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from the 1984-was-not-a-"how-to"-manual dept.
When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.
"They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change."
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide Wi-Fi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyse their conduct or assess their mental health.
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilise students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.
In response we have:
How to (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's Surveillance System:
This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: "Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands," read the Washington Post link.
Vick countered with an offer to students:
If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system.
We're always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Sunday December 29 2019, @03:17PM (27 children)
So, leave your phone at home or ditch it altogether? There is no law demanding that you must have a mobile phone, is there?
Have an interesting and entertaining read at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/theyre-abysmal-students-are-cell-phones-destroying-the-college-classroom/ [arstechnica.com] which is a good anecdote that not having a mobile phone can make you a lot happier.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Sunday December 29 2019, @03:31PM (19 children)
Get everyone to do this and the whole class can have perfect attendance with just one student and a bag of phones:
When the teacher sees one person in class but the computer says everyone is there, there's no way that they can ever trust the system again.
And wtf is it with taking attendance. We stopped doing that part way through high school.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:43PM (13 children)
Depends on the nature of the school, even some community colleges are more in the business of babysitting than they are "higher education."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @06:57PM (11 children)
I work for a J.C. We get funding from the state based on bodies in classes and labs (and what we can steal from taxpayers through large, and poorly managed, bonds). Next year, pay per student instructional hours is changing to pay based on certain outcomes like percentage of students attaining two year degrees. We are mainly a transfer school (students going on to four year colleges), so the new method is expected to severely impact our funding.
Aruba is always sending sales people over pushing beacons for tracking, and also tracking students based on the APs the clients are visible from. So far, technical staff have been able to keep this nonsense from happening even though we installed Aruba wireless.
But, Palo Alto has been more successful in reaching the creepy fuckers in management. They pushed tracking every connection (full urls) that clients make, and tying them back to usernames. Management pretty much got a boner. Those worthless fucks want us to MiM all SSL traffic, by installing fake trusted certs on all school owned equipment) so management can spy on faculty, staff and students-- even their encrypted communications. I pointed out that this allows *anybody* to MiM these connections since Palo Alto would hide the attackers bad cert behind the school's fake "good" cert-- since privacy and decency arguments fell on deaf ears, but security issues also fell on deaf ears. I'm not allowed in these meetings anymore, but when I stated, "If we are really going to go forward with monitoring all activities by employees and students, we, at least, need to make an announcement that our policies have changed, as this monitoring is contrary to everything we have stated about our policies, in the past." The Executive Director of IT (and husband of the school president; even though our anti-nepotism rules are supposed to forbid this) said, "No, they [specifically talking about faculty] would not understand." So far the creepy pro-spying fuckers have not succeeded, but those of us trying to subvert it (and still keep our jobs*), are not very hopeful, as the managers are talking as if all the decisions have already been made-- they do not want us to do an evaluation of other vendor's products-- which was how we had hoped to thwart this, by showing that vendors that had the features we *need*, but not the spying capabilities cost a fraction of Palo Alto, so there could be no good reason to select Palo Alto.
Suggestions, that do not involve being fired, to push back on this crap are very welcome!
*small town; non-retail/fast-food jobs are scarce.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
Is moving an option?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:41PM
Sadly, not for some years.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:29PM (3 children)
Do you have a local or regional newspaper that will print a letter to the editor (from an Anon)? Or a news line where you can call in a tip (reporters live on suggestions of improper behavior)?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 29 2019, @09:53PM
This. I grew up in a small poor region and even small poor regions have some kind of a local rag. And those small local rags love to pounce on and amplify any kind of controversy. Mine has a section where people write in their gripes and some of them were ridiculously insignificant -- one example was a problem neighborhood dog that kept running loose and pissing on all the neighbors' lawns. Basically a semi-anonymous form of public shaming where everybody including the dog-owner knew exactly what the paper was talking about so the problem was solved in short order.
Given that there are often a lot of religious people in small areas, you could play the "mark of the beast" angle on all the digital tracking and whatnot. Even when done facetiously it will attract enough alarm to get those angry letters and possibly even protests sent their way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:46PM (1 child)
This fails the "not get fired" requirement. It is a very short list of people aware of the project. Whittled down further to people who have expressed misgivings / opposition to the project. It would basically come out as a coin toss between two people. I could see them firing both of us.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @11:08AM
Do it with public information. On every computer, go to https://google.com [google.com] and you can then check the cert. If it doesn't match the expected path, boom, you have a story. Don't talk about internal meethings, who did what. Just the results you, and everyone that looks, is aware of. The certs are fucked. MiTM is obvious. QED.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @08:40PM (3 children)
Nonsense like this just creates a perverse incentive to hand out degrees like candy, which is already a problem. The entire system is a scam, and we need drastically reduce the amount of jobs that require degrees. Employers shouldn't be requiring pieces of paper just to save themselves some money on training and hiring (the former they should do regardless).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:55PM
The administration is way ahead of you. We've already begun contacting students to let them know that if they take just one additional class in subject X, they can get an additional two year degree! Or, these three classes will allow three degrees instead of just one!!!
In fairness, evaluating school performance with simple metrics is probably always going to fail-- regardless of metric. And, going beyond simple metrics is always going to be dismissed as impractical due to the work required, and opportunities for subjective bias.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 30 2019, @04:11PM (1 child)
Totally agree.
85% agree, there are still significant bastions of actual research and learning in academia - they've been in the minority for some time now, but they still exist.
