Slashdot Mirror
Big Brother Is Coming To UK Universities (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An upcoming report by the Higher Education Commission, a UK group of MPs, business and academic professionals, will paint a picture of a higher education system that, thanks to the increasing use of data, may undergo radical change, sometimes with painful ethical considerations. Among their visions: an Amazon-style recommendation service on courses and work experience based on individuals' backgrounds, and similar profiles. Or a system in which students at risk of failure can be identified from their first day so that they receive instant feedback and performance measuring. It is envisioned that the system will include knowing whether they are in lectures, at the gym or in the bar, and in an effort to boost their results, students may also want to share data on their fitness, sleeping patterns, and their academic and semi-academic interactions online.
Glorious future awaits! I can't wait to see where the scientific 21st century will take us next!
> [...] students may also want to share data on their fitness, sleeping patterns, and their academic and semi-academic interactions online [...]
Now we know how important sexual activity (especially at the typical student age) is. Why not also share data on their sexual life (preferences, frequency, duration, time-to-orgasm, etc.)?
I'm sure they could find good industry partners to set a public-private partnership!
Attending lectures works for many. But some reads on their own and do just as well that way. Nothing wrong with attending the gym or the bar either - successful people are often enough both fit and social. Some drop-outs fail due to the bar perhaps, but some spend all their time reading and fail anyway - not having talent.
So this excessive monitoring is silly - what they can measure has very little correlation to academic performance. Students at risk of failure can readily be identified through existing practices - tests! Perhaps UK universities need to test their students a bit more often - especially fresh students? the rest of this big brother system is bullshit.
"People who put up with this in the university, also went on to become amazon warehouse employees, and went on to fit in just fine."
FCKGW 09F9 42
Tutorials identify the weak students pretty quickly. Specific gradings are uncertain, but likely failures are obvious.
In general I think it is the responsibility of the student to sort themselves out as an adult, not the university's job to enforce sensible behaviour, especially by expensive and futile monitoring that will be easily circumvented. Failure *is* the punishment for drinking yourself stupid for three years. Personal responsibility damnit.
An upcoming report by the Politicians Advisory Board will paint a picture of a political system that, thanks to the increasing use of data, may undergo radical change. Among their visions: an Amazon-style recommendation service on lobby contacts and media outlets based on individuals' backgrounds, and similar profiles. Or a system in which politicians at risk of falling into oblivion can be identified from their first day so that they receive instant feedback and performance measuring. It is envisioned that the system will include knowing whether they are at parliamentary debates, at certain corporative headquarters or in the bar, and in an effort to boost their election results, politicians may also want to share data on their fitness, sleeping patterns, and their private and semi-private interactions online.
Man that must be a bummer, being treated like you're a failure on your first day!
Look this is just another case of a few companies selling their "Big Data Mining" ideas, whether its to catch terrorists, or catch under performing people.
So morons in education are so far away from teaching as to not understand the issues, and instead they're fed a quick fix by management consultants selling something. In this case big data!
If you want to see an example of Big Data success, take a look at IBM. Its revenues have dropped now for the 15th quarter. If big data can't solve IBMs issues then IBM's big data can't solve yours. At the end of the day, noise is not data, and more noise doesn't not make data cleaner.
....without constant supervision, then you are obviously not university-material. ...or rather: if all the dumb and stupid people are taking over our institutions of advanced eductation, then where do the *actual* smart people go?
Among their visions: an Amazon-style recommendation service on courses...
I went to a university where they did this and it is a pretty double edged weapon because the students who spent their lecture time playing online games or posting on Facebook ended up giving courses and the lecturers bad reviews because they blamed the course/lecturer for their bad grades rather than their own procrastination. The knee-jerk reaction of lecturers was to ban laptops and mobile devices in lectures which had a detrimental effect on me and the others who actually used their laptops to take notes. I for one gave courses where I was not able to take electronic notes a lower grade than I otherwise would have even though I understood why the lecturer banned computer devices and even though I generally liked the course and the lecturer's performance because it forced me to spend double the time I normally would re-writing my paper-notes in electronic form. Basically I don't think applying this form of a product rating system to courses and lecturers is a good idea because it can give you a very skewed idea of the situation. I say let the procrastinators fail and let them piss and moan about it at home, don't give them a forum at school to do that. If they want to play games in class rather than take notes it's their own damn fault and if they want to waste of their own money that way that's their business. That way people who actually pay attention and use their computers for learning are not disadvantaged. Banning computers in lectures just forces the procrastinators to find new ways to procrastinate.
sleeping patterns, and their academic and semi-academic interactions online.
