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Umm, clicking the 'The course -- Data 8X' link takes me to a page with a call-to-action button 'Pursue the Program ($357.30 USD)'.

At least to me, it's not super clear - after ten seconds of looking, how to '...enroll for free.'

From TFA:

"Anyone in the world can enroll for free; learners who want to earn the certificate will need to pay."

The free enrollment link is at the bottom.

https://www.edx.org/ Not a book, but good resources for learning.

A couple of years ago edX got a bunch of investment money and was being run as a business, with hopes of making money from the course offerings, despite having no clear business plan or strategy for doing so.

(I believe originally the plan was to have companies pay to get lists of high-scoring graduates for potential employees, which didn't work out, and last I talked to [edX chief scientist] Piotr, he said you had something going with Pearson but couldn't elaborate because of NDA.)

What is your business plan and what strategy do you have for making money?

Microsoft are losing ground to Google, Amazon Web Services etc in the cloud computing market, so they've decided a free course is the best way to get people using their product

Ah, the old .. market share = competence argument. I guess Linux is the single most worst desktop operating system ever built.

It's nothing to do with how good or bad Azure or its competitors are -- all I said is that Microsoft are not currently doing in a commercially strong position in the cloud marketplace, and they want to change that.

A teacher cannot be a billboard.

By that logic, nobody should be teaching mechanics how to repair a Subaru, cuz.. y know all mechanics should know how every single car works.

You people are deluded. People *want* to learn about/get trained on MS products, because the entire fucking world uses them. Like GP said, I'm glad if even a handful of people get trained and improve their life by finding better jobs. If you want to offer them something better, put your money where your mouth is.

There is a big difference between teaching and training. You teach someone about how cars work and how to repair them. You train someone in using Subaru's engine management system. (Of course, in many teaching courses, you simultaneously train in the use of particular technologies or techniques, but that is only because you need a concrete environment for practise.)

edX (and Coursera) is supposed to be a teaching platform, but there was never any money in that. Udacity claimed to be teaching, but was to all intents and purposes a training platform from day one. It was no surprise that it very quickly started offering vendor-specific sponsor (training) courses, but I'm disappointed that edX are following suit.

Teaching vs training is not just a problem in online education -- CS departments the world over are under constant pressure to train students in industry standard tools so that new employees can hit the ground running, rather than having to be sent on training courses for their employers' choice of tools. You would not teach a two-year diploma in Subaru maintenance -- the Subaru garage would expect to have to train new staff, but if they can find someone with Subaru experience, so much the better!

And the problem extends beyond universities, because in computing more than most fields, you need constant training to keep up with new technologies, and employers are loathe to do that. They expect people to come in with the training already, which means people are now expected to use their own time and money throughout their career just to keep their jobs. By supporting this, edX are actually threatening their own revenue streams, as they already have a "training" business in the form of edX Professional Education, an all-paid-for brand which they're trying to sell to employers, and the existence of free training courses on the teaching site dilutes the apparent value of these.

And Microsoft is at it again:

Introduction to TypeScript
TypeScript is a new highly-productive superset of JavaScript...

Actually they were doing it already.

It's basically a vendor advertising it's own technologies and not all of it is free.

The worst was an IMF edx MOOC that required Excel. Lucky I was able to do the assignments on a borrowed computer that had it.

Amen to this.

I am a "homeschooling" parent. This does NOT mean my children are taught solely by myself and/or my wife, and it does NOT mean they are taught solely at home. It DOES mean that we have personally selected and combined a number of different educational opportunties for them. These include (but are not limited to):

Enrolling in college coursework while still in high school. Example: Harvard Math 23b. The majority of students in this class are admitted Harvard freshmen, but it is also available in an open enrollment capacity through Extension for anyone of any age willing to pay tuition. I like that peer group for "socialization" a whole lot better than the kids at my local public high school.

