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I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…
I’m not sure I’d yet go so far as to call LLMs an existential threat to universities. But I do…
My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…
IHE story here, which, unfortunately, implies (falsely) that most philosophy courses are taught via the Socratic method.
ADDENDUM: Manyul Im (Fairfield) writes: "I'd be interested in what people think about an online degree in philosophy, having taught a few online courses myself and still trying to sort out the issues in my own mind. I expect there's hearty disagreements among philosophers." I've opened this for comments from readers.
I think it's great!
As for advantages of online philosophy courses — from my experience it creates students with better writing abilities because they are required, by circumstance, to voice more of their views and hold more of their discussions with the class and professor in text. Consequently, I find it more important to supplement certain courses with one of the many 'how to write philosophy' books (such as "Writing Philosophy" by Vaughn or "Doing Philosophy" by Feinberg & Shafer-Landau), or even having an entire separate course.
As for disadvantages — depending upon the extent of audio/video lectures and discussion, it can be much more difficult to be 'in-tune' with a class. I cannot use visual cues to let me know whether the majority of the class is understanding a topic. Also, since it takes longer to type a question than voice it, then a student may have less time to sit down and ask all the questions he or she has in mind. I'm sure many of us can recall sitting in our professor's office for half an hour just asking questions about the material, throwing out ideas, and so forth : )
Clearly there are many more aspects that should be considered for online courses and programs, but these are just a few that stuck out to me.
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