That sounds like the Pol Pot solution: abandon the cities, return to agrarian economy, smelt metals in residential backyards!
How about: we require the ability to perform a job competently, whether demonstrated via degree or apprenticeship / time in grade? When I was coming up through high school, the students were teaching the teachers computer science, and even at University level roughly 5% of the students were at a peer or better level with most of the Comp Sci professors. This isn't just about computer science, either - if you've got 10 years working experience in all areas of a business, getting a paper MBA from some institution is a waste of everybody's time and your money. Government, the courts, and corporations need to back off on the idea that a University degree somehow "qualifies" people for certain job titles and start recognizing alternate forms of learning / experience / demonstration of ability.
Having said all that, I'd say that we need to drastically increase the amount of people appropriately trained for the available jobs and get over the idea that passing the 4 year $100K B.S. gatekeeper is all that it takes to get a job in this economy. The gatekeeper indeed should be rendered irrelevant, but not by sending the boys back to the farms to plow the fields with oxen.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:02PM
Rather, jobs that did not used to require degrees (and indeed do not need degrees at all) now require them. Software development is an example; more such jobs now require degrees, completely unnecessarily.
This is more what I meant. I agree.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @12:00AM
Do not demonstrate their stupidity to them. Let someone else do it, or perhaps anonymously. I did this a while back. The flak was extraordinary.
Remember that the education system is a bubble. A mini-pond with it's own ecosystem including scum. Your goal is to stay alive.
Good luck.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday December 30 2019, @02:33PM
When I attended SIUE I only had one instructor who took attendance, and it was a smallish class with maybe twenty students. But then you could take a bypass test, and if you passed you didn't have to take the class. Late seventies so It's probably different now.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:54PM (1 child)
Or get a phone that doesn't support the app. I recently switched to a KaiOS based phone because I wanted my life back. A fringe benefit is that unless these apps are specifically written for the OS, then they won't even run. I can also turn off data and bluetooth as well as they aren't relevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @12:02AM
Just disable bluetooth permanently?
I don't understand why people leave bluetooth and wireless and network data on all of the time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 29 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
>And wtf is it with taking attendance. We stopped doing that part way through high school.
This is my question too. I went to two different state universities (I transferred halfway through), and I don't remember any class ever taking attendance. If you wanted to learn the material, you showed up. If you didn't think you needed to bother, you could skip it. Attendance was always optional, unless of course there was an exam that day (I guess you could say that was optional too, but you wouldn't pass without it of course). I ended up skipping my freshman Chemistry class lectures because I didn't find them useful, and only attended the once-a-week small-group class led by a TA, because I found that far more useful than the 300-person lecture. I ended up getting an A of course.
This attendance thing sounds like a power play by angry and incompetent professors who aren't doing a very good job teaching and who want to see a lecture hall full of students sitting through their useless lectures, instead of skipping them and just studying the material on their own or with TAs that are far better at teaching than them.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:33PM
> This attendance thing sounds like a power play ...
More like the grade school funding mechanism where my high school got a fixed amount of state aid (money) for every student that showed up for a day. I came in late nearly every day my senior year (no morning classes), but always signed in before 10am which meant that the school could claim a full day of compensation for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @11:43AM
My experience is now close on 20 years out of date, but back then we required it for lab sessions in engineering degree courses. We also required them to show their student ID cards at the lab doors for verification on entry, even if they popped out to the toilet their ID was checked when they came back.
Extreme?, maybe, but long story short, it cured some blatant abuses of the system being perpetrated at the time by a certain group of people more used to buying their degrees than working for them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:09PM
It's become a personal safety issue. Still - why are these infernal devices not required to be switched to airplane mode during lectures?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:44PM
We're talking millenials. Ever see one misplace a phone for an hour? Fentanyl withdrawal looks easier.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday December 29 2019, @05:07PM (1 child)
If I'm reading TFA right, not taking a cell phone will automatically reduce their grade. That is epically evil. And retarded. Basically these professors have become cell phone salesmen. Quite frankly, we are just a few hops away from real laws directly or indirectly requiring people buy cell phones for some absurd reason or another. This shit needs to stop.
And somehow all the consumertards are not only OK with this, but they think you should put up with it too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @12:06AM
A few hops? Ha! We're there right now.
You can't or it is hard to get.. get a driver's licence, connect to gas water or electrity, have a package delivered, get a PO box, open an ISP account, buy a phone with a SIM (go figure), enter some places (yes, they ask for a mobile), stay at a hotel, and the list goes on.
I started keeping track of how often I was asked for my mobile number, licence, DOB, etc. It turns out that every company these days likes to do a credit check on you even if you pay in advance. Which is understandable in some ways, but not in others. If your account, like my ISP, is paid monthly by credit card prior to the service being used then why do they need a credit check? It's out of control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:15PM (2 children)
Higher education over the predecessor of this:
Online anti-plagiarism software. We had to give royalty free rights to all our written works in th english department in order to recieve a grade for the entire length of class. I actually bothered to read the EULA and they didn't take any responsibility, but kept royalty free access to your papers forever. Tell me how teaching students to accept giving away their work royalty free is a good first step to learning to be a productive and suitably conservative member of society who can take full advantage of our all nations best laws to enhance our own situation while providing community benefit, as opposed to a rent seeking collector of other's information by locking in exclusive contracts in lots of backhanded fashions and generally pulling American to new lows.
