Posted on 03/03/2020 7:37:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It’s not coherent.
I agree. The cost of tuition and the resulting student debt is totally out of control. There needs to be an affordable alternative and the web is certainly an option.
There’s already so much educational stuff on you tube it wouldn’t be that difficult to assemble a degree program. All you need to add is a testing/assessment method.
Smart boards are a thing of the past. Interactive flat panels are the way classrooms are going now.
The real problem in modern education is motivating students to put down their phones and engage the subject. They tend to procrastinate and never really understand the material well and integrate the new ideas with what they already know. Think of the difference between a pile of scattered Lego bricks and a castle made from Lego bricks. To solve the problems graduates will face required building castles from bricks.
When I was in grad school we were permitted to take classes for credit or audit them. The classes I took for credit - and worked the problem sets from hell - are the ones I remember decades later. The classes I audited, I remembered very little a semester later.
My wife and daughter are both high school teachers of STEM subjects. Their biggest problem is to get their students to start assignments promptly and complete them before the exams. The ones who learn this work ethic do very well. The ones who constantly procrastinate and do not know how to articulate where they began to be confused tend to not even make an honest effort at homework or labs in class. They are wasting the tax dollars of those who pay for the school.
There is a comic strip, drawn by Jorge Cham entitled Piled Higher and Deeper, that mocks graduate student life and the problem with teaching undergrads. The funniest cartoon was the one where the frustrated teaching assistant stapled Taco Bell applications to the homework of the slackers in her class.
Books, pencil, paper, blackboard...works fine for teaching most K-12 subjects.
I’m very familiar with this topic.
For example this chart says the market is highly fragmented, which is true. It’s fragmented because all the products are similar and essentially interchangeable and don’t do much that is novel. There’s no real reason to use one package over another.
Often what is presented as new is just management systems to make administrative tasks easier. For the most part management systems have been ported over to school administration.
I know this field very well, but at the higher level in the medical and health education market.
For one thing you need a computer. Then you need a projector. The projector rarely matches the resolution of the computer screen so image detail is lost. The smartboard connects to the computer through USB and the computer connects to the smartboard by projecting on it. The user has specific tools to make graphic annotations which are transmitted from the smartboard to the computer and laid over the image as it is displayed.
Don’t lose the tools. Don’t use regular markers on the smartboard. Did I mention it has to be calibrated? It requires a computer to be dedicated to smartboarding. Your hand arm and body cast a shadow on the smartboard while you are making your virtual markings. It isn’t a giant touch screen tablet yet.
They may, however smartboards and projectors are being phased out in favor of these in k12.
Everything you say is true from my point of view. I am an engineer with 12 years teaching experience. Started in industry and moved back and forth between the two careers.
The value of using advanced technology to help explain things is tremendous provided the teacher really understands it too.
There is no substitute for teachers who do not know what they are teaching and most also don’t know how to “reach” the procrastinators because that takes a different skill set.
But lots of people can do these things, and in general the level of education will increase and the cost of education will decrease. (My prediction)
KC
Actually we use “whiteboards” now - replacing “blackboards” (wow, that’s racist - how backwards we went!).
While I like the vibrant colors we can see nicely and so on, they have some flaws. First, markers die - and they mark other things permanently, ruining our clothes. Second, the “erasers” are god-awful nasty when they’ve been used alot, full of ink, and are not easily “cleaned” at all. I just finished a session wherein the eraser has gotten to that point and has also made the board nasty dirty.
But yeah, to your point, chalk is cheap and easy and relatively clean, too. Even compared to these fancy whiteboards.
“Technology” (LOL - pencils are tech) is far overrated.
ROFL
IOW, ROI stinks.
Lots of money for NOTHING.
A shift towards Virtual Classrooms and Collaborative Learning Environment .
Wonder why the student failure and drop out rate are so high?.
RE: Wonder why the student failure and drop out rate are so high?.
Undisciplined students will be the same regardless of the mode of education.
The problem is that they curve the exam. One year I did a Freedom of Information Request for the score distribution. This curve is so bad that a person who get a raw score of 40% will pass. This basically passes the buck to the next teacher who has to deal with a large fraction of students unprepared to deal with that grade level material. It is a big lie. Nobody does something like this with sports (you make the team or you don't or perhaps end up on a junior varsity team) or music (different band levels and/or seat checks).
As an engineer with multiple degrees in chemical and mechanical engineering who wrote not one But two theses I can assert the following
Number one you can learn anything you like by yourself either online or through Books
Number two one of the most important thing is to learn is how to write the English language well
This involves being able to write hundreds of pages proofread it organize paragraphs and thoughts move things around and do you research in the library or multiple library’s to see what others have done before you to build upon your own research
What I noticed now is everything is trying to emphasize do it the easy way the short way and that is not the way
You left out one word Teachers
That tells you what competencies the system (or the consumer) truly values.
I think it could be. I'm not against Smartboards, unlike the usual Luddites you see around here, just that in my experience they're not supported well. And that support costs money.
Nicholas Carr, in “The Shallows”-—a book, naturally about how books are superior-—cites study after study that shows that readers who read printed physical page retain far more, and are far less distracted than readers reading the same exact pages on a Kindle or a screen.
The distraction levels on screens are off the charts. Moreover, screens change the WAY you read-—not top to bottom or left to right, but bouncing all around. Further, “collaborative learning’ is often a joke if the students haven’t LEARNED anything to begin with. It becomes an exercise in sharing ignorance and “feelings” rather than real instruction. The Waldorf Schools, for example, allow NO screens until 9th grade, and they are where all the tech execs send their kids.
Finally, “surveys” of what people “think they learn” as as useful as “student evaluations” in today’s universities. They don’t measure nothing.
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