Distance education

"The first distance education course in the modern sense was provided by Sir Isaac Pitman in the 1840s"

In Britain until the mid '80's it was free. University was free and students received a grant that was enough to scrape by on. I believe that it is free in many European countries until today. The open University and distance learning degrees allow you to study at your own convenience apart from exams.
Birkbeck University of London has such a course in philosophy but it isn't free.

Teachers will put forth video recordings of important contents of a provided course. Assignments and projects will be given. - Is there something wrong with this type of system? — Susu

There's a vast amount of video recordings of brilliant lectures even now in the internet. Yet the most important aspect is lacking: you cannot interact, ask the teacher questions. And even if you can ask, perhaps via email, it still lacks the easiness and simplicity when talking to a person face to face.

In fact this site, The PF, is a great example of this. Now you might have noticed that among us amateurs there are (or at least have been) academic professionals too. And you can get their answers and opinions here. Yet it would be totally different if you could sit down with SophistiCat, Jamesk or whoever responses to this thread and have a conversation in the classroom about the subject.

I do the vast majority of my work from home and I am on the phone, writing emails and participating in Skype-meetings. Yet actually meeting physically people is really important.

And education is free in my country. Yet getting accepted to an university is the hard part.

Where do you live?

Basically all the learning will be done wherever is comfortable and convinient for the student. No one will have to struggle with the burden of being punctual for classes or the tediousness and awkwardness of being in class sitting in those uncomfortable chairs. Deadlines are only for assignments, projects and exams. — Susu

And then when you graduate you go out into a world that is absolutely nothing like that. What you have is a formula for failure.

If you want free education, move to Sweden, there are no compromises to the education form, but it's free. Except when it comes to material like books etc. However, there are many online classes as well.

I really don't understand why so few nations have free education. If politicians and the people had just a tiny bit of logical thinking and understanding of the causality involved with giving every citizen a high-quality education, they would not hesitate to make it free.

The problem, as I see it, is that regular people and politicians really don't understand long term consequences and opportunities of their decisions, they can only think short term.

And then when you graduate you go out into a world that is absolutely nothing like that. What you have is a formula for failure. — Brett

And regular classes and education forms are like the rest of the world? There's nothing in education that is like the real world so there's no form to actually shape them for it. This is why math is a failure for most nations since no one in the real world use math like you're taught in school. Only physics, high-level economy etc. use math in similar ways but if you choose a high education for those, then it's specific to that education.

The biggest problem with education is that schools don't know how kids actually learn or how anyone learns anything. They try to force-feed information to people and very little of it sticks. Those who are genuinely interested in the topic being taught will learn it. So the key is to find out how to create interest in the things taught. Primarily, very few teachers are actually good at teaching. They might have gone through pedagogy classes before becoming teachers but teaching has a lot to do with you as a human being, your personality. - If you cannot find rapport with your students, find a place where they listen with their mind and not just their ears, then you can teach.

I think that teachers should be paid A LOT more, but that the demands on them should be higher. Just like with surgeons and other high paid professions, a teacher needs a lot more than just force-feeding information.

If you look at online videos from some teachers who put their lectures online, what is different between those with low views and those with high views. Those with high views tend to have a teacher that is charismatic, who moves around, who jokes and talks in different rhythms. It's like a performance because that's how we communicate regularly.

And regular classes and education forms are like the rest of the world? There's nothing in education that is like the real world so there's no form to actually shape them for it.
— Christoffer

Basically all the learning will be done wherever is comfortable and convinient for the student. No one will have to struggle with the burden of being punctual for classes or the tediousness and awkwardness of being in class sitting in those uncomfortable chairs. Deadlines are only for assignments, projects and exams. — Susu

The world, especially the workplace, does not wait for your comfort, your convenience, punctuality is a pretty basic expectation. Tediousness and awkwardness?; welcome to life, and deadlines; someone’s paying you to do something in a timeframe. That’s what you’re paid for.

Teachers do know how kids learn. Most teachers are good at what they do. They also teach the curriculum, which they do not chose. They do more than go through pedagogy classes. It takes more than charisma to teach. The problem is that we’re never sure what purpose education should serve.