I'm not saying the plagiarism idea was bad in itself, but having it mandatory, handling by a 3rd party corporation and doing it to the detriment of the students definitely was. For reference the average paper showed up with between 10 and 25 percent platgiarism scores. heard you needed between 50 and 85 to get questioned and anything above that was automatic failure. I don't like cheaters, but I hate parasites and rent seekers far more, and these companies were exactly that, not unlike the educational publishing market and others.
Moving to always on tracking of students was simply the next step of professors writing it in as far as handling their students went. The next will be machine learning the content of papers at A, B, C, D, and F levels and automatically marking the grades without ever looking at them.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:10PM
At the undergrad level at least, even in "creative writing" classes, you're not expressing your creativity like you would trash-writing in a SoylentNews Journal. You're banging out the kind of swill that they want to read and according to their own constraints. It's like being in a creative painting class and losing points because you chose not to paint a generic seascape. Hell, my English 101 professor would have us do write-ups about his own mediocre crap.
I think I've said this before here, but I got an undeserved "A" in that class after other students started complaining to the administrators and when he addressed it I sent him a private message saying something like, almost literally verbatim, "I haven't said anything, I ain't no snitch, I just wanna pass the class and get on with my life."
And that was many years ago. I can't even imagine the horror that students are going through now, where even rights answers in math and computer science are marked down and considered to be racist and heteronormative. I couldn't imagine taking engineering or computer science classes and being marked down or even failing the course for using oppressive constructs such as "master-slave configurations."
You see this in industry after it gets Jewed-up. "Let's not use a 'master-slave' configuration, let's instead call it a 'producer-consumer' configuration because more cheap gadgets need to be sold to more Goyim."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:01PM
Plagiarism is more of an issue when instructors are lazy in developing assignments. While there's no way to completely prevent plagiarism, the writing prompts can be designed so plagiarism is unlikely.
As someone who teaches science classes, I've generally assigned persuasive writing and focused on two types of assignments:
1) Apply your knowledge of a topic and write your opinion about an issue.
2) Examine some data and develop a hypothesis that explains the results. Then justify your hypothesis.
One recent assignment I gave that fits the first category is whether we should be engineering rivers with flood control systems or structures to make them navigable. They're required to write a concise essay stating their position and then defending it. In the process of doing so, they demonstrate to me whether they understand the issues and the underlying science.
For the second example, I presented students with data such as the global average temperature, carbon dioxide concentrations, solar output, and other relevant data sets. I asked them to examine the data and tell me which hypotheses best explain the observed warming since 1970 and why. This is assigned after a couple of lectures in class that discuss the physical processes involved like the greenhouse effect, albedo, aerosols, and things like that.
There's an upper bound on the amount of words. Students are required to fully answer the questions and to cite a certain number of sources. I don't have a specific citation format and I actually allow limited use of Wikipedia. My rule is that other sources must be included besides just Wikipedia. When online sources are involved, I allow students to even just give me the URLs. As long as I would be able to easily find the source they're citing, it's allowed.
I try to make the topics relevant to students so they'll actually want to answer the questions. They're not asked to write five page papers or whatever about topics they're not interested in, with citation formats like MLA that they'll probably never use again. I don't think it's particularly likely that students would easily find other essays to plagiarize that would fit my restrictions. But I also try to reduce the incentive to cheat. I don't require my students to submit their papers to services like TurnItIn, nor have I seen any significant indication that cheating has occurred.
Using services like TurnItIn treats everyone like they're potentially committing academic misconduct and creates a toxic environment. Those services probably aren't necessary, provided that assignments are developed in such a way to discourage cheating.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday December 29 2019, @03:40PM (37 children)
was only the worst teachers took attendance. If they could teach they didn't care if you showed up or not. If they couldn't teach their fragile egos got hurt by seeing the sea of empty chairs any time there wasn't a test.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:24PM (9 children)
The point of a class is to learn certain material. If you already know what the professor is teaching, or you can learn it without showing up, the professor should not care. The only exception should be classes that require a public speaking or theater performance aspect.
It's depressing how many people miss this point.
To be clear, I had to show up to my hardest classes because the material was challenging and the professors were good at explaining it. But an attendance policy is absurd - I could show up in class and daydream, and that gets me a better grade?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:40PM
FTFY
In fairness, I had several professors ( even more than 50% ) who did "get" this. I remember an intro to logic class which had 4 unit tests and a final, I showed up for the first day, the four tests, and was exempted from the final with an A+ for the semester, because it was really all just that obvious. Damn shame that I also had to pay tuition to get those 3 credit hours.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:52PM (5 children)
It's not about the prof, it's about the accrediting body. Most colleges issue degrees based upon clock hours. There are a few colleges out there that issue degrees purely upon having passed certain tests or completed certain projects, but typically it's based on clock hours. If you're not showing up for class, you're gaming the system. As long as a relatively small number of students are doing so, it's not necessarily a problem, but if a large number of students are doing it, the college can have problems with the accrediting body as they're no longer guaranteeing that the students are seeing the intended material.