Hiring the chair of the language department at a local private high school to come to our home to provide personalized one-on-one instruction in classical Greek and Latin.

Hiring multiple music teachers for piano, guitar, theory, and composition.

Participation in team sports at the local health club.

Engaging a flight instructor for our son to earn a private pilot's rating.

Successfully completing qualifying flights for TARC

The Internet (Obviously). Taking advantage of online educational programs such as AOPS and edX and Open Courseware

Stocking our home with thousands of quality print books and plenty of subscriptions to lots of quality print journals (e.g. Economist, Nature, Lapham's Quarterly, IEEE publications, etc.)

Buying a whole bunch of the Great Courses

Joining CTY

Plenty of socratic dialogue with Mom & Dad. And plenty of unstructured time.

Flexibility to travel (including abroad) during the school year.

Concrete advice for OP: First, read The Underground History of American Education. Make of it what you will --- just include it (or criticisms of it) as a data point. Next, decide if any your local school choices (either public or private) are awesome. Do they approach the quality of Exeter or Boston Latin or Bronx Science? Understand the concept of a feeder school and that this concept can start at the elementary level. Got great public or private school options you like and can afford? Go for it. Not so much? Then go ahead and homeschool kindergarten. I guarantee you that your drop-out wife is capable of teaching your child to read and anything else they are supposed to learn in kindergarten. I guarantee you that unless you are completely negligent that your child will (if you choose) be able to enter first grade after a year of homeschooling and do fine. And I guarantee you that after a year you will be in a much better position to understand if more homeschooling is the right choice.

My question is similar: when will programming evolve to use subject-predicate syntax, rather than function-argument?

Function-argument goes back (at least) to Frege, and his prejudices against subject-predicate syntax (which dominates natural languages). But isn't changePassword(a,b) more ambiguous than "change the password from a to b"? Don't we get an "information gain" effect from using a syntax we are familiar with outside of programming? When you first come to a function-argument command such as (in Oz, which is used in the Paradigms of Computer Programming MOOC) {Push S X}, there is maximum entropy as to whether S is pushed, or pushed onto. "Push X onto S" has no entropy; you know immediately, from the syntax alone, what is pushed onto what.

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-game-design-mitx-11-126x#.VJTdLAM0N4

I am currently doing Introduction to Functional Programming and I am very impressed on how much it has helped to get into Haskell. Earlier I've tried reading "Learn yourself a Haskell" and "Real World Haskell" but having to do excercises and labs made the difference (for me)

Go to Toastmasters and get a CC ("Competent Communicator") or any of theit further awards. It'll teach you how to present and interact with others in a professional scenario.

Pick a karate school you like and get a black belt. It'll teach you discipline and focus, and help you keep your health as you get older.

Join the SCA and work yourself up to becoming a knight. If you take it seriously it'll teach you honor and integrity.

Take first aid, CPR, and EMT training. Take some survival courses.

Take MIT courses from edX or Coursera for the certificate and grade.

I support your sig, by the way.

But I think education should strive to let each student learn in the way they think is best, for them. Education should be all things to all people.

MOOCs are a start, but they still retain holdovers from an obsolete, archaic educational method that focuses too much attention on cheating and censors students from voluntarily helping each other and sharing information.

As an example, I recently completed a Solar Energy MOOC. It was great because it introduced a lot of theory which required calculus. But they left the deadlines long enough that I could go back and review calculus, and pursue other investigations into the theoretical concepts that were built upon in the class. So even if I had no strong background in calculus, I was able to do enough research into it on my own to get how and why it was being used in the class (to measure the area under the solar spectrum curve, for example). Then I could go to wolfram alpha or somewhere to plug in numbers and let a program do the integrals for me. I got a real sense of how calculus is useful for engineering problems.

That's my vision for education: let each student follow their own interests, learning what they want, exploring into more fundamental concepts as they wish. And asking questions, which others are free to help them with, without fear of being censored because of some antiquated "honor code".

