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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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
...if they choose.
If it becomes established then there will probably be penalties for not choosing to. "But why would you decline something that can help you?" says the university administrator as they set the "expel at earliest minor infraction" flag on the students file.
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.