I realize that this is a libertarian skewed site, but I wish people would spend some time understanding what college degrees are and how they work before complaining as a lot of these things are out of the hands of the individual college. At least not if they want their degrees to be worth more than toilet paper.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 29 2019, @05:59PM (4 children)
I went to two different ABET-accredited engineering schools. There was never any attendance taken. You want me to believe that somehow, students skipping lectures has suddenly become much more prevalent than it was a couple decades ago?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:18PM (3 children)
You assume they're not taking attendance. The profs have a much better understanding of who is and isn't attending class than you realize. In those massive classes they have early on, you're probably right, but in typical classes the prof knows which students are attending.
And if it ever gets to the point where a significant number of students are paying without attending, there will likely be changes made. Students who do well without showing up are abnormal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:32PM (2 children)
Abnormal though they might be, they should have the option of not attending class if they do not need to. And, if someone isn't responsible enough to know whether or not they need to attend class, then they shouldn't receive a degree in the first place; no big loss. The notion that we need to hand out as many degrees is possible is counterproductive and antithetical to education.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
I don't disagree about that, but if students are regularly ditching classes and passing, that's a sign that something is wrong. Personally, I work at a college and we collect as much data as we can so that we have a basis for deciding what support to provide students with.
Personally, I think that simply taking attendance in class and reaching out to students that aren't showing up is sufficient. Using their phones to spy on them is both lazy and unnecessary. It seems to me that there ought to be a less invasive way of correlating attendance to success rates than spying on students that may or may not be able to afford a phone in the first place.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:00AM
>if students are regularly ditching classes and passing, that's a sign that something is wrong.
It's extremely common for college professors to be lousy teachers. It's usually not hard to skip class and focus on studying the textbook, studying with classmates, and getting help from TAs and still pass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:54PM (1 child)
No, it isn’t.
If you’re somewhere rote regurgitation of material is the goal, with respect to professor Dawkins, I suggest you drop-out now and go enroll in a real university.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:07PM
They said nothing to that effect. It's entirely possible to attain a full understanding (as opposed to just having memorized) of the material without needing to attend the lectures.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:36PM (17 children)
I'm struck by the vast improvement in the online learning model vs. the traditional university lecture - office hours - test format.
With online learning, I can zone out while they drone on about all the stuff I already know, I can instantly rewind and replay when they spit out something new to me that I didn't quite grok on the first pass. Having pause and Google immediately available on a 2nd screen when replay isn't enough to "get it"... and, most of all, not having to stop my real life 100% in its tracks for 11 weeks, three days a week for 3 hours just to attend 40 minutes of one-pass lecture at a fixed point in space when that whole day's lecture is more often nothing but review of material I already know.
Of course, there's the lack of camaraderie with fellow students - although with a little bit of effort you can regain that part. There's also the increased ability to cheat, but if this is still about GPAs on a transcript, I think we're doing it wrong.
I got a real social-cultural lesson in my sophomore year Pascal class, taught by a South American professor/greater deity in his own mind. The expectation of rapt attention of all students in the room the moment he became visible in the hallway outside the classroom to any single student in the room, the inability for him to deal with the thought that his students might have a thought other than paying 100% total attention to him while he was present, the mercurial/volcanic temper which would erupt when his expectations in this regard were less than 100% met. I learned far more of value about social differences that semester than any computer programming skills I might have polished.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:48PM (13 children)
Online learning is terrible. It's objectively horrible and it mostly works for diploma mills. Which is more or less what you're describing. If you already know that much content, then you chose the wrong degree. There should be a mixture of things that you know and don't know in most classes.
The other issue is that learning is social. That's inherently true, you ultimately have to construct the knowledge relevant to what you're doing. And in order to properly do that, you really need to be working with other people. Not to mention that when you do get your degree, it's going to be inherently missing the practice with collaboration that most employers expect. For a graduate degree, that's not as big of a problem, but for 2 and 4 year degrees, it's a real issue.
The traditional method of delivery in college worked fine until we started raising children that didn't mature until a decade later, had no study skills and were only going because they were told they needed a degree to be successful. I saw it every day I was sitting in on college classes last quarter. Students that wouldn't show up for class, randomly leave during the middle and not take any sort of notes. Many of them were only there because college was being paid for by the government and the college is an open access institution. As in, they have to take anybody who shows up with money.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @09:33PM (9 children)
It is horrible if it's not rigorous. Many of our traditional colleges and universities are already diploma mills.
So it's bad to understand the subject matter?
What if you simply have a complete understanding of the material? Schools aren't the only way to attain an education. Sadly, many people who already have a deep understanding of the material have to waste their time attaining a degree because employers are short-sighted bigots who just use pieces of paper to filter people out, whether they could effectively perform the job or not. The result is a disastrous 'education' system where pieces of paper are handed out like candy and schools are increasingly controlled by corporations. This article is one example of the consequences.
This one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work. There are many people who are quite introverted and do not learn effectively in traditional authoritarian schooling environment, and can even be hindered by such environments.
I don't think you understand what the word "inherently" means. It's entirely possible to educate yourself outside of a traditional schooling environment while also collaborating with other people. Free Software exists, for example.
And why are we focusing on what employers expect? That is not education. Our education system should not be controlled by employers and corporations. Employers would be perfectly happy if we just trained people to be obedient drones who know only enough to do the job expected of them, but didn't have enough critical thinking skills to question the status quo. We are quickly approaching that nightmare.
No matter how one attains their education, it should be rigorous and academic in nature.
Worked fine for some people. Again, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. If traditional schooling works for you, then you're free to use it. Just know that it doesn't work for everyone.
