[Society discussion] AI&Tech education in different countries

AI Discussions
1

Hi,

I haven’t been there for a while. This is the first time I open the interface from my desktop computer instead of my mobile phone in 1 or 2 years and this is pretty cool :slight_smile: . I have been teaching in tech (private) schools and clearly, 90 percent or more of what I can transmit to my students comes from here!

Anyway, I am really interested in how is education depending on the countries in the world, mainly in tech but I think that there could be interesting corollaries from other domains. I wonder about that since I started studying in 2000, and we all know how education changed drastically. There wasn’t even Coursera!! :smiley: (Thanks a lot to Andrew Ng for this revolution!)

But contemporary education has its pros and cons, at least in France, and I really wonder how it is elsewhere around the globe, want to have your opinion, whether you are a teacher or a student.

My point of view is that (once more, only my personal point of view and in France) that students gained a lot of freedom. They have much more activities, tools, and gigantic online libraries of content (I remember the time spent in my campus libraries, and now I have online access from my national library account to thousands of Springer or Packt books I can read not moving from home… the drawback is that learning with friends is more fun). On the other hand, for us, a lot of education became merchandise. We have private schools popping out of the floor and offering bachelor’s and master’s of science in tech with apprenticeships. For us, this doesn’t cost anything to the student and with government subvention lot of companies take the opportunity to have reduced-cost employees.
This leads to some kind of infernal cycle because, even if the direction of those schools wants to make good things, the competition between them makes them hurry to produce new up-to-date curriculums, to hire freelance instead of permanent (I know something about it) which sometimes cancel their teachings unexpectedly. Sometimes it’s the opposite because of students grading teachers (like one evaluates an Amazon goodie shopped on the web) and the managers preferring to cancel a course then have a bad reputation. On the brighter side, lots of interesting collaborations have been made, offering students many choices. I remember that I had much fewer options and that I went as a free listener to many courses that I couldn’t include in my degree.

Well, that’s it for now. Please tell freely how is education in your country :slight_smile: Thanks for sharing and have a nice day!

2

Hello @Nicolas! Welcome back to the community. Thanks for such an interesting post. I am happy to hear from you.

No doubt, there are both, pros and cons. And with the release of GPT-3, there are more cons for a particular group. For example, we want to grade a student, not GPT 3, for a particular essay or assignment. Similarly, recruiters want to interview a particular candidate who created a CV or Cover letter, not GPT-3. Thanks to Alexander Khazatsky who created a DetectGPT which can differentiate between human and bot writing. But it is in its initial stages, so needs improvement. In short, while some students celebrate the release of GPT as they think the hard workdays gone, I am optimistic that DetectGPT (and similar tools) will be common, soon, like Turnitin which catches plagiarism.

Regarding online education in my country, Pakistan, frankly speaking, it is hard for the majority of students. Many have no stable internet or devices, let alone access to online education. I am living in a major city where the internet is usual but, you know what, the stability of a connection is not usual. For online meetings and interviews, I have to arrange a backup internet connection. So, online education is hard in my country, not for everyone, but for a majority.

Best,
Saif.

3

Hi @saifkhanengr and thanks for your ideas.

You make an excellent point and we have the same question about access to numeric depending on which city you live in. More generaly citizens sometimes complain that political decisions are often Paris-centered, and internet connexion quality is something we neglect when we live close to the capital and have a fast connection.

Also, I have the impression that internet services (websites or apps) are produced considering fast connexions. I remember in the early 2000s my first 28k modem . I still could get a lot of information. Now I feel like a lot of superfluous trafic is generated that is invisible with a fast internet but penalizes sliw ones.

In the same way, I played video games on an Atari ST as a child :smiley: and games took a floppy disk of 720 kB :grin: Now even the poorest mobile game takes few MBs, and we don’t pay attention because we have GBs on flash drives as small as a nail.

4

Hello @Nicolas! You remind me of my old days. My first computer had 128MB RAM. Then my cousin bought a computer with 256MB RAM, my other family members and I were so surprised by its speed. Hahaha.

Thanks for such an enjoyable conversation.

Saif.