I feel like in-person instruction still has lots of pedagogical tools to help kids learn. 25 years later I remember the questions I muffed in front of class when I got called on.
But online instruction feels incredibly cooked (and as others have reported AI is even creating fake students).
This article plants a clear flag marking our current path and is very much worth a read. But also this quote has had me cringing for 32 minutes.
nymag.com/intelligence...
May 7, 2025 12:54The blue exam book industry is about to mount an epic comeback...
Still appreciate that kid that made a looped video background of them paying attention in class during COVID while they did whatever off-screen.
Is it good for their education? Ehhhh. Was it creative problem-solving? Oh, mais oui!
We were screwed even before the rise of AI 😬
bsky.app/profile/torr...Having both taken and taught online courses, I will vouch for their inferiority. Cheating is rampant & catching it is practically a second job in & of itself. Tools exist that are meant to circumvent this, but they are awkward, inefficient, & many colleges don’t even have the infrastructure for them
I don’t mind that online courses are offered, but they should never be worth as many credit hours as the same class in-person. The quality of education is just substantially lower in an online course, and I don’t see any way of realistically changing that at this point in time.
Online instruction has never worked well, even pre-AI.
I teach in person but gave online exams for a few years after COVID. I changed back to in class exams last fall and the average dropped by about a letter grade.
They don't even need to include "humanizing the text" in their prompt. There are AI apps that will humanize the LLM text for them.
I posted elsewhere that part of this is the emphasis on standardized testing in HS. The incentives are all on doing well on those tests and it is shortchanging the actual education. This is leaving a lot of otherwise bright students woefully unprepared for college.
Still wild that a tech innovation, MOOG, is enabling student-loan fraud via a later tech innovation, LLM’s.
There are just so many ways higher ed is challenged. Some schools also have sites where students track how different teachers are reviewed & average grades for different classes. That’s good but also has implications for how students choose classes lol. This is the system we have built.
To paraphrase a line from show biz: The most important part of A.I. is authenticity. If you can fake that, you’re in.
But in Donny Two Dolls’ America, “productive” jobs like factory jobs as mining jobs won’t require an education. Any learning will be passed down from generation to generation. For the rest there is Prager University.
I wrote my own papers and answers to questions BECAUSE I FUCKING WANTED TO LEARN.
Maybe we need to teach kids to love learning and not just "Get a diploma, get a degree, or you'll have a shit job..."
Teaching the love of knowing the unknown is what will get kids to stop trying this shit.
And bc AI is creating fake students colleges are using ID Me (biometric data) to identify us which is shitty too
Kids don't want to learn, they want the permission slip for upward mobility.
Teachers in public schools are weak in pedagogical skills. Training, support n evaluation stinks. I include my retired self in this critique. ✌️
I am so glad I was non-renewed as an English instructor before ChatGPT existed, because I know now my everyday experience would be non-stop RAGE!
