Do they have to maintain decorum all the time or just when they are on professional duty? In any case, I suspect those students were in perfect control of their feelings and very intentionally seeking to call out and disrupt the speaker.
Only certain times and places, just as apparently Stanford’s rules only require decorum in certain times and places. An inability or unwillingness to abide by those restrictions is useful evidence for likely future behavior and should be considered by character and fitness committees.
The administrators voice cracked at least twice… My interpretation of that is she was about to cry… At least twice. Perfect control would mean no loss of vocal control by her, wouldn’t it?
I think you can feel and show emotion and still be very in control of your words and actions. Certainly looked like the administrator was acting very intentionally and in accordance with their values.
It's a matter of focus. We'd love there to be more self-study content available for kids also. But MOOCs have a famously low completion rate and it's hard to stay motivated without interaction. So we're focused on connecting learners and teachers and having them interact over video chat.
Most people who sign up don't actually want a certificate and aren't trying to complete. They are interested in the subject, watching some videos, move on. When you have class sizes with 1000-30,000 students, it's OK if 90% don't complete the certificate since many more did than in a brick and mortar school, yet it cost much less per student to deliver the class.
In online classes where you need to pay to get the certificate, it's been found that paid students have the same completion rate as brick and mortar university students.
> Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a "verified certificate" are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education.
This. Low completion rate of those who enrolled for free is, in a way, actually a positive indicator because it shows a lot more people getting a chance to "taste" a subject. Many decide it isn't for them or they learned what they wanted and are not interested in the certificate at the end. Something not possible with in-class courses.
Cool - Thanks for the reply! Will definitely be checking outschool in more detail.
I think the benefit of the pre-recorded sessions like from Coursera and Khan Academy, is that one concern is unsupervised teacher-learner interaction could be problematic if its unclear how the teacher has been screened.
For instance is the teacher in live mode going to do anything inappropriate or try to initiate in person contact with the learner, etc.
> Not to mention there's very little incentive to amend these policies outside of generating general goodwill.
There is now an incentive for other companies to follow suit since savvy employees will value offers from Pinterest and other companies with this policy much more highly.
It's rare that a company like Pinterest breaks ranks on things like this. I hope they get a lot of goodwill from employees and applicants as a result.
This is really nicely done. I do hope that avoiding the inevitable product death of acqui-hires hasn't reduced your upside from the new gig too much.
I would suspect that anybody worrying about the future of trigger.io as a result would have worried far more had they found out about this any other way - and I'd imagine that as soon as continued active development in your absence is visibly happening (i.e. the next batch of features rolls out) even those people should largely calm down.
An amusing aside - from the Exchange Visitor Host Site Handbook which is sent to supervisors of J1 program participants:
Signs of Cultural Adjustment Issues
“This country is really stupid…” - A common statement from trainees who are seeing a
cultural trait of the United States through the experience of their own culture, not that of the U.S. A response might be, “Why do you suppose we’ve done that for the last 200 years?”
“English doesn’t have enough words…” - A common statement from trainees who cannot
find a way to express emotions that are described in their native language, but not shared
by the Anglo cultures.
“All I want to do is sleep…” – A common statement of depression brought on by the
overload of change.
“I’m gaining a lot of weight…” – The change in food often results in weight gain. It is often difficult for trainees to understand how to use local and different foods for a healthy diet.
“Americans ask ‘How are you doing, but don’t really want to know…”– An accurate and
common observation that may indicate the trainee is understanding what is said literally,
but not hearing the underlying or cultural meaning.
“Why should I celebrate your holiday; I’m not American…” – A common attitude that
could indicate the trainee is suffering a bit of cultural identity crisis.
It's a reasonably common question and we think we have some quite good answers - you can see a summary on our homepage.
Our customers tell us they choose us vs alternatives for:
- the efficiency of our build / test cycle
- the broader API out of the box including native UI components and integrations with 3rd party SDKs like Facebook, Flurry and Parse
- the ability to push updates to the app without going through the App Store approval process using our Reload feature: https://trigger.io/reload
