Higher education is generally a poor deal. A good course at a good institution will boost a career but the vast majority of higher education options are worthless or detrimental. Despite this, people are willing to get themselves into maybe US$100,000 of educational debt. Meanwhile, Ivy League faculty salary often exceeds US$150,000. What do students get for a lifetime of debt? Weed-out classes with a 50% failure rate then top grades awarded with abandon. An increasingly long-tail of third-tier academic journals which are full of bogus results. (A racket within a racket.) Deluxe gymnasiums and student accommodation with en-suite bathrooms. And, in some cases, pressure on staff to ignore plagurism; often due to financial or cultural reasons.
Yes, there's the social aspect and in-person interaction but why is online education seen like a poor substitute along with correspondence courses, vocational courses and community colleges? And here's a humdinger: Why don't the best educational establishments have ISO9000 certification? Are the inputs too variable or is the process too scattershot? Actually, how efficient is education? Are these guys with the US$150,000 salaries even 1% efficient at teaching? I doubt many of them care.
So, what's the Shannon channel capacity of education. Who knows? That's a really poor state of affairs. In the 1940s, telcos knew more about their operational efficiency than educators know now. So, how effective could an education be? How much can we accelerate learning? With CAL [Computer Aided Learning] running since the 1960s we should achieve small miracles. Well, it works brilliantly in limited domains, such as numeracy and vocabulary but the bulk of CAL, educational videos, are a sea of unending dross. So far, I've sat through 18 out of 42 hours of Buckminster Fuller and nine hours of Stanford cultural history. Computer history was the most enjoyable. There's no shortage of content. It ranges from whizzy edutainment to excruitiating virtual blackboards.
As a comparison, I took the small and concise topic of buffer bloat to see what had risen in popularity. Jim Gettys (who you may know from RFC2616) remains dull but at least I didn't have to look at him. The remainder seemed to be aimed at online gamers wanting to reduce latency. I repeated the exercise with Hamming codes. The best by far was also the longest by far: Richard Hamming explaining how he formulated the most important idea of his life. The worst was from the Neso Academy and could easily be mistaken for the Fonejacker mixed with Look Around You.
How much of these presentations consist of dead time, reading text aloud or drawing diagrams? At best, about 30% - which is shocking when presentations have 100,000 views or more. The more polished Kurzgesagt takes more than 1000 hours to produce one hour of output. CGPGrey takes more than 120 hours per hour of output. But many of the Khan Academy clones take one hour to produce one hour of output. That's an externalized cost when basic structure and editing would save significant viewing time.
So, is it possible to make dense, factual content which is fun, informative and structured? Yes. Have slides with concise text and diagrams. Remove silence. Remove "um" and "ah" sounds. Even if it takes 120 hours per hour of output, students will be almost 50% more effective and, for any given presentation, *total* exertion reaches break-even before the 500th viewing.
Excluding assignments and practical experience, 400 hours of structured presentations would take someone from high-school to graduate. If skimming, it wouldn't even require 400 hours of viewing. That's because the cool kids watch video at 1.5 times speed or double speed. So, a minimum of 200 hours would be required. That could fit around a full-time job; maybe during travel on public transport. So, it may be possible to get from layperson to physicist within 10 weeks.
What would happen if we had thousands of hours of presentations and millions of students? The curious? The unskilled? The unemployed? The imprisoned? Stuck in a refugee camp with 100,000 people? Well, 1080p video consisting of slides plus speech requires less bandwidth or storage than pop music. Yes, it is less than 1MB per minute. So, 400 hours of presentations requires a network file server with less than 24GB of storage. 40 courses with no common content require less than 1TB of storage and zero external bandwidth.
The faddish blockchain enthusiasts suggest that digital education can start from a foundation of digital identity but I'd start from digital education alone. Regardless, I hope you consider accelerated learning as practical in some form even if you dispute the details. The best part is accerated learning can be organized by volunteers who never meet. Retirees with a lifetime of experience. Agoraphobics. People in remote locations. People with illness or disability. Or just people who love to share the details of our technological society.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @03:15AM (7 children)
Before degree: you're underqualified for every available job.
After degree: you're overqualified for every available job.
Good luck with that! It's a scam to fuck you both ways.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:40AM (3 children)
That's why it often times makes more sense to get one of those liberal arts degrees that people around here get hard knocking. They don't prepare you for one specific job, they prepare you for the usual learn on the job and change with the times environments that we have now. Unless you're looking for a job in a field where there is a mandatory degree, you're better off getting one that's more general and teaches you how to learn.
Also, it's frequently not the college's fault that the graduates are well-educated morons. They can provide and education, but some people are just so intellectually lazy and stubborn that they'll do what they need to get the degree, and then be less useful than a bag of fertilizer afterwards.
Not to mention the fact that what looks like a promising job now may likely be hard to get or worthless in a few more years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @06:01AM (1 child)
I'd try that, but if the only job that hadn't been outsourced by the time I graduated was barista, I'd still be the butt of jokes.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:12PM
Then go into robotics so that you can automate away the job of barista.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @10:06AM
They don't prepare you for one specific job
Nor should they; that is not what education is about. We should not be preparing people for jobs at all, except maybe at trade schools. If someone is able to self-educate and they have a deep understanding of the theories of a particular field, they will be able to tackle just about any job related to that field if they train themselves a bit. The vast majority of colleges and universities do not provide you with such an education and are little better than the K-12 system that nearly everyone already knows is terrible.
Unless you're looking for a job in a field where there is a mandatory degree, you're better off getting one that's more general and teaches you how to learn.
It depends on the person. Some people are better off self-educating. You're certainly not better off getting a degree if you go to some abysmal community college, at least not if what you seek is a good education. If you're a parasitic job seeker, then maybe you'll be better off no matter what, since lazy employers are often fooled by people who merely possess degrees.
Also, the vast majority of people don't actually need to learn how to learn, having been born with that ability already; that's just a tired meme. When you get into the specifics of what they are actually doing, that is not it at all. It's just an oversimplification.
Also, it's frequently not the college's fault that the graduates are well-educated morons.
It's not only the college's fault that the graduates are frequently uneducated morons, but they certainly played a part in that process by failing to weed out the garbage and failing to have stricter entrance requirements. It's also the graduate's fault for going to a college when that is simply not the type of environment they belong in to begin with; they are usually primarily interested in jobs and money, and not academics.
Colleges and universities should be for academics, not for people who are primarily interested in making money. Sadly, that 'American dream' nonsense has convinced many that everyone who breathes needs to go into higher education even if they are not academics at heart, and the already low standards at many of these institutions have dropped even farther as a result.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @05:24AM
Not in US. After degree, you are still unqualified, just with a big debt already.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday May 14 2017, @09:53AM
Schooling is the scam. Schooling often does not actually supply you with an education, and even interferes with your ability to get one. Do not confuse the two things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @05:23PM
After degree: you're overqualified for every available job.
Not if you get an H1B degree. Those are a golden ticket to a job (a job that has parallels to indentured servitude at the mercy of your employer).