Point being, I think college professors overestimate their impact a bit when regarding bachelors/masters topics. All that is too basic to really need some expert domain knowledge and is knowledge which hasn't really changed that much the last 20 years. SVM's were invented in the 90s. Linear algebra some time before that. The rest is industry or postdoc stuff.
I get the "teaching" part but if you are "teaching" a room of 50 student's it isn't really that different from watching a youtube video for them.
- books can partially teach you the "how" and also partially the "why".
- at university, you are being taught how to teach yourself, not necessarily how to perform practical things. Age of the exercise is therefore less relevant.
- ideally, teaching a room full of 50 students is easy better than an online class with 50, which easily should beat a video. Not all classes are like this which is a shame.
Why does this have to be done in a university setting? Is this explicitly conveyed or is this an outcome of going through classes and it’s what it takes to succeed?
Personally, when I was studying at a pretty strong university in terms of global rankings, I didn’t really “learn to learn” from the classes. The most helpful to me was Cal Newport’s blog (from his grad student days), Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange soft questions, hn discussions about learning and studying, and office hours when I explicitly asked Profs how they study, learn, and solve problems.
When I took what I learned from those sources and stopped going to class to instead work through the textbook/course material at my own pace, my grades improved significantly. If I am able to get an “A” without going to class, does that mean the Prof / university successfully taught me the material or whatever lesson(s) were to be learned?
Sorry for the rant, but I feel the default shouldn’t be to go through higher education to learn to learn. (I’m not saying you are saying that.) So, how can these lessons be made available more widely available?
vs getting a self-taught junior role early and not being $100k in debt?
I do think there is a ton of value in getting feedback from a professor or colleague, but you can get pretty far with a book.
Professors who choose to use the full suite of textbook, plus textbook provided slides, plus electronic auto graded homework might save themselves some time, but definitely are less effective educators, in my limited experiences.
A professor would rather spend their time teaching students and finding the best existing book (less expensive if possible, but better quality is more important) so they can use it for teaching.
I'm sure there are professors who have been thinking of writing their own textbook and getting students to buy them ... the downside is apparently writing technical books and textbooks earns less than minimum wage, and that's if you are lucky because of the way revenue split works with textbooks. So they have to charge exorbitant rates on the textbooks to make even a little bit of money. So most professors don't bother and instead use an existing good quality textbook. Not to say there aren't others who would try to write and sell their own.
Interesting, and disturbing.
I am a math professor at a US state university, and thankfully I haven't observed any of this at all. For lower-level classes such as calculus we all use the same book, decided upon by the department as a whole, but when teaching upper-level classes I generally choose as I see fit.
I am curious, what form does this expectation/pressure take? At my university, if administrators tried to do this, my colleagues (at least the tenure-track/tenured ones) would briefly chuckle, delete the email, and not remember it five minutes later.
To a large extent it’s a political institution, with outdated historical baubles forced upon it (administrative nightmare).
We’re at a hinge point in social evolution where perhaps a university is generally unnecessary.
Accurate information discovery, storage, and retrieval is what a university was built for conceptually.
It’s a matter of human history it is mired in old political speech and social construct. Not necessity to execute its purpose.
You have skills to teach people. Teach them. Dispose of the pretense of teaching “in politically normalized settings”.
Go teach. Really historically you’re teaching people who paid the political price. How free.
Of course many college kids are just kids fresh out of highschool with no financial skills or haggling skills so I guess I take back what I said about there not being enough dumb-dumbs to fuel a market for DRM "textbooks". People do still take out loans to finance their English major, after all.
Would solve quite a few problems altogether - people getting more independent and following their interests. You would still have competition, but that would be moderated by actual needs, both in the private and public sector.
Not sure an end to the classic higher-ed system would be a bad thing.
Big tech giving software and courses is one thing, but those come and go... it is like learning to use any tool, hey do you use a DeWalt or Milwaukee? Each are the same but different. In 10 years, you might use a completely different tool, but the tool was just that, it is the ideas and concepts that you are supposed to learn in (and outside of) the classroom. It is my job to teach you _how_ to solve problems, perhaps using the DeWalt or the Milwaukee or both.
Eh, as others have noted, companies have been donating for years, we could argue that grants shape our research too, but as long as professors keep the goal in mind (how do I get students to effectively and efficiently solve problems using available tools of the day), I think our future will be alright.