Respond with your best reasons, rationally, unemotionally. Don't let yourself get caught in the flame war, instead go on with your life. Why do we need to suppress speech again?
The Honor Code seems like a holdover from obsolete old educational methods. It seeks to make the free and open sharing of information somehow dishonorable.
Often students want to help each other in the forums. The quizzes and exercises can provide interesting applications that the instructor didn't go over in the videos. Why censor a student who, of his own free will, wants to help out another student?
The Honor Code, in forbidding explicit help to questions on assignments, encourages deviousness and obfuscation in the forums. Often, posts will be made deliberately vague, so that one has to make guesses, or "read between the lines", or try to mind-read. Wouldn't it be better to encourage clear, simple explanations on the forums? Students are sometimes as (or more) knowledgeable than the instructors, and can explain things in a better, simpler way. Often the instructors have been at the subject so long that they've forgotten what it's like to look at the material for the first time. Other students can fill in the gaps. But the Honor Code works against this type of peer-helping-peer interaction, because often the most interesting applications of the subject are in the exercises.
When I've argued for the dissolution of the Honor Code before, one response has been: you just have to wait until after the deadline. However this response is not adequate, because often the deadlines are a few weeks off. When a student is engaged in a particular problem, that is the most opportune time for him to learn. I've had questions I couldn't answer, and haven't gone back to check how to do them after the deadline passes, because I'm now involved in something else...
I think the Honor Code works against the spirit of openness and freedom of speech that the internet was founded on. What kind of skills are you trying to teach, by enforcing the Honor Code? Does a client care whether you "cheated" by looking up the answer to a programming problem on the internet, when you're writing a program for him?
I think there are better technological solutions than enforcing an archaic Honor Code. Can you put a "spoiler" tag on posts that reveal how to do an assignment question, and reward those students who don't click on those posts? You're supposed to be tracking our every click...
Solution: free people from the necessity of getting a job and working for an ignorant boss. Vote for government to provide a basic income to anyone who asks, and stimulate the natural creative instinct with challenges. The focus should be on the advance of knowledge, not "any job is a good job". With free MOOCs and the ability to collaborate in an ad-hoc way through the unprecedented communication tool that the internet provides, it is no longer necessary for individuals to work for a company to contribute.
How can people refuse to take some menial job that can easily be automated (self-service checkout, roomba...)? How dare they choose not to do what benefits me by satisfying my need to control others' choices? By Jove, I must find some excuse to compel them... how about economics? Of course I know by the Modigliani-Miller theorem that debt doesn't matter, but I'll cynically use it as an emotional ploy to reassert my divine right to force others to behave according to my whims!1
The safety net should be a basic income, giving each of us a choice whether we want to enter the greedy, sociopathic, mendacious, morally hazardous world of perverse incentives that is the free market.
How about use satellites, or balloons, or drones, to give them free uncensored internet, and let them exercise their unalienable right to liberty regardless of what their government says?
We could do it in Syria, too. Why aren't we discussing nonviolent options?
The idea that a high drop-out rate is bad implies that students can't be trusted to make their own decisions, so steps must be taken to force them to continue.
I think the idea that a high attrition rate is bad comes from a physical classroom where perhaps resources are needed to prepare for a certain number of physical bodies in the classroom. But a virtual classroom is very different because the videos scale easily, and there is no cost to preparing a video that gets viewed by 5000 instead of 10000 students.
The negative view of low completion rates also implies that students who don't continue to the end are lazy, or dumb, or lacking in some other characteristic necessary to be a "good student". I think this idea should be abandoned, because it's more about the educator controlling students and imposing their values than about sharing knowledge. Students should be trusted to make their own decisions on what they want to learn, how much of it they want to learn, and at what pace they want to learn.
I think the single most important thing MOOCs can do to maximize completion rates is to throw out the "honor code": let students on the forums share knowledge freely without censorship. Include "spoiler" tags if you must so those who don't want to see answers to assignments can get extra credit, or something.
You can still teach, in the forums. Vote for a basic income and free yourself to transmit knowledge without the constraints imposed by arbitrary hierarchies whose main goal is to control others, not empower.
There is a coursera MOOC on Aboriginal education and knowledge. One promise of technology is that we can use it to make it fade into the background so we can communicate without having to acknowledge it.