The year I dropped out was the year a just ended military service had altered my sleeping patterns, and the suicide of one of my COs, which I blamed myself for carelessness of word choices near an already broken man, had started its nagging effect. I increasingly became isolated and incapable of performing even the simplest of tasks.
So yes, I'd say for those students with "traumatic" backgrounds it might be a good self-monitoring service. Although I personally wouldn't have been able do anything about the situation without external support which is not there when you really need it. So, now instead of a becoming a trained MSc computer and information technology engineer with a diploma and 100% employment, I consider cleaning jobs in some local service homes. Now I only have to contend with my increasing paranoia towards the way the society is changing.
So you failed your course I take it.
"Learn nothing useful"
Do a proper subject like engineering or medicine, not some social science crap or golf course management then.
Idiot.
Agreed, but in some countries, if you don't have the piece of paper that the University provides, your chances of getting a job (or progressing through jobs) is far more difficult than in countries where there is more emphasis on experience vs what a piece of paper says about you.
Count the visa numbers of the foreign students in and out. Make sure they attend real university courses and dont just drift into full time employment with a digital student ID on computer database thats a fake front for a university.
When they have done with their course send them back home or offer them some rapid degree to work deal if they have great grades. No over staying or ability for the failed or mediocre to just to slip into the work force for many years.
Ensure every student is at their tutorial or other lab work or keeps the needed contact hours.
Focus on merit and wealth to get a better quality of foreign intake so they have no need to work part time.
Rich students will focus on study and be more well adjusted to enjoy getting a degree rather than looking for lots of part time work on arrival.
Count the local and foreign students in and out. Call it a pop quiz every day on the past weeks work... just ensure an ID is needed and noted. Who is missing and why is not really that hard to note with a few trusted staff and students at a door.
No need to pay for fancy new databases and IT staff. Just use what the tax staff, passport control and teams of local staff.
If students don't show up, have a chat with them or cancel their student visa, remove them from the UK and ban them form ever returning under any other visa.
Its not that hard to ensure a good higher educational setting with photo ID's and students actually attending the courses for them.
When done they go home or get help finding a job. Everyone is happy, supported and well educated.
A note on the 'swiping their access card" issues. Dont trust anything but a real person seeing the ID and the photo matches the student for any contact hours with staff for a lab, tutorial. Get to know every student in the tutorial or lab session with questions, work. Kind of hard to fake that day to week and over an exam.
If a university has a retention issue, set better exams and only take in students that can study and are ready to study. Good entry exams and past course work can be used to rank every applicant based on grades.
Re "each student is for their entire degree" could have been done decades ago with a photo id and taking attendance in the smaller group and larger lab settings, no new expensive computers needed.
Re "boost their results" just ensure people who want to learn and have the proven background to learn get a place at a university. 3 or 7 years later they should be ready for the work force.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You can't have any Wifi.
Who here does their best work when someone is constantly looking over their shoulder? I know that management types are scared shitless of people with an opaque style of development, who neither need to nor want to discuss every aspect of their work to see if they're on the right track. But the freedom to try something odd without immediately and constantly getting feedback that you shouldn't leave the tried and tested path is crucial to innovation. If you take that away from people who have the capability to go on arcs of development on their own, you don't get "social introverts", people who readily communicate innovative ideas. Instead you get people who either can't come up with anything new anymore due to the constant interruptions, or come up with basically random ideas that other people can't see the value of because they're not used to pursuing ideas when they can't see the immediate next step.