I don't understand why saying 'a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work' is so controversial when it comes to the topic of education. If it were any other topic, people would agree that it's obvious that there is no approach that will work for absolutely everyone, because people are so diverse. But when it comes to schooling, so many people are determined to force everyone into a box, and discard them completely if they don't fit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:37PM (8 children)
Online learning is horrible regardless of the degree of rigor involved. Drop it rates are much, much higher than with other formats.
Yes, knowing the subject matter ahead of time is bad. It's a waste of money if you're so far ahead that you expect not to learn anything in class like the ggp is suggesting. Not to mention that the school is pushing an accredited body of knowledge/ skills which may not match what he was expecting.
One size fits all works fine. Introversion has nothing to do with it, learning is a social process. I'd love to claim that it wasn't, but that would be denying over a century of work. Knowledge is a social construct and trying to learn on your own is always going to limit the grasp you can achieve.
It's also possible that I could be president of the USA, doesn't make it likely and it doesn't mean that hr is going to check to see that I'm not,. The main purpose of having a degree is that you don't just have the body of knowledge, but that it's accredited. That means they know roughly what to expect ahead of time abs you've proven to have yourself together at least enough to finish the program.
The one size fits ask approach works just fine. Students with special needs generally get assistance. Only the lazy and unmotivated can't figure out how to make it work. I see it all the time. Students blame the school or the prof, but in at least 9 times it of 10, they're not doing what they were asked to do and they're not accessing support services either. You can't credibly claim that the one size fits all approach isn't working when the students that fail aren't using any of the provided assistance and aren't even doing the work.
Referring to it as a one size fits all approach is a but misleading as the students are expected to customize the studying to their own needs outside of class. The lecture itself is merely there to highlight the important points and fill in the gaps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:08PM (4 children)
That's could be an indication of the lack of quality of current online schools, or something else. Drop out rates mean little, however.
Being so deeply interested in the material that you're able to learn it at a high level by yourself is never a bad thing. Supposedly, college is supposed to teach you to 'learn how to learn,' but when people demonstrate that they can do so, suddenly it's a bad thing. How dare you learn in a non-approved way! Individualism will not be tolerated.
In a world of almost 8 billion people, your statement is simply laughable. There are plenty of people who are not served effectively by traditional schooling, but who could learn either by themselves, and/or in collaboration with others outside of traditional schooling.
It can have everything to do with it. Same for many people who are not neuro-typical. The fact that you learn best by attending a classroom full of people doesn't mean that works for others.
A century of disaster. Our school system is an abomination, and doesn't even serve the people who do well in such an environment as much as it could. Both the left and the right overwhelmingly agree with that, but they differ on how they want to fix it. The takeover of traditional schooling by corporations has made existing problems even worse.
In reality, it depends on the field and the individual person. For many, traditional schooling limits the grasp that they can achieve.
False equivalence. There is one president, and it is plainly obvious whether someone is or is not the president. Rigorously interviewing applicants to determine whether or not they are capable of doing the job is a much different matter.
Furthermore, HR drones - who treat people as disposable resources and hire for jobs which they do not even remotely comprehend - are also part of the problem. Many jobs that used to not require degrees now do so due to greed, and this comes at the expense of quality and harms education.
This is what I mean by forcing everyone into a box. If someone doesn't fit the system, then it couldn't be evidence that the system doesn't work for everyone; no, it's just that that person doesn't want it to work hard enough. That's an unfalsifiable argument.
Maintaining that everyone should attend traditional schooling in order to attain an education is a one-size-fits-all approach, by definition. Also, you have yourself referred to it as a one-size-fits-all approach in other parts of your comment, which I have quoted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:39PM (3 children)
Sigh, what you're saying is bullshit. It sounds good, unless you actually have to concern yourself with actually educating people at which point, it becomes very obvious that it's horseshit. The process by which people learn is remarkably consistent across individuals and cultures.
People learn more or less the same way, there are no learning styles, there's little evidence that there are significant numbers of people that have learning processes that differ vastly from the norm. You do see individuals with sensory integration issues, learning disorders and other disabilities that may require some modification, but that's really not what you're getting at and in most cases, it's a matter of changing pacing or representational schemes rather than the process itself. The process itself is still the same, it's just that due to sensory problems, limits on memory or mental organization, they may need some scaffolding to get it into the head in a reasonable way.
This whole notion that people need individualized programs and various choices is just not something that's well supported in the literature. People who insist that they have learning style X or need modality Y regularly violate their claimed needs when left to their own devices.
I've been working in higher ed for many years, I'm about to get a master's on top of my advanced certificate in TESL and I think I know a thing or two about education. The need for personalization and individualization is more theoretical. It's not something that has much support and it's not something that I see very much of in the field. I work with students exactly the same way in nearly every case and it's rarely the case that the student needs something special.
I"m supposed to be personalizing things for the student needs, but in practice, only a small percentage of the students need that and even then it's primarily because they've convinced themselves that they need personalization, not because they actually need it. Those are the students that refuse to do any work at all unless they already know the answer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @05:27AM (2 children)
Except if you ignore all of the individuals for whom your system does not work, which you've made clear is your preferred tactic. It's not a sign that the system doesn't work for everyone universally (a laughable concept), but a sign that the individual has failed the system. That's a very authoritarian black-and-white way of thinking.
And yet many people are still hindered and scarred by the traditional schooling environment. Learning styles are irrelevant.
