Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

Re:Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ ab... by Wowfunhappy on Thursday April 30, 2020 @04:00PM (#23035411)

> Charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.

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.

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Re:Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ ab... by alistairSH on Thursday April 30, 2020 @05:07PM (#23036134)

I was just about to post something similar. I attended a large state U and I got the most out of smaller lectures/discussions than the large classes with 300 students. FWIW, only the most introductory classes had large head counts. Everything 200 level and above was somewhere between 20-50 students (and most had an associated discussion with 10-15 students, usually led by a grad student, but sometimes the professor).

That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.

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Re:Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ ab... by lowbloodsugar on Thursday April 30, 2020 @04:37PM (#23035792)

OTOH, being able to hit rewind is invaluable. Or hitting rewind, googling a bit, and then continuing. My first online course was Andrew Ngs when he at Stanford, and being able to rewind and google whatever he just said was fantastic. It also meant I could play it at 1.5x speed for the bits I had no trouble with.

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.

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