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High School Students Not Waiting For Schools To Go Online
lpress writes UCLA conducts an annual survey of first-time, full-time college freshman and this year they included questions about the use of online education sites like Coursera and The Khan Academy. It turns out that over 40 percent of the incoming freshmen were frequently or occasionally assigned to use an online instructional website during the past year and nearly 70 percent had used online sites on their own. Students enrolling in historically black colleges were much more likely than others to have used online teaching material. They also compile a "habits of mind" index, and conclude that "Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning." The survey covers many other characteristics of incoming freshmen — you can download the full report here
Of course hose who push them selves are more likely to succeed. What kind of idiot do you have to be to not know that?
It used to be that those who went to college were the ones. Then masters and phd's. Now you need a 4 year degree to work at best buy. Soon you will need a college degree to pick blue berries.
The question is how high can we raise the bar before it collapses? Already we have to import illegals to do jobs that teenagers should be doing.
Does that mean what I think it means?
Just want to point out that iTunes U has amazing and free content available to anyone with iTunes. It's unbelievable how easy it is to learn almost anything you want. If you're not taking advantage of it you must be suffering from (in the words of an old colleague) recto-cranial inversion.
I'm genuinely jealous of younger students who have access to these resources. Of course not everyone is going to take advantage of them, but the options for independent learning were severely limited before these movements.
What do people think about the potential for these movements to address the growing costs of quality higher education? Of course Coursera and The Khan Academy are not good enough to be replacements for existing systems (yet), but what is missing and how can we close the gap?
I was under the impression that you could buy a copy of Microsoft Windows for whatever PC you already have and run iTunes in that.
have already figured out that traditional schools are not going to teach you shit. They just give myopic lectures and proctor exams. That's it.
Khan Academy et al are actually making knowledge accessible to people who want it through videos, exercises, and through student feedback and collaboration.
All these computer classes are great for the natural learner, the 20% or so of students who have that ability. But these are the same students who have been graduating high school for year, who can go to the public library and learn everything that they would if they got an MBA(one of good friends did this), who, like reported in the NYT today, did not complete school but invented Scotch Tape.
While we need to make sure not to apply negative pressure to these kids, which means to let them take the online courses, give them independent study, allow to explore, we also cannot use this an excuse to stop the more expensive education of the kids who really need to be taught. The correlation between online courses and independent skills(Or as it says, habits of the mind) in no way indicates that online courses teach independent skills. Sure, you could put a kid a computer and give him an F if she does not complete statistics, but is that teaching? Some would say yes. I would say we are accepting that most of kids will be semi-skilled laborers without the jobs to insure a high rate of employment, which means more welfare checks.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
> . Students enrolling in historically black colleges were much more likely than others to have used online teaching materia
What? Didn't you get the message? It is "black culture" that holds black kids back. There is no way that black kids would circumvent crappy schools and search out other ways to get an education. Not possible, their culture forbids it!!!!!
The blog about the second link (2013 in particular http://www.heri.ucla.edu/brief...) doesn't really add much value.
The UCLA report, however, is pretty interesting. Many of the application strategies described were the same my daughter (entering college in September) and wife and I adapted. We told her that the mortgage crisis of 2008 was triggered by a bunch of adults who were told at 17-18 that signing student debt notes for university was rational and wise, and that it so confused people that it's no surprise they never saved to buy cars or houses and brought the whole economy down. We figured that more and more applicants were coming from overseas, which is a good thing as otherwise the middle tier colleges in the USA will collapse. Like the averages in the report, we told her to apply to many more colleges, as the cost of the application (about $100 per college) was probably less than the standard deviation between financial aid offers from the 1/4-1/3 of institutions she'd get admitted to.
If you are going to apply to college, or have kids headed that way, the report is definitely worth reading. We managed to find a way to get the full cost down to about $15K including room and board. All the things people were told to consider in choosing a college 20-30 years ago don't matter. You can choose based on selectivity, class size, strength of degree programs, etc. but aside from geography the only thing you will remember is people - roomates, classmates, bandmates, workmates, and professors - and there's no way to analyze that in advance, so just take the deal you can afford.
Gently reply
Lesson 1: you don't need anyone's permission to learn.
Also, almost all post secondary schools have classes where the course syllabus/outline are freely available, where you can see what topics are covered and the recommended textbooks.