I'm not speaking about individualized programs or learning styles, but about self-education. Attending lectures and classes does not work for everyone. Not everyone should go to college or university, but that doesn't mean they have to remain uneducated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @02:49PM (1 child)
Precisely who are these people? Even with multiple diagnosed learning disorders, significant brain damage, mental illness and a near complete inability to read materials that aren't interesting to me or generally manage my time, I was able to get through 6 years of combined under grad and graduate level work on my own. You're whole argument is based on a myth. "College isn't working for somebody " is code for they didn't do any of the work consistently and didn't seek any help. These people aren't typically doing better elsewhere and when they do, it just confirms the fact that the college wasn't the problem.
Let's be clear, college isn't hard. You show up for class, do the assigned work and pass. These people for whom the system allegedly doesn't work are practically non-existent. They're mostly people who don't want the degree in the first place and make no effort to get help or do the work. Every quarter I deal with students that are lazy, unmotivated and lacking the study skills and they generally succeed if they get the help they need. These days there is such a sickening level of support given that there's no excuse for any but the most disabled to fail to complete their program.
The students that ultimately drop out aren't doing so because of the format, they're doing it because they didn't want the degree in the first place or their lives were upended outside of class. And effect that latter one is less common as colleges provide more support for other areas of student success.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:25PM
I'm not sure how that would help. Even if specific names were named, it would be anecdotal, and just as readily dismissed by your top-down authoritarian one-size-fits-all thinking.
Good for you, but you're ignoring all of the people for whom that is not true.
I would say the same to you.
Maybe some of them didn't do any of the work consistently because college isn't a good environment for them, and they would be better served attaining their educations via other means? This is what I mean by ignoring all forms of evidence that college doesn't work for everyone.
See, the thing is, I'm not claiming that college isn't right for anyone; I'm simply saying it isn't right for everyone. Your black-and-white thinking does not represent reality.
Especially now that it's becoming increasingly controlled by corporations, increasingly geared towards simply pleasing employers, and increasingly focused on handing out as many degrees as possible. None of that is going to result in a quality education for the people who would otherwise be best served by the college system. Receiving a degree is thus not necessarily a sign of success; a high-quality education is a sign of success.
I'm an employer working in software development and I have hired many autodidacts (as well as people with degrees). The vast majority of them knew that college and university wouldn't be right for them, and simply chose to not to attend to begin with. You, of course, don't see these people, because they're not even part of the system to begin with. So, people with personalities that would not interact well with the traditional schooling system often choose to opt-out in the first place. Even more troubling, anyone who is part of the system but who doesn't do well in the system is simply dismissed as irrelevant. That is selection bias.
Getting a degree also doesn't equal getting a high-quality education. Education should be the goal, not degrees. Your priorities are out of order.
Sounds like the system wasn't working for those people, then, regardless of the reason.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday December 30 2019, @01:48AM (2 children)
It's a rational response when grades are curved to 75 so that 50% of each class must score below that on average! If you know other students already know the material, and they'll be part of the curve then you've got to learn the material prior to taking the class. Which is as dumb as the tactics I saw to force the GPA down. (trick questions, questions over material not covered in that course or any pre-reqs, questions over material specifically mentioned as unimportant or 'you won't be tested over', material several chapters ahead, material from other fields... saw lots of stuff done)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
In the nearly 10 years of college I've taken, I've never had a class that was curved in that sense. Occasionally, I've had instructors adjust the top end, but never force a percentage to fail regardless of ability . Perhaps going to a better school would avoid that problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:35PM
I wonder how many 'better schools' there really are? At what point does the lack of good schools become an issue with the system itself, which is of course never to blame? How much of a quality gap does there need to be between the 'best' schools and the average school before we acknowledge that there is a serious issue?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @01:20PM (1 child)
You're omitting a lot of realities, good and bad.
1. At the pre-college age, a lot of people live in awful school districts. An engaging lecture on Khan Academy beats a traditional classroom taught by Mr. Phone-It-In, or a traditional classroom full of gang members.
2. Collaborative learning requires a teaching system that supports it and small enough classroom sizes for the student groups to be manageable. I went to elementary school and high school 30 years ago, and we did small group projects in a few literature classes in the last year of high school. That was all. Every single other bit of our education was so-called traditional lecturing.
3. Online learning platforms can choose the best lecturers they find in each topic and have them present, and then adjust the learning material based on student and graduate feedback.
4. You can do collaborative projects with online learning using Hangouts, Skype, and so forth. It's rare you need to be in person with someone to work together, unless you're conducting a science experiment.
5. I don't think employers think too much about the college degree and learning environments. I think the biggest benefit is the idea you have some general idea of the field of study in your major and more importantly you showed up for however many years it took and didn't drop out because you were too sickly, lazy, or busy partying.
Last but not least, watch out for those rose colored glasses. Something tells me the 1960s flower-power-LSD kids did not mature a decade earlier than we did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:33PM
It's an issue that employers are not thinking too much about someone's actual level of education. That shows that degree requirements are more about elitism and credentialism than education.
Also, there are plenty of people who are lazy and/or busy partying who end up receiving degrees, especially with increasingly perverse incentives to hand out as many degrees as possible. That's the truly terrifying part, not the drop-outs.
