My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured.

It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you, while you're uprooted like a minor refugee and living who knows where that you didn't plan to.

Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. This is especially true that universities will be prepared this fall, and were not in late winter/early spring.

My sense is that a lot of the schadenfreude and resentment here on HN and elsewhere is due to a general sense that something is really very wrong with higher education at the moment, at least in the US, and wanting to see it radically reformed. I agree, but I think the problems are not really related to the value of in-person degree education vs what you can get online. The real issues have to do with the cost of the education in general, how degrees are viewed in vocational settings, and costs and spending within higher educational institutions. Until those things change, it will take a lot more than SARS-CoV-2 to change things.

For some large classes in certain universities, yes. In the rest it's a regular professor giving a live lecture who is now doing it over Zoom.

> Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students.

Students aren't the only people on campus.

"There will be more openings than usual for tenure-track jobs in a year"

[1] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6926-mayhhsbriefing/...

So no, we're getting lectures over Zoom at the UCs, at least. If my group of friends had the inclination to talk about serious school stuff, and not literally anything else that keeps our minds off of the state of the world, I could ask people about the situation from anywhere from Rice to Stanford to Princeton. But we don't talk about this, because it's heavy, and if we can shrug that burden off for the time we have together, then that's enough. [0]

Going to back to UCSD in particular, the Chancellor's name is particularly acrimonious in connotation. A couple days ago, I wrote a post here on the state of UCSD's much touted dining [1]. Spoiler: it's not pretty. If you look at the privately shared memes, there's a lot of negative sentiment.

[0] Last night's OST: https://youtu.be/Egn_VNVKzI4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?I'd=23034883

I have my doubts that students will be back in the fall. The contagiousness of this virus is not going away, and students (particularly undergraduates, almost all of which live in dorms at Stanford) are far too densely connected for social distancing to be effective.

> major universities doing online stuff have video production crews

Yes, but those crews don't have the bandwidth to suddenly help every professor transition to online teaching in the space of two weeks.

Also, the online versions of courses which those professionally produced videos are part of, are priced lower than the in-person courses which are currently being taught on Zoom. However at my wife’s college the price has not come down, no partial refunds are being given, no deferments are being allowed, and no transitions to part-time are being allowed.

In other words, students get to choose between leaving the course or paying the same vast amount of money for a reduced level of service.

> It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you

No, that's precisely what it is. One week all classes were in person, then the college cancelled all classes for two weeks to transition, then all classes resumed on Zoom. Neither the professors nor the students had any more warning than that. The college did pay for a Zoom Enterprise subscription so that classes aren’t time-limited by Zoom’s free tier, but that was the extent of the help given to professors. Many professors have never used video conferencing before, or have poor WiFi. Many students have no private quiet spaces to join chats because they’re sharing accommodation in a very expensive city. There was inadequate time and no training or help for professors to adjust lesson plans or teaching resources, and library and printing facilities were closed to students.

The college’s entire response was very ad-hoc. This is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, all of us are making it up as we go along. The problem is that this institution is still charging the same sky-high tuition (six figures for a course) to students who are pouring into it their life savings, or going into lifelong debt. Meanwhile the college is delivering less value and sitting on an enormous multi-billion dollar endowment.

We’re not involved in the lawsuit, but we certainly understand where it’s coming from.

I agree with you actually... what I'm suggesting is that the current situation with online teaching isn't really generalizable to long-term experiences of it, or the situation where something is planned with online teaching in mind.

I know things will vary by institution for sure, but for a lot of schools going forward they're going to try to avoid the problems you're mentioning.

My guess is even when students return, there will be things like substituting large lectures with online material, etc. Colleagues of mine at other institutions are being told that going forward training and skills in online instruction is being expected of everyone. This sounds obvious but what it means in practice is that the university probably won't find what happened this past semester acceptable.

There's a lot of issues for sure, but I don't think that the long-term experiences of online instructions can be generalized from this past semester.

The colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use those endowments to hedge exactly this sort of risk.

There were a lot of articles over the past few years about various teeny tiny colleges investing their entire endowment in funds and yelling from the rooftops that they out-performed Harvard's endowment.

The bill is going to come due. Over the next two years, a lot of small colleges that were investing for annual returns instead of for ensuring institutional survival are going to collapse under the quadruple whammy of refunds, lawsuits, decreased enrollment, and decimated endowment.

While I wouldn't argue leaving endowments completely untouched in this situation is necessary, I think saying that "the colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use these endowments to hedge exactly this rot of risk" and criticizing them for investing their endowments is a dramatic oversimplification of the situation.

A small minority of colleges have endowments worth discussing.

To me, it feels like a technical problem. Staring at a small screen in a browser window vs being immersed. Even being able to "see" your classmates or an avatar for them might help.

I'm also an avid educational content watcher, so I've seen and tried to learn from the best educational content creators over the past decade or so. I've also followed the EdTech space, as a hobby, since before the MOOC acronym even came into existence. Combine all of that with tangentially related hobbies like:

* watching and reading about game design and how to incorporate it into traditional learning styles,

* listening to how podcasts and online content is created/delivered,

and that's where I learned about teaching online effectively. I wish I could continue working in this space, but well... that's a story for another time.