As you point out, evaluating how much was learned by a student from these courses is a big problem. Existing standardized comprehensive examinations like the AP or SAT programs seem like at least a starting point for high school students to prove their abilities, but there isn't really anything equivalent for undergraduate students.
So exactly like a Bachelor's degree from an American 4 year university then?
I wouldn't let this experience shape your perceptions of the international population. In classrooms with 30-40 students I see the same shit from American children in their 20's("delayed adulthood"). These are the people who haven't had a job that makes more than minimum wage in their life and think a 4 year diploma is some magic coupon for an $80K salary regardless if you learned anything while you were getting it.
The fact that there are so many with crazy foreign names is probably as much a reflection of the language barrier & high percentage of MOOC students who are from the international community. If American sounding names are underrepresented in the forums it is probably because the language barrier makes social interaction more difficult for them.
After watching these people for nearly a decade I kind of think of them as plague rats which filter through any process in a near uniform ratio no matter how hard you try to weed them out. They are the dandelions to education's grass seed.
What harm do they do? When they hit industry they are the parasite's which use Machiavellian politicking and nepotism to keep food in their mouths. Any organization which doesn't have a sufficiently good bullshit detector/human resources immune system will be brought to it's knees as they demoralize everyone around them capable enough to be doing actual productive work.
Eventually the talented employees get sick of the bullshit from these coworkers and leave for greener pastures. The ones who stay behind to try to immunize the organization go down with the ship.
These wastes of flesh latch on to any group effort like remora fish and are nothing but dead weight to anything they touch. Engaging them is like wrestling with a greased pig. The only thing I've seen work well on them is giving them lots of rope to hang themselves with. If you give them everything they claim to need to accomplish something they will still fuck up because they are incapable of accomplishing anything regardless of how well equipped they start off with. They will look for a sucker to "delegate" their job to that they can blame when things go pear shaped.
Just isolate them, give them rope, and watch them swing in the wind. The Dunning–Kruger effect pretty much says it all.
For one thing, 120 USD != "hundreds" unless you refer to a non-U.S. currency also called "dollar". For another, if your laptop was purchased from nearly any vendor other than System76, it almost certainly already came with a copy of OS X if made by Apple else Windows.
Stale stereotype.
Except when the job market is dominated by myopic employers who prefer proctored exams (as represented by a traditional degree) over actual learning.
Some majors depend on materials whose possession is regulated, and enrollment in an accredited face-to-face degree-seeking course of education is the easiest way to gain access if not already employed by an established company with legitimate access. Examples include dangerous chemicals for chemistry majors, "academic" editions of proprietary software, etc.
Jesus christ, shit is free and you're like "oh, my fucking technical skill suck so much that I need content spoon fed into my retinas."
Haven't you heard the good news about Wine? Install it on your lame linux box and run the iTunes installer. You can ask the interwebs how to do it.
Kahn Academy was a God-send for me. I didn't even have a high-school level of maths before I managed to find my way into an Engineering degree. I learned all of High-school maths and a lot of university level maths in the space of a few months thanks almost totally to the excellent instruction available through Kahn Academy.
Many universities make researchers/professors teach. Some of them do an excellent job because they give a damn, or are passionate about sharing (as opposed to selfish and arrogant which many scientists are). Many of these lecturers are in academia because that's what they personally are good at - and so they don't understand how to teach people who aren't as naturally suited to the subject they are teaching as they were. They don't know what *normal* people find difficult or else they assume they know but completely miss the mark.
Nearly every single mathematical person I have met utterly fails at communication, as I have only found two: a really gifted guy who breezed through university maths and is currently working on his PhD and Salman Kahn of Kahn Academy who is the best communicator of mathematical concepts I have ever found - hands down. He seems to know what normal people find hard and even pre-emptively answers your questions right as they pop into your head.
This only reinforces how outdated the model of university education is and how poor value the university education itself generally is. Normal people can find higher quality resources online and consume them quickly and efficiently and apply them the next day. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars and 2+ years getting a fairly poor imitation of a "T-shaped" education I think the real solution is to set up strong learning resources (online and meatspace workshops) and allow people to cheaply sit certification tests (and portfolio checks) on university-level subjects. People can build their core education as narrow and tight as needed and expand the "arms" of their education out as far as needed in a dynamic fashion which suits this ever-changing world. Hey, if a person completes a whole degree in this fashion they can sell good-ole' degree certificates too!