TL;DR: People are not human resources, and don't work best if "maintained to operate within small tolerances".
Basically the chances of this being implemented are zero
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
i really hope you are not working on something like civil engineering or as a doctor
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
There are two models of education, either "society" invests in its future and education is free or close to free (including higher ed.)
because educated people are the ones who are able to builds a long term sustainable economy and pay our retirements.
Or education is an individual choice and you should pay for it, and society just invest to avoid loosing some of the outliers among people without the necessary means...
In the first case it might be argued that "as society pays" they have "some right of supervision" ... although the kind of students who can be "properly supervised" are also the kind of students you do not want as future colleagues...
In the second case, WTF how dare you define "how" I'm supposed to organize my time, ok I'm not allowed to do a strip tease in a restaurant just because I ordered food, but how much I eat, if I eat, and what exactly I choose are the privileges I BUY.
Now our bright politicians supported by armies of idiots are doing their best to give us the worst of both models...
You pay through the nose huge amounts of money, and you have very little say about what you really study, how, at what rythm and now they want to hover over students schoulders to make sure they act "as expected"....
So the only advice I have is : study things you are really interested in, or who are helping you learn things useful for some future goal, find the cheapest place possible to study, at least for the untergrad part (for graduation studies, if you have to pay for it, you probably aren't good enough, work harder ....) ...
And do no try to study "for work"/"to be adapted to the industry/corporate/business world", what ever that world will be when you start to really look for a job, it has little to do with what your professors know now, and close to nothing to do with the world as it was when the courses where designed
So "use" professors for what they might be good at, scientific knowledge and knowing how to learn...
And for the rest, try to find an activity that you really like (well not this one, another additional one :)) and use it to mingle with interesting people, create your own "competing network" to build what "top universities and schools" are offering.
Good luck
Why the hell would people want this shit?
Is this just to get people used to living in a surveillance society?
How about none of your fucking business? This constant sharing of every aspect of your life is idiotic.
You're in school to learn, in part, who the hell you are. This shit is getting ridiculous.
The world doesn't need analytics of every goddamned thing you do. And one of these days all these people who have plugged everything into their smart phone will realize just what they've really been giving away.
Yeah, get off my damned lawn. I don't want any of your tracking doodads. This shit sounds like a terrible idea to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That one guy thought a dashboard for the college would be great. IT said, yeah, we can do that, and then when the guy left the meeting, they all looked at each other. If they pull this off, I'm going to request the feature be added where you can zoom in on someone's eyeball to see the reflection of what they were looking at. This will be so cool.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Attending lectures works for many. But some reads on their own and do just as well that way. Nothing wrong with attending the gym or the bar either
All this is true the problem is getting the balance correct: you can't spend ever night in the bar, you must spend a reasonable amount of time reading etc. The problem students have getting this balance right is that the standards in secondary schools has dropped significantly over the past few years. Couple that with insane new initiatives at schools such as "no grade zeros" and retakes of exams if they don't do well enough the first time and you have incoming university students who don't expect to need to work hard and who expect to be able to retake exams if they don't do well the first time. We've even had students who were surprised to learn that when they failed courses they could not carry on at university!
One solution is what seems to be proposed here: programme a computer to nanny them. I'd argue a better solution is to fix the schools, bring back the level of academic rigour they used to have (at least in the UK), dump all these silly "no grade zero"-type policies that they have introduced (at least in Canada) and instead of programming a computer to monitor performance we would have taught the students how to do this themselves which would be a far, far better outcome because they need this skill in the real world.
"students may also want to share data on their fitness, sleeping patterns, and their academic and semi-academic interactions online"
Oh yeah that's what the data loving administrators was to analyze, no, my guess is it's alcohol and recreational drug use patters, on line gambling, pr0n watching, sexual promiscuity...and any other vice they can think up.
Universities used to be useful, and the knowledge handed over was more than just was needed to be OK in one field. For example, people scoffed at Latin as "pointless"... but it has been useful as a gateway to basic French, Spanish, and other languages. Similar with chemistry and math for someone going into languages.
