Now it seems whenever I propose this concept online, I always get excessive, dismissive, pessimistic/nihilistic crap, if not just a flat out "No", but I know damn well that there must be some way to obtain a competency based higher degree through independent methods instead of the traditional debt-and-anchor method. I'm young and I feel like the standard college classes just aren't very efficient for scientific growth, as they're so time consuming and expensive. Hear me out, and please tell me if I'm crazy or not.
The baseline
The standard college class, as I've experienced through community college, media, and friends who attend, orients around being scheduled for classes in a semester, in each class whether it be every other day, weekly, semi-weekly, etc., there will be a professor to teach and guide the class, and typically a textbook. You will usually be assigned a particular project to complete on a specific issue, usually in the form of a research paper or thesis (around 40-100 pages for a bachelor's thesis, 60-150 for a master's, 100-200 for a doctoral thesis) which may or may not involve groups, and if the teacher is nice enough, homework that will revolve around the topics being taught, with a midterm and a final to assess the information you have learned. The endgame concept you're trying to go for, say knowledge in biology, is represented by x amount of credits, fragmented into dozens of different finite or generalized aspects of the subject which are learned through classes which have a small amount of credits.
Accessibility of information and resources
There have been recent revelations in information though, with the introduction of high speed internet. Most of the time nowadays students simply use websites found through Google regularly to teach themselves stuff written in their textbooks that they're confused on anyways, to the point where many research papers are written almost exclusively with information obtained from articles, written by doctorates on reputable and popular websites found on the front page of google, or sources from said websites (for example, psychologytoday.com) , and legitimacy may often not be a concern because the information is more often than not a collective of borderline common knowledge. If you would like to talk to an expert, there are many online resources, namely websites like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn, where there are plenty of professionals who are more than willing to help you with your issues. With social media rampant, it would be very easily to collaborate with students of similar interest to yourself online, whether they're actual college students or freelance students. Through free tools like Google Docs, Drive, or the basic editing software on your computer, or Microsoft office if you're willing to pay the price, and a public or personal printer if need be, accessibility to information or resources outside of a college background should be no problem, assuming you have sound organization skills.
Learning the Information, and benefit of independent study
Once you actually begin the process of learning information, organizing it, and documenting it through writing programs, progression should move along very quickly, assuming anywhere from a casual to heavy amount of dedication; Even working on a study for one hour on the weekdays can surmount a significant amount of information. For example, I initially started studying generalized information about all the major sciences online in order to decide on which college major I could focus on, and with geography the world is all the smaller when you list the countries individually, with anatomy I got 15 pages down with just a vague overview of all the bones, muscles, and organ systems, and on my current study of the different branches of psychology, by the time i'm done i'll easily have 50 pages on my hands, I'm not even a third of the way into the different pre-recs, and the room for specific growth is easily obtainable, as a matter of fact some freshmen and sophomores in college have found my notes to be useful. I've probably invested less
than 20 hours into my work overall, and I was being pretty lazy about it. Suffice to say, while current technology is very vast and expansive, we certainly have enough room for learning more that the very foundation of society is basically elementary knowledge. By researching information online instead of at an institution, while the direct professional exposure and social experience is sacrificed, a similar quantity and quality of information can be obtained in over a third of the time, especially without all the social occasions, work overloads leading to stressful meltdowns, and actual restriction by the time of the class (most subjects are stretched out to fit a semester). By teaching themselves information, a student has greater potential to branch into polymathy and more advanced topics that under a typical university education would be an incredibly lengthy and expensive, bluntly put, pain in the ass to obtain (I.E. a well integrated knowledge of anthropology through in-depth knowledge of geography, geology, biology, ecology, zoology, psychology, sociology, global politics).
The Issue
College is expensive, tedious, and stressful, and the higher the quality the education, the better you had to be at doing bureaucratic tasks and obeying orders when your frontal lobe wasn't fully developed (AKA high school GPA), the more money you have to shovel in, and more often than not the higher socio-economic class you need to be born in. Because education across all fields, whether it be general or in-depth, it all has to be fit into a class schedule that is mostly standardized, so a community college freshmen is expected to learn how to cut open a pig and name the basic organs while he takes an unrelated psychology class as a standard pre-rec. And in the same time, a biology master undergrad needs to write a 200 page in-depth thesis on the development of pig-embryos in order to prevent the development of malaria when breeding Chinese pigs with south american ones (made up scenario, don't know what biology masters actually do yet), while also maintaining a group project on something equally as difficult, participating in a work-study, and maintaining a social life. So for the sake of standardization, overall results are both increasingly expensive and significantly delayed (Your first two years of college, depending on what you study, may be capable of being completed in 3 months). Even if you were to study the information independently and put in the extreme effort to be both fluent and competent in your given subject to the point where you could easily compete with a higher degree college doctorate, and were prepared to prove your knowledge, you would still generally be completely discredited by the fact that you didn't invest a bunch of time and money into the big fancy college and most employers and professionals are iffy on online schooling. Worst yet, to my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, in our current academic standpoint, the responsibility of acknowledging individuals as intelligent is the sole responsibility of private, for profit organizations, and the government's only standpoint is to at times make it a legal requirement to be verified by such organization.
So, with that on the table, thoughts?
Submitted February 21, 2019 at 05:48PM by stevenchamp45 https://ift.tt/2U28ZSa
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