The world, especially the workplace, does not wait for your comfort, your convenience, punctuality is a pretty basic expectation. Tediousness and awkwardness?; welcome to life, and deadlines; someone’s paying you to do something in a timeframe. That’s what you’re paid for. — Brett

Absolutely, but we have to realize that a lot of the higher educations focus on jobs that as of now change their entire business strategy to make room for different personality types and the psychology of the employees. A lot of the old ways have been proven to work against the productivity of the companies today, so all of what you say depends entirely on what type of workplace that the education is actually aiming for.

deadlines; someone’s paying you to do something in a timeframe. That’s what you’re paid for. — Brett

Deadlines are deadlines, doesn't matter how you do the work, you deliver before the deadline. I'm working within this system and I plan out my days according to the needs, but always deliver before the deadline. Productivity is not the same as filling out the hours. You can't punch the clock, especially if the job focuses on high creativity activities, which will become far more common as we move into an age of high automation industries.

They do more than go through pedagogy classes. It takes more than charisma to teach. The problem is that we’re never sure what purpose education should serve. — Brett

I know that they do more, but what I'm referring to is the rapport towards the students, that has nothing to do with what is being taught or the purpose of the education after it ends, it has to do with opening the student's minds to actual learning instead of force-feeding information that never sticks.

Most people who went through education forget almost everything. The only thing they know after a few years of work is the actual work that they do and only hints, bits and pieces are left of what they learned during education. The only educations that need crucial focus on the information are educations similar to surgeon/medical educations with extreme esoteric terminology and high risk. Which is why these educations last far longer than everything else.

My point is still that actually getting someone to learn something that sticks requires good ability to establish rapport with the students, which is a very rare quality. Many students I've talked to always refer to a favorite teacher and every bit of information that they remember perfectly comes from those teachers classes, while the rest exists in a blur.

The knowledge about learning, the psychology of learning is rarely understood in many schools and higher education and this is a great problem.

The big question here is, what is most important? To learn the information you are there to learn or to learn how to be punctual? If many industries and workplaces, as of now, are moving into strategies more in line with how psychology maps the best performance in people and it's changing from the "punchclock"-way we've been doing it since the industrial revolution; and blue collar jobs start to disappear because of automation, what is the purpose of keeping a strict form of education to conform students to something that will probably not be true in the future?

To conform to a business way of doing their business, like being punctual and keeping a schedule, is something that is different between all types of industries and a new employee need to conform to those specific industries when they start working there. Do you really think that a person won't be able to conform to that because their education was more suited for learning instead of strict scheduling rules? If I ran a company, I'd rather have someone who might be 20 minutes late but really knows what they are doing. Who gets most done during a day? Someone who is competent with the knowledge or someone who just gets there in time and keeps the schedule. Especially in creative jobs it's irrelevant to be on time if you cannot use your mind.

Given the way we've set the economy up, if people can get away with charging for something they usually will, and they'll often try to charge as much as they can get away with.

One of the problems in the equation is people being willing to pay. You can't get away with charging (much) if people won't pay it.

It does kind of exist: you can take MIT classes for free online. Youtube has thousands of lecture videos. The library is stuffed with books. If you want to learn on your own time, just do it.

Teaching, though, in person, requires a lot of work, time, and energy. It's unrealistic to expect us to be sitting there waiting for your beck and call.

And most people don't have the drive to just learn rigorously on their own. They might learn a little here and a little there, but without a teacher most people are too lazy to learn the less interesting, but equally important things.

If from an education your returns exceed your investment then isn't education actually free? If I spend $ 33,500 on a university degree and then go on to land a job that pays me more than that in the same time-frame then education is free in a way right?

I'm guessing that a high school education is free in most countries. This is because with a high school certificate one isn't likely to earn enough to balance the investment if a high school education weren't free.

College/university is different. These centers produce skilled people capable of earning money and sometimes tons of it. Therefore, it doesn't seem all that bad if one has to pay quite a sum to be in these centers.

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