However, over the years, passing on an education has mutated into jumping through hoops for a piece of paper... and then the price of admission to jump through the hoops goes up on an insane basis.
Degrees also have changed value over time. In the 1970s/1980s, it was very common to have a major, wind up in a job that had nothing related to said major. After 2000, one had to have a major in the same field as they worked in to be considered for a job. Post-2008, college is there as a filter (some companies won't let people advance unless they have a degree), but oftentimes, it is more important to wave stuff like a MCSE, CCIE, RHCE, or a CISSP in front of a recruiter's nose, as well as showing what one did with the latest trendy program or language (like recruiters asking for seven years of Apple Swift2). So, even with a degree, it is no guarentee of a job.
The only real exception to this is what I have seen mentioned here on Slashdot. Supposedly when people talk about degrees, the adage is always bandied around, "there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer". Are J. D.s (+ passing the bar) actually up to the hype, guaranteeing a meal ticket from when it is granted until retirement?
With all the uncertainty with the economy, I wonder what it will be like after the next crunch. In years past, one could go back for a M. S., or a Ph. D., and come out ahead in the job market. However, I see a lot of people with even postdocs fighting for the same jobs as the people who don't even have anything but a high school diploma (if that.)
It looks like Ethan "Douche Canoe" Siegel is submitting his spam as anonymous now since the general Slashdot readership has wised up and started avoiding clicking through anything with handle attached to it.
No surprise at all.
Once upon a time, we had advisors and house mothers in college, and it seemed to work better. They did things, you know, like pay attention to when we were studying and if we went to class. But, that was at a time when college was valuable and worth paying for, instead of being another 5 years of babysitting and welfare.
Yeah, cuz engineering jobs are so plentiful and well-paid.
Naive numbskull.
Students guilty of wrongthink can be identified and removed.
They're out there if you have the qualifications. Which obviously rules you out.
My program currently is teaching us plenty of great hands on technical stuff and has a very high rate of graduates getting well paid jobs. So I think if you make a bad program choice you are right, but if you enter blooming fields you are wrong.
I took engineering. Working as a local shop as garage help. Diploma helped there.
What's depressing about this is not so much that the data is available, but that important idiots will use the data to make significant decisions about students. You can bet they will do it even without any evidence that library time is an independent variable causally responsible for positive outcomes, and that A- students who go to bars are somehow worse employees/grad students/med students/interns than A- students who go to the library.
There is a growing pressure in universities to reward students merely for going through the motions. I have colleagues who actually penalize students for being absent from class. I asked point blank whether any students who get top scores on all the tests ever get less than an A for the course, simply because they missed some meetings. Apparently, this happens, and I was disgusted when I learned of it. I hate the encroachment of high school paternalism into college.
Education above a certain level (and the western states are critically dependent on having a significant number of people getting education above that level) is a very individual process and vastly different for everybody. Hence this may work for producing dumb but somewhat educated public servants, but it will fail for anything above that level.
Not really a problem though, the UK has massively overstayed their welcome as a member of the first world anyways. Their attempts to correct that are therefore a definite step in the right direction.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Engineering jobs at the upper end pay well, have good working conditions and you can select your employer. Of course, they tend to require actual skills and talent.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
get you used to the (benevolent leader) system in University so you do not mind if they run the rest of your life the same way. It's called, "learning".
Engineering jobs at the upper end pay well, have good working conditions and you can select your employer. Of course, they tend to require actual skills and talent.
That is true of any field. But, just like not everyone can be a world famous brain surgeon or concert pianist, so not everyone can be a superstar engineer. Or do you think that most people deliberately choose to work for poor employers with bad pay?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think some people go into the STEM field not because they love the the field, but because they want to have a secure job and make a decent pay. That does not work and they need to stop.
I also think that this was about whether getting a university education was worthwhile and in the STEM field, if you have the talent and interest, it most decidedly is. I do know several engineers that regret finishing with a BA or MA and not having gone higher. I know no STEM graduates that think their studies were a waste of time.
So your point is?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.