Comment by 1932812267
21 days ago
One thing that's changed in the past decade is that college professors are now competing against youtube. There are really bad lecturers in college (and also really good ones!). But now, when you encounter a bad one, that's okay--you can watch lectures online.
Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments.
Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.
And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/
I think that's the biggest disruption of all, and goes well under the radar. Universities were originally guilds of students who hired masters of fields to profess their knowledge.
Now anyone with a computer connected to the internet can have access to the best lectures in the world. People talk a lot about employment, diploma mill mentality, student and professor ethics in this thread.
But I think the silent revolution, one that has nothing to do with AI, is that nowadays anyone can learn and acquire basically any knowledge based skills they might want. I have always lived by the maxim "don't let school get in the way of your education". And I also think that education is a life long journey. Fretting about the state of complex systems is an exercise in futility. Educating oneself has never been easier and I love it!
> And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
That is shameful. Instead of doing that, they should have given that out upfront and then spend the class discussing it and helping those who still had doubts/questions.
Not to mention that there are now also LLM’s to help you understand difficult topics!
I'm sure the average college student will know when the helpful LLM is hallucinating, misrepresenting or stating outdated material as factually accurate today, right?
Don't worry, professors do it too.
I had one such professor in accounting. Typos, numbers from wrong year, copy/paste mistakes, forgot to turn on precision as displayed, mismatching account numbers, etc.
The textbook (written by someone else) also had mistakes. At least not in every exercise, but enough to be annoying.
Exams were also graded based on an incorrect solution, so you always had to fight for a revised grade.
Probably the worst thing you could ask to help you understand a topic you yourself don't understand and are encountering for the first time.