, it’s much harder to see these things, especially when cameras are off.
The other thing, imo, is that shame plays a surprisingly strong role in collegiate success. People will turn up for class if they know their absence will be noted; online, you can check in, and no one will know if you’re there or not. Sleeping in class is still something students find highly embarrassing, but the doze rate for online is, I bet, tremendous. And then it’s just about gaming the quizzes or whatever the metrics-maker is, which they’re proficient at after being trained in it through K12. They know they’re not learning that way but the imperative to make the marks is stronger.
After years of being pushed to make courses “scalable”, which is after all the mandate of a giant university, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t believe in mass education, and that education is quite a personal thing. I think what you get in enormous courses is pretend education, with many learning nothing, some smaller slice believing they’ve learned lots but in fact highly confused about what’s going on, and a few who really have gotten it. I was talking about this recently with a dean, who agreed, and told me about her experience teaching at Cornell – she’d been given a tremendously large class for the place, 100 students, plus TAs, and she thought it was a disaster. My immediate reaction to that number was “you can’t even have them all in your field of vision at once.” She divided the course into four sections so that each group of 25 had a human, and then went round to all the TA-taught sections for support, but of course it wasn’t the same as actually being able to connect with all the students.
It used to be that you could circumvent the problem by going and living in office hours, but the profs (at state Us, anyway, and I imagine generally) have too many demands on their time now for a kid to monopolize it that way. Metrics, metrics. Boy do they get in the way of learning.
Again, a good question, but the answer’s in front of your eyes. The financiers are their buddies, and the rest get dragged along behind. I’ve often wondered how it’d play if there were actually demographic parities up at the top. I suspect they’d make different choices, and have more firmly in mind the fact that there are needs beyond revenue and various types of dominance, and that if a democratic society isn’t centrally about the people in it, you haven’t got much of a democratic society.
Considering what you wrote before about routes into “elite society-defining jobs”, it is more likely that the financiers and elites see technologists (along with other workers) as tools, not buddies.
Financiers, yes…but also buddies they went to school with.
The “buddies they went to school with” are a very small subset of technologists.
Exactly. They’re also the ones defining where their businesses are going, what they’re making, how they’re shifting the technological world they’ve already built for people to live on. I’m not persuaded that most of their money buddies actually understand what they’re doing, but they won’t care so long as there’s a payout. And you don’t have to watch many Congressional hearings to know how disastrously far behind the poli sci and law housemates are. Sometimes the journalism majors across the quad get it, and you know when that happens because then the technologists turn remarkably nasty.
2018, to be exact. If the bill is enacted, this fall (2021) will be the last time new OOS students qualify (those already receiving it will continue to qualify at levels determined annually in the appropriations bill).
Just catching up on this one.
The point of the money isn’t to give profs swimming pools’ worth of money to play in. Most of the money wouldn’t go to them, anyway. It’d replace tuition money in paying existing staff/faculty salaries, would increase the number of staff and pay them properly, would probably expand a multiyear-contract or permanent-hire lecturer class, and would improve and restore facilities. Profs would get more time to teach well and do research, which is presumably what you want them doing; students would come out debt-free or near it.
An average state-U non-medical professor salary for someone who’s been there for 20 years, and is doing heavy lifting in mentoring junior colleagues, working with admin on keeping their colleges running, serving on university-level senates and committees, and keeping their department and possibly their subfield running, is around $110K or so. This person still works around 80 hours a week and there’s a fair chance they’ve been divorced because of it. (And if they’re not in a major city, the odds of their finding someone else aren’t terrific, because they can’t move and they’re still working all the time; you see people bumping around until someone else they’ve known forever gets divorced.) This person will likely not ever get another promotion or significant raise unless they also take on administrative work. If they have a good salary match for retirement they’ll do all right, but there are a lot of anemic benefits packages out there, and there’s a reason why profs try to hang onto their jobs well past age 65, when they used to get kicked out. They haven’t made enough to retire on, especially after having spent more than they could afford to send their own kids to college somewhere else. If there’s a spouse with a fulltime job, that picture’s different.
