The new WVU budget slashes nearly 10 percent of majors and 7 percent of all faculty—but students and staff aren't going down without a fight.
    • Jim@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Just because you can get part of your education remotely or through self-learning didn’t mean “anything can be learned online”.

      And if you were hiring a math tutor for your kid, would you prefer a self-proclaimed expert from watching YouTube videos or would you want someone who got a degree from a credentialed university? And even if you don’t care, why are you surprised that others would be skeptical of the YouTube expert?

      Remote learning can be fine for some things, and self learning through informal channels are also fine, but it’s not a full on replacement for formal education in all cases.

            • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
              1·
              1 year ago

              Lmao. Nope. I’ve done both. Online classes are a fucking joke. Maybe some schools do it well, but most treat online classes like a correspondence course.

              • hexi [they/them]@hexbear.net
                2·
                1 year ago

                It’s beside the point whether you like it personally.

                If someone was able to pass advanced math tests, does it matter how they learned it?

                Why should it count for less because they did it online, so long as they did understand the concepts in the end?

                • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Because math and science are large interconnected fields that you simply cannot learn from a textbook study. You must speak with other people about many different topics so you can broaden your understanding of where your education fits in the world around you.

                  Have you ever studied a particular subject and wondered “OK… I can solve that problem now. Why did I learn it?” Textbooks are notoriously bad at explaining the why.

                  • hexi [they/them]@hexbear.net
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    That’s all very vague, what specifically do you think people wouldn’t know from online work?

                    Someone studying math online could be speaking to many more people through video calls, online forums, and get exposure to many professors through different videos.

                    You can ask “why am I learning this?” during an online class, and in-person work can be textbook heavy.

                    If there’s something specific people need to know, it should be tested for. The vagueness around what problems online courses have seems to be an excuse to preserve a system that is inaccessible to the majority of the population. Only about 40% of the population ever gets a bachelor’s, and many of those are online already.

    • Sinonatrix [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      1 year ago

      For one, you can have a second screen and Google the answers. It’s a little bit harder in person.

      I’d really like to see a system of online learning where extension offices are built out into testing center networks. This still disenfranchises people sadly, but staves off some existential questions about what passing an exam even means now.