[jkhdigital]

This is exactly right. I started teaching undergrad CS about 18 months ago after 20 years wandering through other careers, and I quickly realized that students do not need better teaching. They need frequent, direct feedback and an environment that more or less requires them to commit to studying until mastery or to quit early and do something else.

Effective learning techniques have been known for decades, but universities have -zero- incentive to improve teaching quality. There is no standardized assessment infrastructure to compare graduates across schools, or to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching interventions at scale. So any effort put into teaching quality is invisible and thus worthless to a university.

Every attempt to make high-quality instruction available for free has been largely irrelevant to the unwashed masses, because universities have a monopoly on credentialing. The self-starters can learn anything for free, but they were never the problem. It’s the middle 50% that we have utterly failed.

[bsenftner]

I believe a huge part of the failure is the lack of teaching anywhere, the general idea of how to manage discussions of disagreement. Because that is not discussed or taught, any topic with disagreements triggers emotional reactions in just enough people that no discussions of any progress can be made in such areas.

When the "middle 50%", as you call them, find they need help or really anything beyond what is immediately available they find they cannot articulate their need, nor can anyone around them understand them in their requests. They are propped up with an incomplete script and just left to flounder around, and because they cannot articulate their situation larger society is allowed to ignore them. Which is a completely manufactured situation.