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Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by barry-cotter on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:22PM (#22372434)
Why don't you think schools can scale? You need instructional material and the equivalent of professors/lecturers and TAs. Instructional material scales really well; that's what textbooks and MOOCs are. Professors scale well; otherwise 100 plus lectures wouldn't work at all. They obviously do. Intro classes in the huge majority of US universities are in the 100-600 range. I wouldn't be surprised if there are bigger. So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.

There are definitely people who can do a challenging Master's degree with minimal help and feedback, just books, marked essay assignments and a final written exam. This is a model that's as old as the University of London. TAs and structure will increase the proportion of those who start who actually finish.

What about running a school obviously doesn't scale?

Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by dx87 on Thursday February 20, 2020 @12:19AM (#22372886)
> So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.

They said bootcamps don't scale, not that education or schools as a whole doesn't scale. And your solution of raising the entry requirements so only people who can teach themselves can attend is proving their point. Someone who can teach themself isn't going to pay to go to a bootcamp, but people who want to switch careers and can't figure it out without help, will.

Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by barry-cotter on Thursday February 20, 2020 @01:39AM (#22373155)
Bootcamps are a kind of school. If we agree that schools can scale why should bootcamps specifically not be able to scale?

I mentioned two solutions, raising entry standards and providing greater support. There are people who can teach themselves. There are very few people who can teach themselves as fast and as well in a self-directed environment as they can learn with a real curriculum and some feedback on their work. If you are confident you can teach yourself in two years or reach the same level of employability after nine months of Lambda School the latter looks pretty good even at $30K once you get a job paying over $50K.

Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by BlueTemplar on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @11:57PM (#22372785)
It is dubious to me that 40+ lectures work well (especially with first year students).
Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by barry-cotter on Thursday February 20, 2020 @01:47AM (#22373199)
I didn't say they work well. But they definitely work. And you can take an existing crappy partial solution like video lectures, and add support structures until you have something that in aggregate works as well as a university course. Plain vanilla MOOCs work well for a small minority, about 10% now, when no one cares at all about them. If you can't quadruple that by actually trying I'd be very surprised.
Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by BlueTemplar on Saturday February 22, 2020 @08:27AM (#22390867)
IMHO we should aim at better than 40%, and I doubt that can be done without actual presence ?