University's and the internet

Originally posted by twhitehead
I would argue that the online experience is often better. I have done quite a lot of online courses myself (for the free, valueless 'certificate'.). It was a great advantage to be able to do it for free, do it from home, manage my own time, rewind and replay the videos, pause the videos to look up stuff online etc. I also like that collaboration with othe ...[text shortened]... uld have had the opportunity to keep going until they did complete instead of having to give up.

I do agree that a re-wind function and the ability to attend on your schedule (instead of the slotted class time) is wonderful.
I just don't think my education would have been the same if I lived at home and took on-line courses instead of attended and graduated from a four year University.

Originally posted by quackquack
I just don't think my education would have been the same if I lived at home and took on-line courses instead of attended and graduated from a four year University.

I fully agree that it wouldn't have been the same. I disagree that it was necessarily better. I think that some students would benefit from being at a university and other students would benefit from purely online learning. There are pros and cons to both and the pros and cons are different for different people.
The biggest difference of course is access. I would never be able to do a degree at Harvard. I have nevertheless be able do do some online courses of theirs. This doesn't just apply to quality of education but also specific programs. There are many specialised courses that are simply not offered in most countries and the costs of studying abroad are beyond most peoples budgets.

I have to add that in my own career, 99% of my skills were not learned in school at all. I am largely self taught as far as what I do for a living. The internet has revolutionised how I learn new skills. When I started out it was extremely difficult to find good learning material, now its a few keystrokes away.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I fully agree that it wouldn't have been the same. I disagree that it was necessarily better. I think that some students would benefit from being at a university and other students would benefit from purely online learning. There are pros and cons to both and the pros and cons are different for different people.
The biggest difference of course is access ...[text shortened]... ed out it was extremely difficult to find good learning material, now its a few keystrokes away.

I'm not against increasing the number of ways one can get learn things and more access to on-line course would be a positive. But again, I think in many contexts there is a big difference between taking on-line courses from Harvard and being a traditional Harvard graduate.

Originally posted by quackquack
I'm not against increasing the number of ways one can get learn things and more access to on-line course would be a positive. But again, I think in many contexts there is a big difference between taking on-line courses from Harvard and being a traditional Harvard graduate.

A big difference yes, but not necessarily a positive difference. I see no rational reason why an online graduate cannot be just as well educated as a traditional Harvard graduate. I agree that some practical courses are harder to do remotely, but many courses and degrees do not require practicals.

Originally posted by quackquack
While you can have discussions on line, it's not exactly the same as being in a room. A lot of learning -- even academic leaning -- on a university setting is done by being immersed in the same place. There are side conversations before/ after/ during class and often I'd meet people in class and we'd study together (something less likely in an on-line ...[text shortened]... a great class, one teacher for six students isn't the ratio that will significantly lower costs.

You're right that it's not 100% the same experience, but it can be pretty close with use of technology. IM platorms, private messages, message boards, synchronous online study halls, interactive lessons with built-in quizzes, gamifications, etc. All of this can make well-designed online courses effective. I'm not going to say it's completely as good as in-person, but the difference is marginal and the overlap consideration.

A well-designed online course with 15 students gets you a lot more interaction with faculty than a traditional university class with 100 students. This, I trust, is self-evident.

Cutting costs by increasing class sizes is really a separate issue that can be done with or without a campus. Online classes can help with this. Many school districts that cover broad geographical areas will offer high school level online courses when the demand is spread among several different geographical areas. It's a lot easier to run one online class for 25 students spread across a district than to run 5 classes of 5 students each in 5 different buildings. This is another advantage of distance learning.

Originally posted by twhitehead
A big difference yes, but not necessarily a positive difference. I see no rational reason why an online graduate cannot be just as well educated as a traditional Harvard graduate. I agree that some practical courses are harder to do remotely, but many courses and degrees do not require practicals.

I'd add that with better and better online simulators and more companies that mail out lab kits, the number of subjects that cannot adequately be taught online continues to decrease.

Originally posted by sh76
Many do. Even state schools and community colleges are now very often offering degree programs or courses online.

The only problem is they generally charge the same tuition whether you're in person or online, so it helps with convenience, but not really with cost.

There are countless online colleges with lower tuition and some (like coursera or Saylor) of ...[text shortened]... slow to come around to the idea that online education can be equivalent to in-person education.

Thank You

Originally posted by whodey
Community college is nothing more than glorified high school. A degree from there is about as good as a high school diploma.

Not quite. A lot of community colleges offer two-year degrees, which are then transferable to to an actual university. This is a common practice in Rochester, where MCC (Monroe Community College) is one of the top Community Colleges in the country. It's quite common for students to then transfer to U of R (University of Rochester) orRIT (Rochester Institute or Technology), where the inventor J-Query attended studied. This is a very cost-effective measure, where students complete a "two-plus-two" program (2 years at MCC, two years at another school like U of R).

The cost of graduating at MCC is chump-change compared to two years at RIT.