Or, like kicking away a ladder once we've reached the level we wanted to get to, we can use it to get to a point where we don't need it anymore.
A language's expressivity is often limited by its syntax.
For example, in Python, I want to type "exit" to exit the interpreter, as I can in Ruby and the cmd interpreter. But Python enforces a syntax requiring me to use parentheses, even though the interpreter knows what I'm trying to do and could easily let me do it. Then Python violates its own rule when assigning functions to class variables, such as "__getitem__ = getitem" where getitem is a function.
So when I'm closing windows I can type "exit" to exit an irb session, a cmd window, an octave instance; but when I get to the python interpreter I have to add parentheses. Why? Purely because of a silly syntactic requirement that adds unnecessary keystrokes. (Same with the change in Python 3 requiring the "print" statement to use parentheses.)
1) Do there exist easy methods to decide how good/effective/complete/accurate (add your own metric) an online course is? As the number of online courses grow, it would be nice to have some way to compare courses against each other. For example to decide which one(s) are more 'worthy' to invest ones time in.
Why force people to learn? Let them approach a subject when they are interested, motivated, and they will learn much more effectively. The drop-out rate is irrelevant; you can learn something from the first classes, which often state the basic principles or axioms of the subject. Sometimes it takes a while to understand those; perhaps you disagree with them and don't want to continue until you figure out why precisely.
Thus, students can be invited to participate in that process either as a negotiation (such that the teacher has the final say) or by simply permitting students to grade themselves. If people find that idea alarming, it’s probably because they realize it creates a more democratic classroom, one in which teachers must create a pedagogy and a curriculum that will truly engage students rather than allow teachers to coerce them into doing whatever they’re told.
He's making a case against grades; but the more general concern is about motivating students, not coercing them. Free MOOCs provide an opportunity to figure out how to use technology to make a class all things to all students; if some students decide they've learned enough, for now, after the first class, so what? They can come back to the subject later, when they're motivated.
Slashdot Mirror
They also have no obligation to publish truthful articles. Should they, though?
Respond with your best reasons, rationally, unemotionally. Don't let yourself get caught in the flame war, instead go on with your life. Why do we need to suppress speech again?
http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/eurofxref-graph-usd.en.html
The euro started at about $1.17, in 1999. It's now about $1.35. The highest value was close to $1.60, just before the 2008 crash.
They don't have to. They can be scaredy-cats and get all butthurt by words on the internet if they want to.
The Honor Code seems like a holdover from obsolete old educational methods. It seeks to make the free and open sharing of information somehow dishonorable.
Often students want to help each other in the forums. The quizzes and exercises can provide interesting applications that the instructor didn't go over in the videos. Why censor a student who, of his own free will, wants to help out another student?
The Honor Code, in forbidding explicit help to questions on assignments, encourages deviousness and obfuscation in the forums. Often, posts will be made deliberately vague, so that one has to make guesses, or "read between the lines", or try to mind-read. Wouldn't it be better to encourage clear, simple explanations on the forums? Students are sometimes as (or more) knowledgeable than the instructors, and can explain things in a better, simpler way. Often the instructors have been at the subject so long that they've forgotten what it's like to look at the material for the first time. Other students can fill in the gaps. But the Honor Code works against this type of peer-helping-peer interaction, because often the most interesting applications of the subject are in the exercises.
When I've argued for the dissolution of the Honor Code before, one response has been: you just have to wait until after the deadline. However this response is not adequate, because often the deadlines are a few weeks off. When a student is engaged in a particular problem, that is the most opportune time for him to learn. I've had questions I couldn't answer, and haven't gone back to check how to do them after the deadline passes, because I'm now involved in something else...
I think the Honor Code works against the spirit of openness and freedom of speech that the internet was founded on. What kind of skills are you trying to teach, by enforcing the Honor Code? Does a client care whether you "cheated" by looking up the answer to a programming problem on the internet, when you're writing a program for him?
I think there are better technological solutions than enforcing an archaic Honor Code. Can you put a "spoiler" tag on posts that reveal how to do an assignment question, and reward those students who don't click on those posts? You're supposed to be tracking our every click...
Thanks
Not to mention the slaughter and mistreatment of animals.
Solution: free people from the necessity of getting a job and working for an ignorant boss. Vote for government to provide a basic income to anyone who asks, and stimulate the natural creative instinct with challenges. The focus should be on the advance of knowledge, not "any job is a good job". With free MOOCs and the ability to collaborate in an ad-hoc way through the unprecedented communication tool that the internet provides, it is no longer necessary for individuals to work for a company to contribute.
jazz musician
Legalize heroin.
I have a lifetime ban on moderating, because I up-voted "The First Slashdot Troll Post Investigation"!
How can people refuse to take some menial job that can easily be automated (self-service checkout, roomba...)? How dare they choose not to do what benefits me by satisfying my need to control others' choices? By Jove, I must find some excuse to compel them ... how about economics? Of course I know by the Modigliani-Miller theorem that debt doesn't matter, but I'll cynically use it as an emotional ploy to reassert my divine right to force others to behave according to my whims!1
The safety net should be a basic income, giving each of us a choice whether we want to enter the greedy, sociopathic, mendacious, morally hazardous world of perverse incentives that is the free market.
Yes, our govt should provide free internet. And we need to vote out the bums who support surveillance, It's up to us; power resides in We the People.
How about use satellites, or balloons, or drones, to give them free uncensored internet, and let them exercise their unalienable right to liberty regardless of what their government says?
We could do it in Syria, too. Why aren't we discussing nonviolent options?
Of course it does:
>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit
The idea that a high drop-out rate is bad implies that students can't be trusted to make their own decisions, so steps must be taken to force them to continue.
I think the idea that a high attrition rate is bad comes from a physical classroom where perhaps resources are needed to prepare for a certain number of physical bodies in the classroom. But a virtual classroom is very different because the videos scale easily, and there is no cost to preparing a video that gets viewed by 5000 instead of 10000 students.
The negative view of low completion rates also implies that students who don't continue to the end are lazy, or dumb, or lacking in some other characteristic necessary to be a "good student". I think this idea should be abandoned, because it's more about the educator controlling students and imposing their values than about sharing knowledge. Students should be trusted to make their own decisions on what they want to learn, how much of it they want to learn, and at what pace they want to learn.
I think the single most important thing MOOCs can do to maximize completion rates is to throw out the "honor code": let students on the forums share knowledge freely without censorship. Include "spoiler" tags if you must so those who don't want to see answers to assignments can get extra credit, or something.
You can still teach, in the forums. Vote for a basic income and free yourself to transmit knowledge without the constraints imposed by arbitrary hierarchies whose main goal is to control others, not empower.
How come I'm always in the tails of "big data" analyses, and thus ignored?
No need to ban sado-masochism. Just don't force everyone into that mold.
There is a coursera MOOC on Aboriginal education and knowledge. One promise of technology is that we can use it to make it fade into the background so we can communicate without having to acknowledge it.
Or, like kicking away a ladder once we've reached the level we wanted to get to, we can use it to get to a point where we don't need it anymore.
A language's expressivity is often limited by its syntax.
For example, in Python, I want to type "exit" to exit the interpreter, as I can in Ruby and the cmd interpreter. But Python enforces a syntax requiring me to use parentheses, even though the interpreter knows what I'm trying to do and could easily let me do it. Then Python violates its own rule when assigning functions to class variables, such as "__getitem__ = getitem" where getitem is a function.
So when I'm closing windows I can type "exit" to exit an irb session, a cmd window, an octave instance; but when I get to the python interpreter I have to add parentheses. Why? Purely because of a silly syntactic requirement that adds unnecessary keystrokes. (Same with the change in Python 3 requiring the "print" statement to use parentheses.)
Probably the best "metric" is word-of-mouth.
Why force people to learn? Let them approach a subject when they are interested, motivated, and they will learn much more effectively. The drop-out rate is irrelevant; you can learn something from the first classes, which often state the basic principles or axioms of the subject. Sometimes it takes a while to understand those; perhaps you disagree with them and don't want to continue until you figure out why precisely.
Alfie Kohn writes in http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcag.htm :
He's making a case against grades; but the more general concern is about motivating students, not coercing them. Free MOOCs provide an opportunity to figure out how to use technology to make a class all things to all students; if some students decide they've learned enough, for now, after the first class, so what? They can come back to the subject later, when they're motivated.
Is there any free videos source available online?
Take the linear algebra mooc, or the mathematical philosophy one.