I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.
When I went to the next class in person, our professor was finishing up the exact same example problem from the lecture video. It could have just been coincidence that that exact lecture lined up the way it did, but it kind of opened my eyes to how silly it was to have professors repeating the same thing year after year.
The peer group in the ivy leagues have been strongly pre-selected to value achievement in academic related pursuits.
Could you supply some examples? I know of Western Governors University, but it only has limited majors.
In particular, do you know of any online degree programs in materials science?
A lot of materials science is highly experimental, so it's not super easy to teach advanced skills. I went to a top 10 materials science school for my PhD, and the absolute vast majority of what I learnt was self-taught. However there is a caveat - I self-learnt by doing, and failing multiple times. The advantage of a high ranked school is that the research facilities are top notch and professors bring in external grants, so the research facilities are always maintained at a high standard through overhead costs.
As a self-taught developer and proud of it, I like this quote. A lot. It's easy to let yourself fall into a toxic mindset where you (and many employers) unjustifiably feel inferior because you didn't take the traditional 4-year college route.
But in less than a decade, hearing of couples who met on Tinder has gone from a novelty to the norm, reminding us of how quickly societal paradigm shifts can happen (for the better, imo).
I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls.
But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking.
I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me.
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† College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.
That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.
If we wanted to make it better to support interactive questions, one could imagine an online system with videos plus "Push now for live help". Or facetime your peers.
To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom).
To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out.
Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.
A few months ago I saw a Lambda School tweet with a giant stack of regulatory filings and I’ve been wondering ever since why I don’t hear much about higher ed compliance. It isn’t one of the areas that immediately comes to mind when I think of “highly regulated industries” (banking, insurance, healthcare, etc) but perhaps it should be.
with regard to 3, i think the larger question is, is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc.
I don't know if finding ways to expand someone's network and connections necessarily means we have to create elite clubs - having networks is vital to success in any way, especially in a system based on merit.
So maybe I was one step ahead of what you were saying. I read it as more along the lines of given the entire set of X people in our education systems, how do we ensure a system that is fair and allows for the maximal human flourishing of each individual member while taking into account our psychology and the negative externalities / side-effects of emergent system dynamics. (Of course this last point, is something we sorely need in many fields - not just education).
Let’s say your average class size is 20 people at a good school and a professor costs the school 200k including benefits per year. Assuming a student takes 18 credit hours and a teacher teaches 12 credit hours that balances out to ~15k per year. But, more than 2/3 of what a teacher spends their time on is outside the lecture such as grading assignments etc. So, removing lectures only saves ~5k per year.
Sure the physical room adds a little, but the average teacher is also far less expensive at most schools.
Then you take a software job that's available but not interesting, and you get pidgeonholed into that field. It's not retail but it doesn't seem great for EEs who didn't go to a top-10 school. I'd be very interested to hear any other EE grad's perspective though.
College is selling you the promise of an opportunity to join the club. You pay an application fee, and then you may or may not get into the club. If you don't get in, they keep your application fee, and you have student loans and a degree but no viable networking.
This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.
First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.
Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too."
tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.