Slashdot Mirror
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.