Junior profs are making $60-85Kish, for, again, multiple jobs’ worth of work. Nobody’s “going home” at the end of the day. You go home, there’s some time with family, then it’s back to work in the home office, and/or you’re up at 4 am to try to get some work done before you go to work. There is no such thing as a family vacation that doesn’t also include manuscript preparation, proposal-writing, meetings with collaborators or conferences or archive visits, etc. The prize for not getting tenure after being hired t-t is…well, find a new career that probably has little to do with your 15 years’ worth of training and education, despite your innocence of the world outside academia.
Non-tenure-track faculty are generally making anything from <$20K, no benefits or security (as adjuncts) to $55-80K as lecturers teaching 4-ish courses a semester, usually large ones. I remember a graduating PhD student who turned down $75K at one of the UC schools for a 4/4 or 4/3 lecturer position teaching classes of 750 students – not enough money to live on in the area with loans to pay, no advancement, no time for research (meaning job prospects elsewhere stunted after a year or two), and burnout guaranteed within a few years.
As for state-U staff, who do the work of seeing that the profs can do their work, that the students can get in and through and housed and fed, that the buildings and facilities keep standing up and functioning, and that all the bills get paid and regulations followed, you’re looking at fulltime salaries normally in the $30-70K range. Most have bachelors’ degrees; an increasing proportion have master’s and PhDs. Yes, there’s a handful of admins making obscene money, and they’re made much of. But they’re not the primary salaries expense.
Basically, it seems to me that most of the people who talk about lazy/overpaid/entitled profs and the outrage of universities wanting more public money are people who wouldn’t consider doing as much work as most state-U employees do for the money. Wouldn’t be inclined to take any jobs at those salaries in the first place, especially with so little opportunity for significant advancement. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want my salary and hours, not at my age.
I’ll say it again: education is expensive, it’s timeconsuming, it’s labor-intensive. Which all of you know, because you’ve lavished untold hours and expense on your own children’s education, spent untold hours teaching them yourselves, having conversations about the world with them, looking for the best programs for them, buying them books, thinking about what they might be interested in, cultivating relationships with their teachers. It gets more expensive if you want the universities to dress up as resorts, and if you pay top administrators more than the president of the United States makes. But even if you stop doing all that, even if you keep the salaries modest across the board, it’s expensive, and someone has to pay. If you want a well-educated populace, the “someone” will be “everyone”, and the vast majority of the expense will be public.
I’m a big fan of OCW and have taken a lot of courses from the list. I’ve also fallen asleep hard in a lot of those online classes and abandoned some partway through. And I’m really, really good at school. I also can’t help noticing that there’s a tremendous difference between first-year MIT courses and first-year same-general-name courses at every other school I know about: they start off the same, then fall into an abyss of astonishing depth and complexity. Absolutely marvelous courses. But if you don’t happen to have a lot of MIT students around you, and MIT faculty holding office hours, and MIT staff who were also MIT students, I don’t give you great odds of making that adjustment at the age of 19 or so, and managing to keep up, even if you’re really quite spectacularly bright. Unless maybe you’ve been to one of the top preps for STEM, then I imagine you’d have a fighting chance.
Take a look sometime at the MIT courses offered on edX, where you’ll see the Q&A for the TA sitting there at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll find that a lot of the people attempting earnestly to take those courses are missing the point pretty hard.
There’s more to it than sitting there listening to a course and prestige and credentialling. Incidentally, I guarantee that State U profs are recommending and assigning parts of OCW and EdX courses. I’ve also suggested to my state-U-bound daughter that, if she finds she wants to stick with her first interest, we look for online courses from top U and profs in that subject, because the local U isn’t so good in that field. There’d be stitching-together to do with transferring credit and matching it to local requirements, and I’m sure the local profs in that dept would be alarmed and might even try to fight it (she’d probably have to arrange it as independent study, so they’d be able to claim the course hours), and there’d be extra tuition to pay, but I don’t see it as a problem reputationwise as far as her transcript goes.
The thing is, even though Germany tracks from an early age, they do provide pathways for people (usually young adults) who went through apprenticeships to eventually go to uni. In fact, I believe the either a substantial percent or even a majority of students at uni in Germany are non-traditional students these days.