Did they bother to check if any of the students had really taken a course? Most likely the students were just picking the check box that made them look good. I would bet that the actual % who took a course is far lower.
and trade schools are roped into the college system as well.
Now I think that tech / trades schools can be better off by not being tied down to the old college degree system. At least they have way less filler and fluff classes that other schools have.
will fail when jail / prison is better then paying back loans at the mc job wage and it comes with free room, board and doctors.
Now we don't need to get rid of all of the old college system but most people will be better off in more community college, tech school, trade school, boot camp (tech school) then the old college. Also need more REAL apprenticeships that are not tied to college and have real work in them (no coffee boy ones)
http://articles.chicagotribune...
Could millions of college dropouts get a second chance through a GED-style equivalent of a college diploma? In today's age of blue-collar blues and online education, the idea of college-equivalency exams doesn't sound so outlandish anymore.
These are the new realities: The high school diploma is not the gateway to the middle class that it used to be. Amid new corporate efficiencies and the migration of high-paying, low-skilled jobs overseas since the 1950s, growing numbers of college graduates are occupying jobs like postal worker or restaurant manager that used to be filled by high school grads.
The results are new pressures on blue-collar families and the sort of class tensions voiced by presidential candidate Rick Santorum with his recent verbal jab ("What a snob!") at President Barack Obama's push for more college attendance. In fact, Obama, like Santorum, also has been a major cheerleader for community colleges and trade schools. He did not say college was something everyone should do; rather, he said it is "an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford."
Yet, give Santorum his due. He touched on a reality that deserves more public discussion: College isn't for everyone. Some very bright students thrive better while learning a hands-on trade, for example, than they do in a classroom. Others simply can't afford the time or tuition of college because of their personal circumstances.
As a result, the percentage of college graduates who come from households in the bottom fourth of income earners — as I did — has declined to only 7.2 percent from 12 percent in 1970, according to Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, who also is director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
Santorum's remarks while campaigning in Michigan moved me to call Vedder, whom I have known since he tried to put some economics knowledge into my noggin when I was one of his students many years ago.
Author of the 2004 book "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much," Vedder sees a disconnect between the cost of college and the needs of the job market. He has found as many as one out of three college graduates today to be in jobs that historically were filled by people with less education.
"These are jobs that do not require higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature," he said in a telephone interview.
At the same time, we see cheaper alternatives to college like online education growing to the point where we see Internet Age stories like online student Kayla Heard. The Union, Wash., 16-year-old graduated last year from Washington State University with a 3.7 grade-point average in social sciences without ever stepping on campus, except to pick up her diploma.
Let's go a step further, says Vedder.
"As college costs rise," he said, "people are asking: Aren't there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers?"
People typically believe there are no good substitutes for college. But if prospective employees can certify to potential employers that they are as bright, knowledgeable, good at communicating and eager to learn as a better-than-average college graduate, they can present themselves as a bargain — willing to accept wages that are higher than normal high-school-graduate standards but low compared to most college-graduate salaries.
Vedder is encouraged by recent agreements between the Education Testing Service, which operates the famed SAT test for the College Board, and the Council for Aid to Education to provide competency test materials to students online through StraighterLine, an online education firm. The challenge is to persuade college-accreditation organizations and the business community that colleg
adapt or die
This is just the modern example of a student who engages in independent study. Did they account for students who prefer to grab a textbook, and work through the problems?
Agreed. However a well-rounded education is something that everyone should receive. I'd suggest raising the bar in middle and high schools to cover current 12-year curriculum in 11-years worth of class time and including some lower-level university courses for the rest of the time.
"Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning."
While the above statement from the summary doesn't directly suggest causation, do to the intricacies of the English language, it implies that taking online classes contribute to academic success and lifelong learning. However, I would assert that, if you're going to imply causation, it may be accurate to suggest those who have been academically successful have already started on the road of lifelong learning and utilizing online classes is just one method of travel along said road.
What the fuck is a freshman?
"'Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning.'"
In other words, students who are more motivated to learn generally do better in academic settings and generally learn more. Glad we had a study to prove what we already know.
Next up. Study proves that practicing a sport can affect one's ability to perform in said sport.
Evaluating what was learned in standard courses is a big problem.