The Miseducation of Dr. Moore

Always trying to improve myself I recently tried to do some MOOCs about statistics for public health...and in spite of these courses coming from reputable universities advertising online graduate degrees, they were awful.

Some of the best universities in the world have online programs, essentially for adult workers. The lectures I saw scare me with statements that were so watered down and confused as to be actually false. For example, one lecturer, in trying to explain what a variable was, said it was a characteristic of a person. He didn't claim that characteristics of a person are EXAMPLES of variables- instead he made the patently false claim, in an Intro to statistics for public health class, that all variables are characteristics of people. Apparently height, weight, gender, ethnicity, survival status, vitals and disease status of people are the only variables in this cartoon world. By extension, I suppose every exposure is a constant? Sadly, this variable mis-definition is only an example of the stupidity these course made me hear. I might feel like I was being demoted to 2nd grade science class, but actually, I don't remember them ever dumbing things down so much.

Of course eventually in the course they will stumble on super obviously important variables- like number of patients in an emergency room- that are clearly not characteristics of people...no apologies, or explanations. I'm glad even they don't believe their own nonsense.

Sadly, my experience is not at all unique in terms of many quantitative subjects taught in universities. My husband, an extremely skilled programmer recounts suffering through computer science classes where he had to turn in code written on a Word document- because the instructor couldn't read code as a file of code. Like any programmer, when he writes in Python, my husband makes .py files or some other standard kind of file he uses as a pro...but those just can't cut it in academia where instructors who can barely code more than 5 lines need a .doc file to check your Python code. For a an 18 year old taking their first class, they may just accept the idea that this is how things are done. For people who have worked for any serious amount of time, such absurdities are unbearable.

The failures of adult education are a multi-factorial mess. Part of the problem, is that anyone with even a pretty low level of quantitative skill is imminently employable in a well remunerated job in the private sector. When it comes to certain areas of computer science, you are actually dealing with the flunkies if you stay around about academics. Compounding the problem, no one has told these flunkies about WHO exactly they will be teaching. Perhaps they dream of finding a 19 year old dewey eyed young woman to "empower" with some STEM education. Apparently few have the quantitative skills to figure out they are actually more likely to be dealing with some 27 year old male computer nerd or some fat old

crone like me, wise to the ways of academic nonsense.

So sadly, as we fight dementia, until the education industry can find a fix, most adult learners of any caliber interested in quantitative subjects will probably have to learn to be auto-didacts.