It's definitely a trap a lot of kids fall into. Even though I'm sure those in academia think this to be taboo, kids have got to start thinking of college as a business decision. Because that's exactly what it is.
I graduated in 1999 with a degree in communications, was already employed in a specialized call center while in college. I worked my way up within the organization into middle management and my degree is now a check mark on my resume. I turned down an offer this week for a 6-figure job because I didn't think it was the right fit.
That said, in hindsight, a more specialized degree would have allowed me to make more money quicker ultimately increasing the money I make over a lifetime.
I've seen enough to know that for all practical purposes, the only way to move up in your career is to move out.
Although I quit to go to school, change the year and change call center to HEB and this would basically be me.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/mag...3.php?page=allAs the platform wars commence and huge online courses grow in prominence, most of the first adopters won’t be American students forgoing the opportunity to drink beer on weekends at State U. Instead, they’ll be students like Bali, among the hundreds of millions of people around the world with the talent and desire to learn but no State U to attend. The initial MOOC statistics bear this out—according to Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, more people from Lithuania signed up for his Stanford class than attend Stanford itself.
Instead of trying to directly challenge American colleges—a daunting proposition, given the political power and public subsidies they possess—the new breed of tech start-ups will likely start by working in the unregulated private sector, where they’ll build what amounts to a parallel higher education universe.
http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...l_systems.htmlThe danger in overreliance on global MOOCs is that they don’t build local capacity for education, research or knowledge creation in the education sector.
For example, Kepler, a U.S.-based endeavor, announced its intention to offer an education superior to any available at a Rwandan university for a lower cost. This may benefit a small group of Rwandans in the short term, but it does not assist President Paul Kagame’s struggle to improve education and technology in that country over the long term.
It’s easy to imagine a future in which the educational equivalent of reruns of Baywatch—a limited menu of glossy American fare—comes to dominate the cultural landscape in developing countries around the world, making it more difficult for cash-starved universities in those countries to pursue scholarship relevant to local contexts. This potential undermining of local education becomes especially problematic when the U.S. government takes an official role in promoting the use of MOOCs as a form of public diplomacy.
"more people from Lithuania signed up for his Stanford class than attend Stanford itself."
duh, Stanford students already have a probably heavy course load.
I like the pay it forward idea....which is basically a student loan at 3%. Missing are amortization details. Any caps or does the 3% continue for a set term?
Plus, as the article stated, 3% might not be the best deal for some.
damn blue states, always PROGRESSING out front of regressing red states.
^^^ more psuedo-rationality masquerading as wisdom. typical boutons.
Some country, very serious about investing in the next generation, gives college students loans with interest rate equal to rate of inflation.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-02-2013 at 08:36 PM.
Why is San Antonio so ed up?
Is Chump responsible?
impressive, if true, being that ChumpDumper lives in Austin.
kids don't need a college degree to work in the retailing industry imho, which's most today's graduates (like my old virgin Jacob) find their first jobs in
I always wonder how the flipped classrooms work. There is a professor at Caltech, George Djorgovski, who does a flipped classroom for his Galaxies and Cosmology course at Caltech and then publishes his lectures online at coursera. Pretty cool .
I have taken a few of those courses on edx now, and a lot of them are dumbed down, but the ones from Caltech and MIT usually aren't. I don't think they're really the game-changer the article makes them out to be though. MOOC courses work well for lower division stuff where you're calculating an answer that an autograder can easily evaluate or if you're writing a program that can be timed and so on, but not for upper division nor graduate level work when the problems are more in line with "prove result X holds". The limitations of the grading really held back a Stanford Quantum Mechanics MOOC course from last year, for instance, since deriving results instead of calculating numbers is such a crucial part of a course like that. The only realistic scenario is peer grading where students grade the problems, but then they have to be dumbed down since since you have everyone from kids to experts in the field taking the course together.
students break up into groups and teach each other. not everyone progresses at the same rate. let the kids who've already mastered it teach it to their peers, so the teacher can focus on the trickier cases.The only realistic scenario is peer grading where students grade the problems,
This is something that education has to constantly endure, the magic bullet.
There is no magic bullet. What we have found is that people learn effectively in a variety of ways. It's nice to explore options, but in the end it seems the best way for the majority is having a competent human being to guide and help.
And if you put 35 students in front of a competent human being you are less likely to reach all 35... as opposed to 17 students.
Looked back at the thread le, 35% graduation... Shame on us.
Last edited by pgardn; 03-04-2014 at 10:16 PM.
it's a discussion thread. the flipped classroom is just one idea of many mentioned here. that it was offered as a magic bullet is your own imagining, not mine, silly.
It's an interesting idea for college work. I mean did anyone here actually do the readings before class when they were in school? I only did it when it was a course I was really into, but otherwise? Never. The whole point of going to the class was so that you could skip reading the book or at least see the motivation behind the ideas in the book. Flipped classrooms make a lot of sense since you get people to work together When they come to class like they would have to do in any job in the real world. It's a great use of student time since you're actually doing the work in class and can bounce ideas off each other vs sitting there and zoning out 20 minutes into the lecture.
I don't know that it's workable at the high school level though. Average high school students don't seem like they'd be too disciplined to watch lecture videos at home in preparation for class.
in principle it ought to work whenever some of the students do their homework and understand it, both big ifs, understood. one of the big disappointments of going to college was how few people there were to talk to in class. in most classes there would be 2-5 other people who bothered to do the assigned reading. one some days it was clear no one besides the prof had read.
I jumped the gun a bit too much in my post above. In humanities courses where the reading was truly critical most of my classmates and I did the assigned reading before lectures. But in STEM courses no one does them because the lecture and the homework/projects are the critical parts of the course, and the book is usually just a reference or a guide for going deeper into a topic not covered enough in lecture.
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