Comment by reqo

2 years ago

I feel like visualizations like this are what is missing from univeristy curricula. Now imagine a professor going trough each animation describing exactly what is happening, I am pretty sure students would get a much more in-depth understanding!

15 comments

reqo

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Arson9416  2 years ago

Isn't it amazing that a random person on the internet can produce free educational content that trumps university courses? With all the resources and expertise that universities have, why do they get shown up all the time? Do they just not know how to educate?

  • syntaxers  2 years ago

    It's an incentives problem. At research universities, promotion is contingent on research output, and teaching is often seen as a distraction. At so-called teaching universities, promotion (or even survival) is mainly contingent on throughput, and not measures of pedagogical outcome.

    If you are a teaching faculty at a university, it is against your own interests to invest time to develop novel teaching materials. The exception might be writing textbooks, which can be monetized, but typically are a net-negative endeavor.

    • tiffanyg  2 years ago

      Unfortunately, this is a problem throughout our various economies, at this point.

      Professionalization of management with its easy over-reliance on the simplification of the quantitative - of "metrics" - along with the scales (size) this allows and manner in which fundamental issues get obscured tends to produce these types of results. This is, of course, well known in business schools and efforts are generally made to ensure graduates are aware of some of the downsides of "the quantitative." Unsurprisingly, over time, there is a kind of "forcing" that tends to drive these systems towards the results like you describe.

      It's usually the case that imposition of metrics, optimization, etc. - "mathematical methods" - is quite beneficial at first, but once systems are improved in sensible ways based on insights gained through this, less desirable behavior begins to occur. Multiple factors including basic human psychology factor into this ... which I think is getting beyond the scope of what's reasonable to include in this comment.

  • cmiller1  2 years ago

    Have you considered the considerably greater breadth of content required for a full course, as well as the other responsibilities of the people teaching them such as testing, public speaking, etc.

    • dannyw  2 years ago

      It probably would be massively beneficial to society and progress if teaching professors could spend more time and attention on teaching.

  • webnrrd2k  2 years ago

    This is the result of a single person on the internet, who was not chosen randomly. it's not a fair characterization to call this the product of some random person on the internet. You can't just choose anyone on the internet at random and get results this good.

    Also, according to his home page, Mr. Bycroft earned a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Canterbury in 2012. It's true that this page isn't the direct result of a professor or a university course, and it's also true that it's not a completely separate thing. It seems clear that his university education had a big role to play in creating this.

  • erosenbe0  2 years ago

    I second the reply about incentives. Funding curriculum materials and professional curriculum development is often seen as more of a K-12 thing. There is not even enough at the vocational level.

    If big competitive grants and competitive salaries went to people with demonstrated ability like the engineer of this viz, there would be less stem dropouts in colleges and more summer learning! Also, in technical trades like green construction, solar, hvac, building retrofits, data center operations and the like, people would get farther and it would be a more diverse bunch.

  • wrsh07  2 years ago

    You're betting on the hundreds of top university cs professors to produce better content than the hundreds of thousands of industry veterans or hobbyists...

    Why does YouTube sometimes have better content than professionally produced media? It's a really long tail of creators and educators

    • physPop  2 years ago

      This isn't new. Textbooks exist for the same reason, so we don't need to duplicate effort creating teaching materials and can have a kind of accepted core cirriculum.

  • sgnelson  2 years ago

    Because Faculty are generally paid very poorly, have many courses to teach, and what takes up more and more of their time are the broken bureaucratic systems they have to deal with.

    Add that at research universities, they have to do research.

    Also add in that at many schools, way too many students are just there to clock in, clock out and get a piece of paper that says they did it. Way too few are there to actually get an education. This has very real consequences on the moral of the instructors. When your students don't care, it's very hard for you to care. If your students aren't willing to work hard, why are you willing to work hard? Because you're paid so well?

    I know plenty of instructors who would love to do things like this, but when are they going too? When are they going to find the time to learn the skills necessary to build an interactive web app? You think everyone outside of comp sci and like disciplines just naturally know how to build these types of apps?

    I could go on, but the tl;dr of it is: Educators are over worked, underpaid and don't have enough time in the day.