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EdX Drops Plans To Connect MOOC Students With Employers
First time accepted submitter cranky_chemist writes "MOOC provider edX plans to abandon a program that allowed companies to mine their massive open online courses for talent after a pilot program in which none of 868 students were hired failed. edX cited HR departments for the program's demise, stating 'Existing HR departments want to go for traditional degree programs and filter out nontraditional candidates.'"
This is not surprising at all. Online access to education is mostly good as a supplement to skills, not as a means to get a qualification or a job.
'Existing HR departments want to go for proven degree programs and filter out unproven candidates.'"
HR department don't like to be product testers.
Students who don't show up to class don't take out millennium old college system in first try. News at 11.
Also, "democratizing" as a euphemism for "watering-down".
That summary is extremely clumsily written. "...none of them were hired failed"? What kind of gibberish is that?
And whats the big deal about filtering by which method a degree was obtained? Is a degree somehow better if its obtained by physically sitting in a classroom with 30+ other people? The content is the same, the students learn the same material to qualify them in a given field (which is what a degree certifies). Are they admitting that degrees are basically worthless, since something as trivial as whether or not you attended class physically to get your degree from a reputable university influences hiring decisions?
I never go through HR to get a job. I'm a self-taught learner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism and HR departments don't hire my kind, I don't even make it past the first screening. Judging by the types of resumes they send me for positions I hire for, they don't seem to have much to choose from.
I suspect there are plenty of talented people that never make it past HR.
Yeah now that students are wised up to the Bad Deal http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815
student loans are and are avoid college unless they can pay (which after decades of tuition inflation, they can't) they really have no means to support themselves except through raiding the ol' endowment , which can last at best another 7-10 years even in the case of multi-billion dollar endowments.
They can see online learning is going to rip them a new one, so thy're trying to get out ahead o fit,. now how to make money from it so things can be business as usual (hint: you can't!). Hey, maybe if we cut ourselves a slice of that Monster pie, we can keep this thing going.
Here's a dose of reality. For decades and decades you've ripped people off imposing double and triple inflation rates tuition increases with not a thought to the financial burden you were imposing on "people barely not children" and co-signing grandmas. Then you lobbied congress to make student loans unbankruptable just to keep your gravy train going. You discouraged stymied and thwarted every attempt to put your courses online or bring costs under control right up until Kahn Academy proved it was so simple it could be done by one guy with a magic marker.
Now you're all about it!
But the math still doesn't add up, does it? No , it really doesn't. You're still just fucked.
Sometimes in life, the new things just don't include the old things in any way at all.
And you thought you were bigger than history and changing times.
I just want to make sure that the state doesn't waste our precious taxpayer money making good on pension obligations when you-all go bankrupt, which can't be too soon.
No one already established will take a chance on a new method or paradigm. This is why all real changes happen in smaller, lighter, hungrier companies.
A traditional B&M place doesn't want to change their hiring practices for a changing labour market? Wow. Big surprise there.
Big old org's have never done well with change, especially with entrenched business practices like HR chasing after degrees instead of actual talent.
Grads of alternative programs would have better success going after jobs outside the B&M crowd anyways.
Employers don't care about your education or your skills, they care about the modern school which offers nearly ritualistic schooling, and that you have it on paper.
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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.
A US Supreme Court case found that if an employer was using skills testing that resulted in racial discrimination, then they were guilty of racial discrimination if they intended to be discriminating or not:
The court case is "Griggs vs. Duke Power"
For an explanation, see-
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=1749
The only kind of testing that US companies can use now without fear of discrimination lawsuits, is educational requirements. Ridiculous but true.
Re: “We’re taking a phased approach to head in the direction of completely democratizing education,” said Mr. Agarwal. “It’s not something you do overnight.” Yes, Mr. Agarwal, it isn't something you do overnight. Why don't you look at the democratised, publicly accountable education systems we already have in place around the world? For all their shortcomings and issues, they provide better cognitive development, instructional scaffolding, and learning outcomes than any MOOC ever has. That's where the bar is set, you're not even coming close, and are unlikely to for the foreseeable future. Education is NOT a self-organising system that you can just set up and leave to run itself. It takes considerable amounts of highly skilled intervention, guidance, and support... ...perhaps you need to hire some actual teachers instead of leaving learners to fend for themselves?
Trying going to university and changing the way they do things, putting courses online or REALLY being innovative about how people learn and interact. I did in 1999. They took me apart- kicked me out of labs, literally hounded me out of school. My sin? I wanted to pout all my major's courses online so that profs wouldn't have to teach them over and over again and people could spend classrom time asking custom questions, which themselves would be recorded for posterity.
If it makes you feel better, in the years since you left the process you're describing has become a major educational trend. And I agree it's an interesting model.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
"Rigorous" as a euphemism for "ram the current model so far down their throats that they'll never question it, so my papers will get me tenure".
I would agree to a certain extent. You look at how your typical colleges work, and student learn the same thing, there are few real new minds that come out of college.
And explain how that is any better then MOOC classes? Other then the obvious, you have a interaction with a teacher, but the teacher is the same sod as the last. They to are not really bringing anything new to classes.
Having said that, people want to know why unemployment is down. Your forcing people to go into debts for real world colleges, and they're not learning anything more. Giving someone with an online degree a internship or a 60-90 day trail in a real world work place may surprise these companies. I guess having people that may be able to think outside the box is too dangerous.
"What kind of gibberish is that?" It's unemployable gibberish. To start with:
It still sucks. No amount of rephrasing will fix it. It's trying to create an infantile shock reaction while tiptoeing around the essential factoid:
We don't want to think, we just want to gasp at straws.
Slashdot: Nose peas for gasping Aspers, snuff that smatters
...who are like the scary talking doll in some nameless horror flick I once saw whose line was:
"Hi. My name's Tiny Tina, and you better be nice to me".
It was "Talky Tina", and it was an episode of Twilight Zone.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
They took a bunch of people that had taken ONE comp sci course and threw them at companies like Google and Amazon and were shocked that no one landed a job? Are the people running edx morons?
And yet, tech companies claim there is a job shortage ... now their true colors come out.
as there are nontraditional candidates who have disability who do better in more hands on learning.