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A comment on A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life. Parent comment

Re:A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life by mindvirus on Friday July 31, 2020 @03:11PM (#24012637)
Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions.

I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular delivering lectures. I don't think the main benefit of being on campus is the lectures or coming up with assignments, instead (as another comment noted) it's the peers and the people you interact with and how they help you learn. And so by automating away the rote part of it and focusing on the creative (research, TAing, peer interaction), it seems like we should be able to create better outcomes.

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Re:A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life by robotresearcher on Friday July 31, 2020 @03:38PM (#24012965)
Why do you think universities still give lectures, as the (contemporary) material has been available in written form for a few hundred years? Thousands of professionals, most of them smart and well-intentioned, have had these choices since the advent of cheap printing. Yet lectures today would be recognizable to the ancient Greeks. Why?
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Re:A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life by mindvirus on Friday July 31, 2020 @03:52PM (#24013145)
That's a good question. I think two things:

1. High quality video recording and transmission is still relatively new technology, and it seems most lectures are audio visual performances.

2. There hasn't been a push for a paradigm shift. Lectures work well enough, and have lots of benefits like creating a gathering of people. But does COVID change that?

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