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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...
Yes, I believe you've mentioned that previously. Verbatim, in fact.
I don't have experience with Corsera courses, but I am currently an OMSCS student at Georgia Tech (http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/). So far, the lessons (YouTube videos through Udacity) have been well done. However, the course discussions on the forums (Piazza) in some cases have been more valuable than the courses themselves. In particular, we've had a great thread going on about real world agile vs. non-agile development models as we've seen them in the professional world.
The difference may be that while not all students are US based, all students have to apply for admission to the program, with minimum credentials being a BS degree (generally in a STEM field) with a 3.0 and TOEFL scores for non-native speakers. Students are expecting rigorous courses and are generally graded at least a little bit on forum participation, so students have incentives to participate and the faculty and other students don't put up with "give me the answers" type posts (those would be an honor code violation and could easily get you kicked out). Maybe having to be admitted to a real school makes all the difference?
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.
Totally contrary to my experience (but I fall in the qualification of thirld-worder ). I started the course not for the credentials but for the skills to learn. I didn't frequent the forums since I find the social aspect of education way distracting, but the times I entered I found:
- tools to help doing the exercise (without cheating/giving away the answers)
- good explanations for some excercises and the problems arising
- further research of a specific topic
There was also some people asking for certification, but they might have been so insignificant that I can't even remember one in particular. Perhaps some courses are more prone to this, but not the one I entered ( Cryptography I by Dan Boneh BTW, amazing content).
The good thing is that I noticed I was lacking in some aspects ( mainly calculus) so that motivated me to study it on my own, to improve my understanding on the matter, next time I'll probably jump on module 2 of the course or a machine learning course that's really interesting.
I think that online courses are great, specially for guys who don't feel comfortable anymore hanging out with freshmen students, but if you go there for the certification then it's obvious they never will be as acceptable as formal in-campus education, so you're wasting your time.
For me the hardest part about MOOC courses was watching the lectures, as an adult with other obligations (or just lack of attention span) its not easy to make time to sit through a video of a lecture.
I worked as a TA in a university. There are people there also, missing deadlines and asking for higher grades. They just don't do it in front of everyone.
There is a simple solution to this problem:
- Clear, written rules for all, posted at the beginning of the course
- Enforcing those rules on forums too (people will cry, but let 'em)
- Deadlines, that give time to finish the assignments
- Deadlines, that do not move, even if they are bombing your city
I have encountered many of the same problems myself, taking MOOCs. They go away, when the instructors learn from these things and create new rules, and enforce them. This is how Coursera is evolving. The student material is the same, but the instructors learn from their previous problems with the students.
I've also noticed, that the quality of the forums is often based on a few bright inviduals , that really bring insights into conversations (and one of them was from India, and he was a better programmer than me (15 years of experience)). If everybody is a nagging idiot, well the forums are not going to be fun. That is the price we pay for free education without prequisities.
I am actually thrilled, to see Africans and other nationatilities on same courses, and graded the same as you Americans and us Europeans. They come from a totally different background and actually have to do real work, to even get materials for high level education. I wholeheartedly support bringing education to everyone, and have yet to see "free certicate" given to someone on a MOOC.
I wrote about MOOCs back in 2012 when they were first starting to be a thing. I'll save you from reading with the summary: each course is different, your mileage may vary.
Today I find that the only real change is in the number of offerings. There are still experts in their field that are completely incapable of teaching (or at least, teaching using a primarily lecture based system), classes where the TAs appear to be more knowledgeable than the lecturer, and those few where all the stars align. Having an active and useful forum is just another factor you can't predict.
Of course, I disagree that learning is "about interacting with your fellow students," anyway. I think this is a potential benefit of some form or another, but that's not what learning is about. Without looking up the definition, I'd say that learning is the acquisition and comprehension of new ideas and skills. Saying instead that it's about forum postings - or forums with high value-for-content ratios - is like claiming your food tastes bad because you didn't like the restaurant decor.
If it IS a factor to you, you can always organize your own invite only unofficial forum or email list. I remember setting up many a majordomo list in the day, though I recall they were used more for sharing pat solutions and socializing rather than a forum to encourage learning. In my own experience, collaboration with my peers was rarely exceptionally useful. Office hours and the email address to the TAs were much better resources.
You seem to be saying that it's not easy to make the time, but what I'm hearing is, "I lack the discipline to schedule and prioritize my time and I need someone to explicitly provide me with that structure."
What's the alternative? Having an in-person class at a set time and location? That seems like it would take more time - and not of your choosing.
Until we get our lessons in pill form, there is no greater convenience to be had. You can learn literally any time you choose to. Get distracted? You can rewind and rewatch. Online quizzes, tests, and assignment submissions usually offer real-time feedback. You can be sitting on the toilet learning nuclear physics if it takes your fancy.
If you haven't got time for this, what are you doing on slashdot at all? You haven't got time for it either!
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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I have a university degree completed in person, and I've also completed real complete university courses online. I know exactly how to manage time. I'm saying that a 3-hour lecture the student needs to sit through is an outmoded concept driven by the idea a hall needs to be reserved and students need to travel to it.
