Ask Lemmy

As someone with ADHD, I do horribly when I try to learn online. If it's not being forced to the forefront of my mind by going to a classroom every few days, I never get any assignments done and I end up failing.

I played wow during almost all of my online courses

My education credentials: I am a flight instructor.

Classrooms are a terrible place to teach. Laboratories are better. I can give you a 9 hour lecture on the aerodynamics of maneuvering flight, with a lengthy powerpoint presentation with pictures and such...or I can give you a half hour briefing and a one hour flight lesson and you'll come away knowing more than you would have from that 9 hour lecture.

A degree you earned from sitting in a classroom watching powerpoint presentations and doing homework on paper is going to be useless. They're going to teach you how to fill a page of paper with calculus or an MLA formatted essay. No one actually does those things. Maybe. Maybe. something like computer programming or the like where the student can bring their own computer could be done entirely from home, because a laptop is sufficient lab equipment for that field of study. I can think of very few other degrees that should be granted based on listening to a professor talk and answering trivia questions about what he said.

Biology majors need to cut a creature open. Engineering majors need to design and build things. Psychology majors need to talk to people. Chemists need to mix shit together. Aviation majors need to fly a fucking plane. If your degree program doesn't include a fair amount of practical lab work like that, you're either in a diploma mill or you're majoring in business. Either way, just unenroll.

Because American educational institutions are not and haven’t been about academia and learning for some time. It’s a good ol’ boys club you pay with daddy’s money or massive amounts of debt to be a part of, to give you a piece of paper you can use to virtue signal to other people who wasted similar amounts of money in the same place.

Hiring in IT has been an eye opener, I actively distrust people who present their degree as their first and foremost point of hirability; because they’re usually useless.

Look at it this way, I paid £3,290 per year in tuition fees to attend university back when I went. The price of tuition has since nearly trebled to over £9k.

If I paid £9k per year for online courses and was denied the student experience of actually attending a university campus (as many teenagers who went to uni during COVID had to), I'd be fucking livid!