> My son just started school at a respectable US university.
> I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
At a disadvantage for what?
For learning the material - sure, when an easy avenue for cheating with obvious incentives is available, it's unreasonable to expect people not to take advantage of it. Also, I expect that teachers have significant incentives to reduce their lecture efforts - why read the room, modify the lecture in response to Q&A, and tailor curriculum to the actual class progress, when you can just push "play" on the recording from last semester?
On-line classes give him an advantage for getting a piece of paper from a respectable US university, however - less work, same piece of paper, same results as far as job eligibility and resume eye-catchers...
I'm sure you enjoy being contrarian, but I also suspect you know precisely what I meant.
In the short-term, yeah, what's the big deal? But in the long-term, this devalues the courses and the degrees.
It's not in the long-term interest of the universities to behave this way because the course they offer are, ostensibly, a way of determining who understands the material and who doesn't.
Also some people have hard time breaking the rules even when they know that everyone else is breaking those rules and they are unlikely to get caught. We probably want to discourage systems that give cheaters advantage over honest people.
> I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
At a disadvantage for what?
For learning the material - sure, when an easy avenue for cheating with obvious incentives is available, it's unreasonable to expect people not to take advantage of it. Also, I expect that teachers have significant incentives to reduce their lecture efforts - why read the room, modify the lecture in response to Q&A, and tailor curriculum to the actual class progress, when you can just push "play" on the recording from last semester?
On-line classes give him an advantage for getting a piece of paper from a respectable US university, however - less work, same piece of paper, same results as far as job eligibility and resume eye-catchers...