(Score: 2) by danmars on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:23PM
I took some online courses circa 2007 when I was in college, and my girlfriend took a bunch more circa 2015, and they were at least as good as the in-person classes, but with the added benefit that you didn't have to participate at a specific time and place that required you to adhere to a specific schedule. There is a lot more participation if you have to post in writing about something, and then you have to respond to classmates' posts, than for you to all sit in a lecture together or go to a group thing where you may not necessarily get randomly grouped with people who have a clue what they're talking about. Plus you have none of the awkwardness of needing to deal with people in person. I fully support 100% of General Education / Humanities Requirements classes being online. Maybe there's some value to having your specialization classes in person, but there wasn't any for gen ed requirements. And I've seen specialization classes online, and they seem to work just as well.
I don't know who hurt you, but online university classes are not all terrible.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:20PM (1 child)
Let's be clear: the ideal learning model is one on one learning with a professor who is both an expert in the material and in pedagogy. Unfortunately, that is not practical or cost efficient, so you end up with one professor in a subject paired with multiple students, but not enough that the professor cannot provide personalized education.
That's the problem with most "universities", where the professors do research and by contract are required to teach classes (esp. to undergrad) where they lecture (not teach!) to an auditorium of hundreds of students.
I had the fortune of going to a great liberal arts college where the class sizes ranged from 5 to 30, and the traditional university lecture - office hours - test format worked just fine.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 30 2019, @03:22AM
That beats the shit out of my university with an "average class size of 9 students," because - if you know how averages work, you can have 101 classes in that university, 100 graduate level specialty classes with a 1:1 student-teacher ratio, and a single massive freshman lecture hall with one professor for 809 students - that's 101 classes with a total of 909 students in them et. voila': average class size 9 students. Nevermind that 89% of students are experiencing horrific ratios, the published number is 9:1. Of course, I exaggerate, slightly. First semester I think I had 2 classes in the major 100+ student lecture bowl format, most of the rest were in the 35-50 class size range (though the published average was 9:1). The upper level graduate classes I attended later tended to be around 5 or 6 students each.
Yeah, it worked fine for me in the 1980s too - when there wasn't much of an option, I was in my late teens and didn't have anything else to do with my life besides attend school. Here, now, I feel like I can get as much quality learning out of a (well prepared) free online class with lecture videos, robot graded lab exercises and quizzes, at least in computer/math/science/engineering oriented subjects. The main point is: I can slot those learning hours in when they're available in MY existing life, slow days at work or home, not having to restructure my life, and the lives of everyone who depends on me now, around class.
If you want to practice the fine art of literature interpretation and similar things, yeah, that's still best done face to face in a small room with a small number of students paired against a wise old man - and that's going to require some schedule-structure.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @10:27AM
At my university, we had online tests and apparently there was a glitch with the testing software where you could click on all the answers until you got the right one, and then hit the "Send" button.
Our professor published all of our marks, and we had a few students that were at 30% for every other test, and then suddenly they shot up to 100%, and then back down to 30%.
I brought this up to him, and he hadn't noticed it. He was pissed about it, and he made sure that the glitch was fixed.
I thought that these students would have been ousted or had some sort of disciplinary action taken against them, but nothing was done about it...nothing! So, the official school policy of not cheating was all bull, and they just wanted our money.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:40PM
You're paying for the courses, if you choose not to show up, that's really on you. Which is a large part of why the profs don't care. At the college level, students are assumed to be mature enough to know that they need to show up for class and pay attention.
I"m not really sure why colleges are even bothering with this other than the fact that completion rates are a powerful marketing tool. If 96% of students are completing the coursework, that's something they'd be proud of rather than something like 60%. There's also often times pressure from the state to get completion rates up and to have students completing their degrees within 4 years of starting.
Also, the students that don't show up are usually either the ones that don't need to show up to learn the material or are too lazy/stupid to succeed without a ton of work on the part of the prof. This particular change is almost certainly coming from somebody higher up than the profs or even deans.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @06:52PM
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:05PM (6 children)
I saw these types of comments when Slashdot ran this story, also. It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
It's definitely important that the instructor be enthusiastic about the course and be able to explain the material clearly and simply. While that definitely makes a difference, even the most attentive students have limited attention spans and will lose focus over the duration of a lecture. Students are more likely to attend if they feel they're actually learning and they're being prepared for the course assessments. Passive learning isn't a particularly effective way to teach students.
It's much more effective to have shorter periods of passive learning punctuated by active learning exercises. This can be as simple as posing a problem to students in class and asking them to collaborate with other students to solve it. Peer instruction is quite effective in helping students learn. The instructor can assess in real time whether students are understanding the material with student response systems like clickers. Students learn more through active learning than through passive lectures. Breaking up the monotony of passive learning also increases student attention during the periods of lecturing.
Another common recommendation is that students are more likely to take active learning exercises seriously if credit is attached to them. This is as simple as asking students to submit their answers online while also retaining a copy for their reference. Of course, giving credit for the active learning exercises also effectively mandates attendance. I suppose the instructor could excuse any students from the active learning exercises if they miss class, only calculating the grade based on assessments they were present for. However, is it really the responsibility of the instructor to be accommodating of students who decide they don't want to attend class?
Should attendance be mandatory for classes that teach solely with passive learning? Perhaps not. But active learning is far more effective at teaching students. Active learning generally does require that students attend class. As I noted, there are reasons to attach credit to those exercises. Additionally, requiring students to submit their responses provides useful feedback to the instructor.