Video also forces a particular pacing, why should we still be limited to the (below) average learning speed? Real online courses for credit when I took them (~10-years back, math, science, arts) all used textbook reading and paper.
If they feel video is necessary, why not slice the weekly topics into individual videos? Easier to record, easier to consume, easier to review a specific topic later
Did you lose the stop button?
Use a media player that allows to seek and change playback speed.
I took over 10 courses at coursera. And I'm right now enrolled in one where the "lecture" is just 1 minute video introducing some acronyms and 2-3 links to external web pages or pdf going from 5 to 80 pages. I personally find that the worst style of the course I've seen on coursera.
Perhaps the style, that coursera usually does, simply does not fit your needs.
"A wild SJW has appeared!"
If you capture one, remember: no meat, no gluten, no GMOs.
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
Credentials are worthless and have always been worthless, unless you're in a grunt job like an IT helpdesk. I've been a grader and a teaching assistant at a university, and the same attitudes were there as well. Students whose parents paid a lot of money would gripe and moan about the deadlines and asking for extension with flimsy excuses; but it was third world, first world, rich, poor, male, female, etc.
This is why teacher's pets exist. One student who appears to want to actually learn, and learn more than the syllabus encompasses, can make it all worthwhile to someone who is trying to teach.
This isn't because of republicans, but corporations. They put intense pressure on universities to stop teaching a broad subject and teach job specific skills, like the big name schools are supposed to be nothing more than mere trade schools. And the universities fall for this, because they hope for some extra funding for a new lab from IBM, or an endowment from Intel, an extra faculty position paid for by SAP. Some day there may be the Taco Bell Chair in Culinary Engineering.
Democrat or Republican politicians, the majority have never held a real job outside of law or politics, a small number have had jobs in teaching or medicine, but I can't think of more than a handful who've started in engineering or science. So these politicians do whatever corporations tell them, and then end up believing the charts that say there are no qualified American citizens who can handle engineering/programming/technician jobs.
That's bullshit. When you look at an outsourced company in India itself it is not staffed with the best and brightest people, but people from IT specific schools and not computer science or engineering and definitely not a broad based education. That is, you get someone from a school with a highly focused curriculum based upon the job requirements for the next year only. You also don't get the best graduates from those schools. Because the best and brighest Indians are already in America or Europe, there's a huge brain drain problem that is going to seriously affect India in the next generation.
Videos are just not always a good stuff to present information. They can be boring and time intensive. But people love to make videos because they pay back a few cents over time, whereas writing a concise description in text that takes ten seconds to read earns you zero cents. A good lecture has questions and answers, a video does not do that. A good lecturer can tell when the audience is getting confused or is nodding off, a video lecturer can not do that. A video lecture is the modern day equivalent of the elementary school film projector.
I think you've phrased your argument in terms that are going to get people's backs up. So let me try in slightly different terms, because I think you do have a valid point. In many forms of education, people with similar levels of ability are put together, because teaching a mixed ability group can be difficult, certainly with live teaching. If you have 20 people who are learning an advanced topic, if they all have passed a similar class last year and there is one person who has no experience of the topic, then that person asking questions is going to slow down the learning and hold people back. That argument also holds if 20 are native English speakers and one is not, you don't want the whole class being held back by the person who is struggling with the language. I think there is a valid argument to have different tracks tailored to different abilities and/or to look for the forums to maybe be separated by skill sets, I'm not saying it's trivial, but it should be considered. Really though the larger issue is that the forums on these sites are just awful anyway, generally reams and reams of unstructured junk, no way of even marking stuff you've read so you don't see it again nevermind any useful search or filtering tools.
Both forms require a lecturer who is good in his chosen medium, and more importantly, a student who is attentive and dedicated to learning. If you fail to provide both, you're going to have a bad time.
So I dismiss the idea that video can be 'boring and time intensive' offhandedly. So too may be normal lectures, to the student unprepared to dedicate themselves.
There are many flaws in in-person lecturing that video lecturing solves, the biggest of which is the 'pause', 'rewind', and 'skip ahead' buttons. With subtitles, we do away with accent/language issues. With online quizes and tests for comprehension, we get instant feedback and verification instead of continuing on to appease the 40-200 other students.
All of this, and we still allow for a question and answer via email, forum posts, or even live 'webinar' style office hours - with the benefit that the non-realtime questions and responses can be answered by a larger body of people (professor, ta, other students) without interrupting the lecture, and in a way that maximizes information density.
It may not be the most efficient mechanism when trying to teach a given high quality student, but it provably is if you ever mix even a single lowest common denominator student into any class.
I was about to make the same arguments to see them already listed in this post.
Every single item that in the grandparent post appears to apply only to live and in person lectures. Long. Boring. Pacing unrelated to my personal comprehension speed - whether that was slow or fast. Unable to pause in the middle for any reason. The only thing I could take away was notes - assuming I could write down what was being shown on the board AND listen to the professor AND try to digest it all at the same time, all before they moved on and wiped the board clean.
None of them apply to video lectures which provides unparalleled freedom - as long as you're willing to take the initiative and follow through.