[madpata]

I can imagine a future in which Universities just pay someone to create online courses which they can reuse over the years and then just keep the teachers for courses which have a practical side (e.g. Robotics, biology/physics/chemistry experiments).

[znpy]

This might not be 100% bad as a model, as long as it is properly implemented. One important thing would be the role of teachers in doing exercises and Q&A instead of plain lecture recitation from the books.

Having had a roommate that used to be a researcher in the university i was attending at the time I was able to see a lot of the back-office side that most people don't see.

Long story short, most researcher and professors are evaluated on the basis of the output of their research (number of publications, journals, h-index and that kind of stuff).

Teaching is really an overhead, and a lot of researchers/professors game the system by making things as standard as possible in their own interest (and whatever about the students).

I had seen this myself during a surprisingly short exam (circuit theory): taken in the morning, the professor had corrected ALL of the exams before 3:30 pm. The trick was in using simple numbers (the computations were not the hard part of the exam), skimming briefly the piece of paper and then checking if the numbers in the solution matched his own numbers in his already-solved exam. Duh. I had to go there, ask to have the exam evaluated in front of me, and for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.

You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper. (I had learned from the book instead of his lessons because I had a full-time job -- and thus he hadn't recognized the procedure)

Anyway, I had to keep my temper and explain. He agreed and assigned me the points.

To come back to the original point: somebody might think he's just an asshole (and btw they wouldn't be wrong) but if you know about the back-office dynamics you'd understand that he was/is just minimizing the overhead. In a wrong way, but still, that's what he was/is doing.

[jbullock35]

> for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.

> You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper.

I can't speak to this specific case. And awarding no points at all does sound quite unusual. But, speaking as a professor, it's disturbing to see how often and how badly students overestimate the intelligibility of their work.

Important qualification: I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions. The situation may be very different in circuit theory and other areas in which answers to exam questions often aren't in prose.

[znpy]

> I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions.

Dude/Dudette, circuit theory can't be further than it already is from prose essays and and open-answer questions.

As I mentioned, part of the strategy was to use simple numbers (think of stuff like 1, 2,-1, pi, stuff like that) because the hard part of the exam was not in numbers and/or raw computation.

So basically if you can read numbers, you can see what's been done there.

And I expect an engineering professor to be able to read numbers.

[imtringued]

In theory you can just make your presence courses so bad that students are forced to do online courses to actually pass the course.