It's worth noting that this is very different from an attendance grade. Students are expected to attend class, but receive points for the work they do in class. These in-class exercises should also generally prepare students for homework assignments and exams. A good instructor, one who incorporates active learning, should care about whether students are attending to participate in the active learning exercises.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:38PM (5 children)
If someone demonstrates that they understand the subject matter by passing the exams and assignments, then that is what ultimately matters. That's the entire goal.
What works for some (attending class) might not work for others, so one-size-fits-all solutions shouldn't be imposed via an authoritarian decree. Forcing people into boxes is in opposition to education and individualism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:45PM (2 children)
“That's the entire goal.”
No. It isn’t.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @02:17AM (1 child)
You're obsessed with compliance and conformity, not learning. If someone can demonstrate they know the material, that's all that should matter. You are interested in promoting conformity and assimilation, not education.
Just because "international students" struggle to understand the material doesn't mean people like me should have to suffer through going to class. I don't want to sit in a room with a bunch of "international students" just because some administrator wants to push their leftist ideas. Make no mistake, higher education is all about indoctrinating youth with leftist ideas.
And the "international students" you reference in your other comment are really a bunch of dark-skinned morally and intellectually deficient freeloaders who want to mooch off of America before destroying it. Niggers, kikes, towelheads, wetbacks, pakis, dune coons, curry niggers, chinks, and all other darkies hate America. The darkies hate us, which is why I hate all of them. My hate is strong and I'm damned proud of it. In fact, my hate is getting stronger as I talk to you people.
Those of you who have been indoctrinated with leftist propaganda in college will certainly accuse me of being racist. However, I'm not racist, nor is there anything racist about my comment. There is no valid reason that American taxpayers should be paying to educate chinks and curry niggers, who have nothing to contribute to our country. It is inexplicable that leftists want to educate sand niggers in American schools, the same bastards who killed thousands of Americans in the cowardly 9/11 attacks. Americans should not be educating the next generation of terrorists.
Attendance is about conformity, just like leftists want everyone to conform to their warped worldview. I don't want to sit through some professor pushing leftist propaganda when I already know the material and can learn more by reading the textbook than by listening to his nonsense. I have far better things to do than listen to the leftists in the ivory tower insisting that I conform with things like liking niggers and believing that humans are causing global warming. It's my right if I don't like niggers and nobody has any business demanding otherwise. And it's obvious to anyone with a clue that the sun is responsible for global warming and human activity is a drop in the bucket compared to solar activity.
Stop pushing your leftist propaganda in these comments. It's clear that you've been spamming this story with your demands of conformity and attendance in class.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @03:46AM
Good christ you’re a loonie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:48PM (1 child)
Nope, the only group I see where that makes sense is with international students who may not have the necessary language skills. Skipping classes is shooting yourself in the foot in virtually all other cases. Even if the prof is just reading out of the textbook, at bare minimum, you're gaining insight into what's going to be on the test and what's important.
The lectures haven't been the sole source of information in at least a century, the prof is there to limit the rate of information to something manageable.
As far as individualism goes, what a load of bollocks. If you think sitting through lectures is a box, you have no business going to college as it's a waste of your money and their resources. The phone is definitely not cool, but if you can't figure out how to take the information from the course and make it your own, then you're too fucking stupid to accomplish anythng.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @05:08AM
Except if you already have an understanding of the material.
Acting as though everyone must do so is trying to force everyone into a box.
The point is, maybe someone has already done so, and thus don't necessarily need to attend the classes.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:22PM (1 child)
The people working on the campus portal app were asked for that feature. They flatly refused, told the boss that it was unethical, the informed the unions (yeah we have different unions depending on your diploma, it's a weird kind of caste system) and that was it. We never heard about it afterwards.
Now try the same thing without union protection, you'll become a pariah if you somehow manage to keep your job.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:42PM
It's not really a caste system, different unions tend to specialize in different types of work. I used to be in the SEIU and it was a bit of a mess as the nurses, janitors and security personnel didn't always have much alignment. The nurses made the most and the union focused more on their issues. In many ways, it would have been better had the nurses been separated from the janitors and security personnel as it would have removed the skew.
If you look at some large unions, the types of workers covered can be rather diverse, but having diverse workers can lead to problems like this where there's a built in incentive to focus more on some of the workers than others.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday December 30 2019, @04:17PM
https://archive.is/eSLh7 [archive.is]
https://archive.is/6uwoN [archive.is]
https://archive.is/GBoQt [archive.is]
If it were my class, I would kick anyone out unintelligent enough to have a smart phone on the first day of class, and I would confirm that with every electromagnetic means available.
What if I told you the internet made the university obsolete?
It did.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Tuesday December 31 2019, @01:37AM
There is more to it than just the smartphones. At this point, for any larger class, almost all written content is shared via a course management system/portal/what-have-you. In part this is because students now demand copies of slides, etc, in advance of the day's lecture (I have commented on this in other SN threads). Other aspects encouraging the adoption of these systems include online quizzes (marked by machine), and class bulletin boards.
What most students don't realize, is that as the instructor, I am also given access to their login behaviour. So, I can see which students have never logged in; which ones compulsively check for new content every 20 mins; those that log in once at the beginning of term and never log out. I can see a record of each and every page load.
Now, while I can only see this for the classes that I happen to teach, the faculty, and higher up, university admins, can see these details for all students at the institution. No doubt, they can also see my instructor login activity.
Some valid arguments can be made for why these trends are good and helpful. But there are also just as many, for why this is dark and scary.