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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: 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.
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 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.