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As Coursera Evolves, Colleges Stay On and Investors Buy In
An anonymous reader writes: The hype over online academics has diminished as it became clear that it wasn't a panacea for cheap, global education. While many organizations are struggling with the realization that online courses don't fit in everywhere, Coursera has found out they definitely fit in somewhere. The colleges partnering with Coursera are sticking around, and the company has drawn fresh investments totaling $60 million from venture capitalists. Rather than shoehorning traditional college courses into an online format, they've begun experimenting with different ways to structure education. "The company has created a series of courses that add up to mini-degrees that students can earn quickly, and pay a small fee to certify that they successfully completed them." Other students are using it as a stepping stone to traditional universities: "Rice University, for instance, reports that it is getting more applicants — and higher-quality applicants — for its computer-science masters' degree after offering a CS course on Coursera."
I'm a life-long learner. I can't get enough of learning. I have three college degrees, a couple of diplomas from community colleges, plus some IT certs. I try to attend conferences and training sessions whenever I can to afford to, time-wise and cost-wise. I've also taken several MOOC courses.
The MOOC courses have been, by far, the worst out of all of them. It isn't the quality of the lessons or the material that's the problem. Those actually tend to be top notch. It's the social aspect of MOOCs that are absolutely awful.
Let me give you an example. I took a MOOC course about a programming language. It involved some relatively simple programming assignments, followed by a final exam. The tutorial videos were good, and the assignments were good, too, but the forums for the course were abysmal.
So many of the other forum participants were from India, China, or some African country, asking for their certificate PDF even before the course had started! I mean, the course videos, assignments and exam weren't even available yet, but these people demanded that the professor leading the course send them the certificate that they had not earned right away!
This same sort of bullshit happened once the course started. Every day I'd go into the forums to try to find other actual students to converse with, but I'd end up wading through a huge pile of these useless third world comments demanding certificates, asking for exemptions from the assignments, asking for exemptions from the exam, complaining about how deadlines fell on obscure religious holidays, demanding re-grading of assignments and exams that had been failed, and so on.
Learning isn't just about watching videos. It's about interacting with your fellow students. MOOCs should allow this on a global scale, but instead all they allow is for third worlders to try to get unearned credentials easier. Not only does this ruin the learning experience for the few legitimate students, but it helps make the credentials seem very untrustworthy in the end. I don't mention the MOOC certificates that I've earned, even the verified ones.
After these numerous bad experiences, I no longer engage in MOOCs. I'd really like to, but I just can't justify putting up with so much bullshit.
Coursera is definitely a great way for universities to show off how good their star teaching faculty are.
I know that some professors also get great satisfaction from the opportunity to offer free education to people around the world.
What I'd like to see in the future is more advanced courses. The problem with what's available is that it's nearly all at the freshman and sophomore level.
is such a scam. People hiring know what colleges are fakes, like Univ of Po-he-nix and will not hire dishonest people that buy a degree. It is amusing that Republicans create these fake colleges because they're crooks, then it is only Republicans that are stupid enough to pay cash for a fake degree. They're eating their own. It is awesome.
to send me emails apparently. I'm pretty sure they've sent me a dozen emails in the past month and no advertising messages prior to that.
Colleges: tell our investors to buy stocks in this technology. we might be able to fire a few more adjunct faculty members and finally rid the cafeteria of the last remaining actual food product to be derived from real animal or vegetable.
Investors: tell the undergraduate money factory we bought those stocks they wanted.
Good people go to bed earlier.
the model espoused by Kahn academy and others is to flip the classroom. You still go to school. But you watch the lesson at home before class. The teacher summarizes the key points in class then they rest of the time is spent working problems from the lesson .
So it's no a no school mooc but just the opposite. You have to watch the lesson by a deadline then you get intensive application experience to find the bugs in your understanding guided by a teacher in a more one on one way.
These mooc videos will be very useful once schools try using them that way. You can imagine having multiple less masterful instructors in the classroom and the master teacher on video saved for all time and in competition with competing master presenters.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Is to see if you're stable enough to make it through a four year degree. It lets employers sift wheat from chaff. MOCs will never do that since they're inherently more accessible.
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Speaking as a "MooCaholic" (I've done dozens, and highly recommend Rice University's Python series), the contrast with a traditional university course was recently brought home to me when I was asked to be an external examiner. The traditional university course had the advantage of paying actual money, but I'm still on the side of MooCs as far as educating students goes.
Between doing my paid for marking, I was doing "free" peer reviewing for Coursera's Data Analysis series which I'm busy on (which I also highly recommend), and it struck how much the students doing a traditional university course would learn if they marked each others' papers as is done on MooCs instead of oustsourcing this job to an external "expert". I've found the marks you get from the peer review process in MooCs to be a bit of lottery -- sometimes I think I get unfairly low marks, other times overly generous marks. But the main thing is by comparing assignments I've recently done to those of other students, I sometimes get an epiphany as in "why didn't I think of that" and other times "you fell into a trap I avoided". (Incidently, I found this helped in the external examiner gig in that I first wrote the given assignment myself, and then ranked students according to whether they did better or worse than me -- and many thought of things I didn't).
Something the Data Analysis course doesn't do, but which other MooCs do which is an excellent idea, is to get people to grade their own assignment after comparing them to other students' work.
An advantage MooCs have is most sensible people doing them actually want to learn stuff rather than get "statement of accomplishment" in the hope of landing a job. So the peer grading system falls apart with people just wanting to be top of the class without learning anything. But if I were an employer, I'd focus on people motivated enough to do MooCs, though I doubt many corporate HR departments are that enlightened.
If it works, it's obsolete