Education today is more about control than knowledge transmission. Eliminate grades, and stop worrying about cheating. Focus on the knowledge and try to facilitate each student's individual approach to knowledge acquisition.

https://www.edx.org/course/uqx...

The course's contents is still accessible. "Episode 3" is about Ultrasound.

All videos from the course on Youtube (there is a lot more content on edX - text and images):

https://www.youtube.com/channe...

Look for "Brian has an Ultrasound" in that list (after loading all videos under that account) and go backwards (left and up) in the list for all videos on ultrasound.

The course/the videos are really interesting!

I am late to the party here, but want to leave one last tidbit: read astronomy journal articles. Many you will not understand, many, you will understand the language, but not the math (especially articles, they omit many many steps since they are so short), but ultimately, you will understand some, and understand the data they took to arrive at a conclusion, and maybe even question the data, the measurement, or the data processing. Maybe even enough to contact the authors and ask for clarification, or suggest alternate methods. At this point, you are doing astronomy. One added bonus to being a college student: Awesome libraries that can access all these journals at no cost to you (except your tuition of course).

Some suggestions for more hands on stuff:

Kewl book: Exoplanet Observing For Amateurs, by Bruce Gary (free! courtesy of the author)

edX Courses: They actually teach from journal articles! Math is at the high school level.

Citizen Science projects:

Find Exoplanets
Dicover and measure KBOs

Age? Phooey on that. Upon completing my 2nd M.S. degree in my mid 50's, I got letters of recommendation for PhD school (which I chose not to pursue).

Lots of generalities and assertions, no depth at all. Was this really worth being posted? They may or may not be right - but all you can have after reading it is an "opinion". No actual knowledge in that article, or even any insights. It is mere boulevard paper level journalism.

Also, what is missing is the speed with which the options increase. I just finished edX course MIT "Introduction to Biology" (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! WARNING: CONTAINS ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE! https://www.edx.org/course/mit...) and so much happened just the last 10 years! So an assessment of the danger of these developments that only looks at the current state (and what a bad job they do with this) is kind of useless.

Folks,

My son took the course last year as a senior in high school via iTunesU.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/co...

It's also available on EdX.

https://www.edx.org/course/har...

Heck, I took it way back thirty-odd years ago. :-)

Also, here's a link to the original article in the Harvard Crimson:

http://www.thecrimson.com/arti...

--Paul

I know the feeling, so I'm taking the edx Thermodynamics MOOC to try to learn more about the subject.

Something I learned in the first week: the assumptions of Thermodynamics are astonishingly limited. According to Professor Gaitonde, the science of Thermodynamics is macroscopic (so it doesn't say anything about microscopic phenomena). The assumptions are:

1) No quantum effects

2) No relativistic effects

3) No scale effects.

So any limits derived by Thermodynamics only apply to a small range of phenomena, when you consider the universe. Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, and Computer Science (since scale effects are very important) are not limited by the assumptions Thermodynamics makes. The laws of thermodynamics, based on these assumptions, don't apply as broadly as people commonly assert.

Doesn't the CMB indicate that re-ionisation occured much earlier, with the latest redshift being 7 which is well before a billion years since the Big Bang?

The discrepancy between CMB measurements and quasar measurements of reionization is presented in Week 5 of Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe.

Where is the energy removed to?

In the edx Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe MOOC, a student asked a question:

First:At the 2nd lesson you said that the energy of photons and particles, at the young universe, is the same (equipartition) and higher of the today energy. But the first law of thermodynamic says that the energy is constant in a closed system. We have any violation of the law?

To which Professor Paul Francis replied:

First question - it turns out that energy is not necessarily conserved in General Relativity on very large scales. So it is possible that the energy just goes away! Some people believe that there is a sort of potential energy built into space-time, and so as space expands, this potential energy increases, compensating for the loss of energy of the photons etc. They sometimes go on to say that this (negative) potential energy is exactly equal and opposite to the energy of everything in the universe, so the whole universe has a net energy of zero (and is hence the ultimate free lunch).

I'm taking the edx MOOC Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe. One of the instructors is Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Prize winner for discovering Dark Energy. I just watched a video where he displays his data from 1998, which led to the conclusion that the universe's expansion rate was speeding up. In his words, "What a surprise."

So I think I was quite correct. Dark Energy was (surprisingly) shown to exist after the guy's book was published.

Of course you were correct - I was adding to the discussion, not contradicting you.

I have a book from the late 80's that discusses the possibility also. Which was my one addition.

My other point is that naming something doesn't mean we understand it. Dark matter, dark energy, singularity.

Lot of work left to do. A universe that is accelerating in expansion is about as interesting as you can get.

I'm taking the edx MOOC Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe. One of the instructors is Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Prize winner for discovering Dark Energy. I just watched a video where he displays his data from 1998, which led to the conclusion that the universe's expansion rate was speeding up. In his words, "What a surprise."

So I think I was quite correct. Dark Energy was (surprisingly) shown to exist after the guy's book was published.

You can find a lot of open CS courses from prominent universities offered online with lecture videos, assignments, projects, the works:

edX
udacity
coursera

Some offer certificates, but most universities won't accept these. You can try to get the silly credits like English requirement done at a community college which will offer night classes. If you can't give up your 9 to 5 then you can attend a state school or community college part time. Some employers partner with state/community colleges for internships and jobs such as Lone Star College and HP (which actually share a campus in northwest Houston!).

MIT OpenCourseWare is up to around 2200 courses... let alone the 20+ they've done through MITx. MIT has spent tens of millions of dollars giving free education material to the world.

Disclaimer: I work for MIT OpenCourseWare and still get annoyed that we have a ton of people who don't know about us cranking away at free course materials for the world for more than a decade! (MIT OpenCourseWare was announced in 2001.)

As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money (such as this one). Schools join the consortium by putting up more investment money.

They're burning through this money with no clear business plan; specifically, they don't have a product to sell.

On top of this, edX at least seems unconcerned with the quality of their offerings. For example, their course offerings aren't searchable by keyword (that I can determine), you have to slog through the entire catalog to see if they have something with, for example, "neuroscience" in the title. Having found a neuroscience course, the introductory video tells the prospective student nothing about the course - it's completely useless.

Pointing this out to them, they said that there's nothing edX can do - Harvard is responsible for that course, and edX is only being used as a marketing vehicle.

Other players are making innovative changes in infrastructure and technique. None of this is happening at edX or Coursera - it's all videotaped traditional lectures. There's nothing that distinguishes the big MOOC product in a business sense; ie, nothing that says "our product is better for *this* reason".

As an outside observer, the big MOOC players appear to be living a bubble similar to the 2001 tech bubble: lots of hype with no clear business plan.

As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money (such as this one). Schools join the consortium by putting up more investment money.

They're burning through this money with no clear business plan; specifically, they don't have a product to sell.

On top of this, edX at least seems unconcerned with the quality of their offerings. For example, their course offerings aren't searchable by keyword (that I can determine), you have to slog through the entire catalog to see if they have something with, for example, "neuroscience" in the title. Having found a neuroscience course, the introductory video tells the prospective student nothing about the course - it's completely useless.

Pointing this out to them, they said that there's nothing edX can do - Harvard is responsible for that course, and edX is only being used as a marketing vehicle.

Other players are making innovative changes in infrastructure and technique. None of this is happening at edX or Coursera - it's all videotaped traditional lectures. There's nothing that distinguishes the big MOOC product in a business sense; ie, nothing that says "our product is better for *this* reason".

As an outside observer, the big MOOC players appear to be living a bubble similar to the 2001 tech bubble: lots of hype with no clear business plan.

I meant the link to go to here. Sorry.

First, let me point out that professors have been using various forms of online learning for decades, so what edx and others are doing with moocs is simply taking what we have been doing to the next level in terms of scalability and quality.

Think of online learning and platforms to create great online course material not as making teachers obsolete, but as tools for teachers, which will enable them to do a lot more than they could previously with the time they had. Sadly, among the few teaching tools we have given professors in the past few centuries has been a piece of chalk. Blogging sites and online news did not make journalists obsolete, rather created 10 million journalists, while making news much more interactive and exciting. In much the same manner, online learning has the potential to transform education. Online learning and moocs can give existing professors new tools to create additional modalities of teaching. Professors and soon-to-be professors like yourself that are quick to experiment with these new tools, are likely to find success, creating new ways of engaging our millenial generation of students who are perfectly comfortable texting, tweeting, blogging, emailing, moocing, youtubing, slashdotting ( :-) ) and snapchatting.

We have also been experimenting with blended models of education where you combine the best of online and inperson. Initial results are promising. In one these blended model experiments in which we collaborated with san jose state university, the students watched videos, did online exercises and virtual labs on the edx online platform, and then came to class for in-person activity including working in small groups and interacting with the professor to get a deeper understanding of the material. The pass rate for this course went from a traditional average of about 60% to 90% with the blended class. Research by Brewlow et al (you can see paper at https://www.edx.org/research) also shows that student success in a mooc course was positively correlated with working with an instructor or mentor.

I know, why do today what you can put off till tomorrow :-) Seriously, a large number of our learners like you just want to audit a course and prefer it to be always available. For that reason, a significant number of our previous courses are indeed offered as "past courses" or "archived courses". You will see this on the announcements page when you go into such an archived course: "This is a past/archived course. Certain features of this course may not be active, but we still invite you to explore the available materials." To see archived courses you can click on courses at edx.org, select courses, and then select past courses. For example, the justice course from HarvardX is available as an archived course at: https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-university/er22x/justice/571 In general, we strongly encourage our university partners to offer their past courses as archived courses. A few courses (like the one you tried perhaps) are not offered as an archived course. There are several reasons why a university might choose not to offer their course as an archived course. The next version of the course might have started, and so they might take down the archived course because they reuse some of the questions which have their answers available as handouts. Or, the course might need significant resources to run, for example, special grading servers may need to be maintained, for which they may not have resources.

An Honor Code covers things other than cheating or "open book" issues. see: https://www.edx.org/terms

Would you argue against this: "Not engage in any activity that would dishonestly improve my results, or improve or hurt the results of others." ?

MITx is offering the second session of their free massively open course 7.00x on Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life taught by one of the best teachers I have ever listened to, Eric Lander of MIT, which starts on Sept 10th:

https://www.edx.org/course/mit/7-00x/introduction-biology-secret-life/1014

This class is mostly about the molecular biology machinery that makes cells work, and it should be fascinating to anyone who finds the way computers work interesting because most of what goes on at the cellular level is actually information processing and digital operations (though based on stochastic principles).

Warning: this class might make you want to (or wish you could) change your career path...

G.

Who cares how did we learn, what matters is how can be best done today.

I'm not too fond of the memories of long nights banging my head against the White Book--but then again, it was only a high school hobby. Still, I wish someone would've steered me towards a more friendly introduction (and language), not to programming, but to problem solving with computers, AKA Computer Science. MIT's "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" looks like a dream come true.

We're really living in amazing times.

Most online courses to date have been lacking in one aspect or another, most notably student interest - drop rates of over 95% are common. Teething pains probably, as teachers begin to recognize that a) courses online must be presented in a different way, and b) teaching techniques must be effective (in terms of keeping student interest) when the audience is not captive.

Recently I saw this gem, which is extremely good. Good presentation, good technical quality (web form scoring &c), good content, and some experimental techniques in keeping student interest.

While I don't like the techniques used for keeping student interest in this course, they are at least experimenting with new techniques and learning from past mistakes. The quality keeps getting better.

Their business model varies, but one site hopes to provide an MBA ensemble for $50 (Udacity) and another gets finders fees from companies that hire the top scorers (edX). And of course there's Kahn academy, which is turning high-school education upside down.

In a couple of years, you will probably be able to get a complete high-quality education by self-study over the internet for thin money. You'll be able to study as much as you want for whatever topic you want and for as long as you want.

No more massive student loans just to get a decent education.

Another example of a moribund business model being overtaken by new technology.

Amazing times indeed.

We're really living in amazing times.

Most online courses to date have been lacking in one aspect or another, most notably student interest - drop rates of over 95% are common. Teething pains probably, as teachers begin to recognize that a) courses online must be presented in a different way, and b) teaching techniques must be effective (in terms of keeping student interest) when the audience is not captive.

Recently I saw this gem, which is extremely good. Good presentation, good technical quality (web form scoring &c), good content, and some experimental techniques in keeping student interest.

While I don't like the techniques used for keeping student interest in this course, they are at least experimenting with new techniques and learning from past mistakes. The quality keeps getting better.

Their business model varies, but one site hopes to provide an MBA ensemble for $50 (Udacity) and another gets finders fees from companies that hire the top scorers (edX). And of course there's Kahn academy, which is turning high-school education upside down.

In a couple of years, you will probably be able to get a complete high-quality education by self-study over the internet for thin money. You'll be able to study as much as you want for whatever topic you want and for as long as you want.

No more massive student loans just to get a decent education.

Another example of a moribund business model being overtaken by new technology.

Amazing times indeed.

I've been into the online teaching thing since it went mainstream, almost 2 years ago now. I've taken courses from all of the big online players, and "tasted" several others.

In terms of functionality, they're all pretty good. Where they fall down miserably is in presentation design and logistics.

The edX presentation emphasizes soft colors, rounded corners, italic serif fonts, and such. At the same time, small areas of information are buried within blankets of surrounding style.

For an example, check out the ongoing 802.x discussion forum, and note how much blank screen space there is. In order to get this much blank space, the presentation reduces the list of topics to 10 and hides it behind a slider. The underlying slider data is 15 topics (more or less, depending on the subject length) with the option to "load more" at the bottom.

The overall feel is that you're reading a newspaper through a greeting card with holes cut in the front. Most of the text is hidden, you have to move the card around the page to get all the information. Pretty, but time consuming.

The logistics are a bit uneven, but to be fair most of the players are experimenting with this right now. For the 802.x course ("Electricity and Magnetism" by Walter Lewin) , hour[ish]-long lectures are broken into segments, with a quick quiz between each segment.

It's impossible to get really "into" the lecture as one would get "into" an interesting movie. You'll watch a segment and it's fascinating, you want to see what happens next - Prof. Lewin is a great lecturer - and suddenly you have to stop, break out a calculator, do some calculations, check it twice, do some research on the net, enter the answer and hope you didn't typo a digit or something (the quizzes form part of your grade). Now back to the lecture, pick up where it left off.

Switching gears back-and-forth like this makes it hard to keep track of what's going on in the lecture - sometimes you get less than 5 minutes of watching before you have to stop and calculate some result. The system won't let you go to the next lecture without answering the quiz, and you are scored on the first try. You can't preview the lectures to get an overview, and you can't download them for offline viewing (there are work-arounds though).

Maybe in a couple of years these aspects will be more polished and useful. Throwing the code out as open source will only help, because other players can try different approaches and perhaps better methods of presentation.

I've been into the online teaching thing since it went mainstream, almost 2 years ago now. I've taken courses from all of the big online players, and "tasted" several others.

In terms of functionality, they're all pretty good. Where they fall down miserably is in presentation design and logistics.

The edX presentation emphasizes soft colors, rounded corners, italic serif fonts, and such. At the same time, small areas of information are buried within blankets of surrounding style.

For an example, check out the ongoing 802.x discussion forum, and note how much blank screen space there is. In order to get this much blank space, the presentation reduces the list of topics to 10 and hides it behind a slider. The underlying slider data is 15 topics (more or less, depending on the subject length) with the option to "load more" at the bottom.

The overall feel is that you're reading a newspaper through a greeting card with holes cut in the front. Most of the text is hidden, you have to move the card around the page to get all the information. Pretty, but time consuming.

The logistics are a bit uneven, but to be fair most of the players are experimenting with this right now. For the 802.x course ("Electricity and Magnetism" by Walter Lewin) , hour[ish]-long lectures are broken into segments, with a quick quiz between each segment.

It's impossible to get really "into" the lecture as one would get "into" an interesting movie. You'll watch a segment and it's fascinating, you want to see what happens next - Prof. Lewin is a great lecturer - and suddenly you have to stop, break out a calculator, do some calculations, check it twice, do some research on the net, enter the answer and hope you didn't typo a digit or something (the quizzes form part of your grade). Now back to the lecture, pick up where it left off.

Switching gears back-and-forth like this makes it hard to keep track of what's going on in the lecture - sometimes you get less than 5 minutes of watching before you have to stop and calculate some result. The system won't let you go to the next lecture without answering the quiz, and you are scored on the first try. You can't preview the lectures to get an overview, and you can't download them for offline viewing (there are work-arounds though).

Maybe in a couple of years these aspects will be more polished and useful. Throwing the code out as open source will only help, because other players can try different approaches and perhaps better methods of presentation.

Okay, I'm not Anonymous, and I haven't taken any Richard Buckland courses.

I have been involved with the MOOC movement since last year (Dr. Thrun's AI class), taken several online courses, and study human learning for my day job. I've evaluated and compared the teaching styles of MOOCs for my own purposes.

From what I've seen of his work online (YouTube videos), Richard Buckland is the best.

In my opinion his style of presentation maximizes the student interest. Regardless of the content, Richard Buckland will make learning enjoyable; he will cultivate the student's interest and perceived value.

Coursera and edX believe in the "learning is hard" model - they present artificial barriers and difficulties so that only the most intelligent and dedicated student will complete the course. For an example, watch the first lecture or two of Daphne Koller's "Probabalistic Graphical Models" online course.

Richard Buckland takes the view of "learning is fun", and does everything he can to motivate the students. He's been trying out different techniques over the years, keeping what works and dropping what doesn't. At this point in his career, he's got a pretty good handle on what encourages students to learn.

I predict that "The Art of Programming" will have the highest completion rate of all the online courses.

Of the course offerings and business models I've seen, this is likely to be the best one to date.

I've been "tasting" the various online courses for the last 15 months or so: started with Dr. Thrun's online AI course, have contacts with people at edX, have taken or viewed courses from a half-dozen entities.

One salient aspect of all of the MOOCs is their overall poor quality.

While it's true most early MOOC courses are a bit limited in interaction, pedagogy, assessment, etc, they have already had an interesting effect on universities.

I've been working on smart teaching tech on and off for nearly 10 years, including on an older project by some of the people behind edX at MIT. More recently I've been looking to bring online into the lecture theatre. For most of the time I've worked on teaching technology, I've often heard the reaction that's all well and good but no-one really cares about teaching because academics are promoted on their research and teaching is just something we do to bring in the cash. (There's always been some academics and centres who are very interested in teaching innovation, but it's seemed to me like they've not had as much attention from the rest of academia as they should have.) In the last year or so that seems to have changed. There's a lot more attention been drawn to the idea that yes now is the time to make some changes to how teaching is viewed and done in universities.

I've been "tasting" the various online courses for the last 15 months or so: started with Dr. Thrun's online AI course, have contacts with people at edX, have taken or viewed courses from a half-dozen entities.

One salient aspect of all of the MOOCs is their overall poor quality.

The teachers are, as a general rule: smart, familiar with the subject, nice people, and well meaning.

The online courses are, as a general rule: boring, poorly presented, supported by poor online tools, and counter-instructive.

Everyone realizes that education is changing, and that in ten years or so there will only be a few players left. Everyone wants desperately to be one of those players, so you have everyone frantically recording lectures and putting them online in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.

Sebastian. Thrun's AI course never bothered to check or correct errors in content, resulting in massive frustration from the students. Anant Agarwal's electronics course had students drowning in directionless theory that suddenly uncovered a useful equation. Daphne Koller's presentation style makes the simplest concepts appear dense.

To give an representative example, Kristin Sainani over at Coursera is running a course on scientific writing (writing for purposes of a published paper, or review of said paper &c). The course content is very good, but the students edit and grade each others' homework.

Perhaps 80% of the students speak almost no English. The end result: 80% of the editing work is tediously instructing other students not on course content, but on basic English (when to use articles, which prepositions to use when, &c), while 80% of the corrections you receive for your work are utterly useless. The overall experience is "massive waste of time for a course of heavily diluted value".

There are occasional standout exceptions, but the overall quality is very low. No one has quite realized that you can't just videotape a lecture and put it up on the web - you have to plan things out ahead of time, add good production value, and have good support. It's not easy, and no one group so far is doing it particularly well.

Online learning is still in beta. Perhaps in a couple of years the technology will mature.

How about giving away a free voltmeter to any student from a 3rd world nation who passes the edX course "Circuits and Electronics"?

6002x "Circuits and Electronics", an online version of the MIT introductory electronics course. This was an exact copy of the MIT course, taught by an MIT professor, and was just as hard as the original course. Same material, same difficulty, online format.

Some of the 7,000 graduates were from 3rd world nations. For example, this article talks about a class of high-school students in Mongolia:

I'm reminded of William Kamkwamba, who built a wind-powered generator and was able to bring electricity to his village. His Ted talk is pretty interesting.

Mr. Kamkwamba had nothing. He built his windmill from scratch after learning the principles of electricity from books in the local library. He built his own circuit breaker by winding wire onto nails driven into wood.

His task would have been so much easier if he could have measured continuity, or the output voltage of his generator.

Most of the modern world is based on electronics - measurements, actions, communications, and so on. Having the tools and understanding would allow people to repair broken equipment and machinery, to take pieces from ewaste and hook them together in new ways, and generally have better life opportunities.

Supplying 5,000 students (a generous estimate) would cost only $10,000.

Here is the contact page for edX.

How about giving away a free voltmeter to any student from a 3rd world nation who passes the edX course "Circuits and Electronics"?

6002x "Circuits and Electronics", an online version of the MIT introductory electronics course. This was an exact copy of the MIT course, taught by an MIT professor, and was just as hard as the original course. Same material, same difficulty, online format.

Some of the 7,000 graduates were from 3rd world nations. For example, this article talks about a class of high-school students in Mongolia:

I'm reminded of William Kamkwamba, who built a wind-powered generator and was able to bring electricity to his village. His Ted talk is pretty interesting.

Mr. Kamkwamba had nothing. He built his windmill from scratch after learning the principles of electricity from books in the local library. He built his own circuit breaker by winding wire onto nails driven into wood.

His task would have been so much easier if he could have measured continuity, or the output voltage of his generator.

Most of the modern world is based on electronics - measurements, actions, communications, and so on. Having the tools and understanding would allow people to repair broken equipment and machinery, to take pieces from ewaste and hook them together in new ways, and generally have better life opportunities.

Supplying 5,000 students (a generous estimate) would cost only $10,000.

Here is the contact page for edX.

I havnt done much programming myself, but i am currently working at getting back into it; in my attempt, im going to be taking free online classes from harvard edx. here is a link: https://www.edx.org/