The Problems With Online Math Classes

dcollins writes "As a college instructor specializing in statistics, I felt compelled to survey one of the massive-enrollment online education courses that are all the rage these days. This summer, it seemed a perfect opportunity when Udacity unveiled Introduction to Statistics by founder Sebastian Thrun (of Google autonomous car fame). Having taken the entire course through to the final exam, my overall assessment is: It's amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for college lectures encountered by many students during their academic careers. I've tried to pick out the Top 10 problems with the course structure and address them in detail."

Comments

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[ChrisMaple]

So you're saying that until near the end of your career, you're doing an incompetent job of teaching. Furthermore, since you have presumably been taught by experts, you've failed to gain from them, and each generation of teachers starts out at a uniform level of incompetence, never learning from history.

But that's the goal of modern education, isn't it? To leave its victims ignorant of history?