Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

A lot of courses taught these days also are sold as a package from the textbook companies. Often, a textbook comes with premade slide presentations (aka, lectures), projects, and tests based on their material. So even when you have professors teaching, a good number of them are really not doing much work themselves.

Teachers/administrators are told that they need these packages from corporations to make sure students best learn the material and to make sure that teachers best teach material, too, but what really ends up happening is that teachers become worse at teaching and students become worse at learning because more organic methods of education (teacher-student interaction, certain forms of abstract thinking, etc) can be forgotten, and we can see the lines between offline/online schools blurring as education becomes a corporate process like so many other things in our age. It is a bad racket all around.

As someone who's worked for a college before, there are things I could say about accreditation, but won't because it's generally a valid practice.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: