I used to take a lot of courses on cousera and EdX. I still take some here and there, but not as many as before. Some of the courses are amazing and unbelievably rewarding, like Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models, Robert Sedgewick's Analytical Combinatorics, and Gerald Sussman's course on system optimizations. I'm very grateful for such learning opportunities. Unfortunately over time, I also found that these courses had diminishing returns for the following reasons:
- Due to the nature of MOOC, the assignments are largely either multiple-choice questions or programming assignments that merely asked students to fill in some blanks in some functions (there are a few exceptions of course). What a descent US university does really well is challenging students with tough yet insightful and inspiring assignments. That's how students learn deeply and retain the knowledge, at least for me. Merely listening to lectures and ticking off a few ABCDs hardly helps real learning.
- Lack of feedback. A university course assigns TAs, gives tutorials and office hours, grades assignments with detailed feedbacks, and it is so much easier to form study groups and have high bandwidth discussions. MOOCs try their best to offer such help, but they don't work as well or at least not as conveniently.
- Many courses are watered down. For instance, Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera is far less rigorous than that (229? I forgot) offered in Stanford? The course is great for students to gain some intuition, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for one to build solid ML foundations.
I completely agree that trying to get an education/certification model with no feedback and simple, robotic questions is completely useless.
What's even worse is that almost none of the MOOCs used the strengths from online classes. There are other ways to learn than a hour-long video of a person talking to a webcam.
It's funny how a big part of Andrew Ng's classes is waiting for him to write text with mouse as if he were using the world's worst whiteboard; he could have prepared properly-drawn figures in advance.
> It's funny how a big part of Andrew Ng's classes is waiting for him to write text with mouse as if he were using the world's worst whiteboard; he could have prepared properly-drawn figures in advance.
My personal experience actually showed otherwise. It was more effective for me to learn if instructors write on a whiteboard to gradually develop what they teach. I guess that's because when an instructors writes a whiteboards, students will know exactly what she focuses on all the time, and the writing speed matches the speed of understanding. In contrast, a professor in my university was a big shot on operating systems. He used well prepared slides and he talked fluently, yet I got lost in almost every class.
To be honest, instead of wasting time on writing, the professor could share anecdotes from history, his life, industry, and other aspects i.e. the social aspect of doing science and research. I really find those interesting than mere cut and dry exposition of concepts.
This, when they draw with a mouse, even after tons of lectures, it always looks like shit. The good ones use tablets and change colors and thicknesses and such as they go.
Udacity had a great Python course back in the day (Programming 101, for Python 2.7)
It had vidoes and then a REPL would drop down and you would continue writing your program, test it against test cases and then a new video would go on for a few minutes explaining the theory for the next step.
I can see why not many try and do this. It obviously took a lot of work, both technically and pedagogically to set up the course and problems.
How would you rate the prerequisites of each course and level of material covered? I've never taken Andrew Ng's ML class, but the impression I get online is that it's great but it's always hard to tell from these positive reviews if the course is just an introductory exploration or something more in-depth.
In my experience, there’s a vast difference between “education” aimed at the individual and what is delivered in accredited academic courses. The commercial aspect / tailoring to get people to buy and stick with it / no doubt is a factor.
Coursera got enshittified like crazy. The first couple of years had legit college courses on it. Then it became all about micro degrees and courses with twenty minute lectures.
Wow how did I not think of that, surely the pattern of services getting worse to extract more money from users is due to someone saying a dirty word on the internet.
Platform decay is more accurate becasue it's not about general worsification, it's about platforms specifically. I realise that "platform decay" doesn't sell books but it's perfectly usable in ordinary speech .
"Writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism "enshittification" in November 2022, though he was not the first to describe and label the concept[1][2]. The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year. "
ADS said: “From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow’s posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts.”
There's still some really good stuff out there. I just finished the General Chemistry courses on EdX and they're really good (with a very quiet discussion forum that's still visited by MIT staff). The Finance MicroMasters was also excellent and had active TAs on most courses. Exercises on all these courses were generally very high quality.
Another great online course that I recently took is this one on parallel computing [1]. It's not on Coursera/EdX but uses a custom platform, and I would say it goes beyond "fill in the blanks", the assignments are really challenging and have a lot of depth.
Compared to 5-10 years ago the trend is unfortunately definitely downwards though. A lot of great courses are archived and far fewer are being added than there were in the past.
I forgot the name. It may be called system engineering or something like that. The focus of the course was on parallelization. The instructors spent great deal time on work stealing queues and parallel divide and conquer.
I don't really like how any of the MOOCs run, and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers. They all have the Same courses and the same degrees. Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees.
A successful MOOC in my mind isn't one that will have some credits for an online certification for programming or nursing that can transfer to a Real school. A successful MOOC is one where I can take a course on Ulysses or Semantics or Mathematics or Plato or whatever just like I could in a real undergrad, but without the same financial and time constraints. I want to be able to spend $5000 taking classes that I find interesting, and accidentally have an English degree Or spend $5000 and really focus and get my degree in X.
I worked in this field - I've met Anant, John Katzman, and Bonnie Ferri. The MOOCs (and any well-run university, probably the minority) have excellent data on what classes students want to take.
Well over 90% of the searches on their site are for tech-related topics. And most of the remainder are probably for business.
You can fantasize about a USA where people want to read Plato and accidentally get English degrees. I also think that would be great. In our current reality, only the trust-fund kids, who already know they never need to work, will want to pay for that. (I mean, their dad or grandpa is the one paying.)
A large part of the issue, as I see it, is that the university format is just a very poor way for people to learn information. If people want to learn a tech skill and don't care about credentials, they invariably find a lot of other ways far superior to university courses. The closest I've seen to university style courses that people actually find useful is Udemy. Very few people seem to get much use from EdX or Coursera classes, far fewer still think it's a good idea to take classes at their local university.
Same with Plato. You can read Plato on your own, you can listen to many more hours of free lectures on Plato, usually from better quality speakers, than you'd ever get at a university, you can join groups of people who want to discuss Plato's philosophy. These people will actually be individuals interested in the topic, not bored university classmates who spend half the time talking about other things because of their disinterest. This is all for free.
Even discounting the cost, university education trails far behind other forms of learning. Once the cost is factored in, the only appeal ends up being the credentials and the four year summer camp environment.
That's why when I see MOOCs brought up these days in the wild, it's usually from people who are taking them for credentials. Once credentials are taken away, MOOCs and universities just don't have a ton to offer for a motivated learner. It would be good if credentials and education were decoupled (for instance, like with the CFA), but there doesn't appear to be much of a push for that.
decoupling would really make a difference. i should be able to acquire knowledge however i want or am able to, and then pass a standardized process to get the accreditation.
the problem with standardized tests however is that they lead to more schools just teaching for the test and not actually helping the students learn. it's tricky. depending on the subject or field. though i suppose papers and dissertations can be judged on their own merits. but other tests are trickier to do in a way that they can't just be passed by memorizing test knowledge.
Honestly, though, removing standardized testing usually just obfuscates the problem. There are many ways to game the system. The ubiquitous college cramming is usually about temporarily learning for the test the night before a big exam.
It's better to work on improving transparent standards for credentials than to have tens of thousands of different standards that no one pays attention to and hoping that they're adequate, despite having no clue if that's actually the case.
As a related aside, "competency-based education" is a thing, slightly more popular in Europe than in the US.
I don't want to destroy all universities (like Trump or DeSantis do). But it IS true that the higher-education system needs a big revamp, and that the necessary change is unlikely to come from within, because the people (tenured faculty) who currently hold all the power have a strong interest in not rocking the boat.
I was once excited about Udemy. I bought a lot of courses, most of which I never started.
But the few times I started a Udemy course, every single one was terrible, once I got past the first 20% or so. And contrary to their advertising, they did not allow me to return the course, because I had "completed too much" or something. IIRC I was around the 30-35% mark.
Totally different from Coursera, which can be hit and miss, but best stuff is very good.
Have you had a different experience? Which courses did you complete that were good?
TLDR: Udemy - cheap, and you get what you pay for.
There was a Python course offered by three profs at Rice University that was A+.
Similar for Dan Ariely's Behavioral Economics class - of course, maybe it was all lies (now it turns out), but entertaining nevertheless.
Andrew Ng's course is quite math-heavy (I haven't done it), but it gets rave reviews.
So many Coursera tech/CS courses are offered by profs at elite universities - there's no way they could be the kind of crap that is standard on Udemy.
What Coursera lacks (compared to the university experience) is personal interaction with a real professor, group projects with smart and focused classmates, and personalized feedback.
The other point, as made in the "EdTech doesn't scale" post the other day, is that Edutainment is one of the only really scalable ways to do EdTech profitably, and that favours consumption, not growth or testing (because for learning to be effective, it more or less has to be quite hard). At least, to remember most of the content, not just highlights.
Something I noticed is that I watch a lot of edutainment content but I don't really retain any information from that, not even the highlights. I'm wondering whether this is basically wasted time.
Wasting time is okay. Some people watch sports, play video games, go to the pub, work on that old thing in the garage (and just end up watching youtube videos about other people's projects).
I started taking notes, started cutting down on low-quality infotainment/edutainment (for example while I know folks at SciShow work a lot on their content, put a lot of effort into producing scientifically correct stuff, but it's just not deep enough, it's too fast), and in general try to watch/listen to multiple videos that touch the same topics. (Because many complex things require multiple passes to comprehend anyway, and getting different viewpoints, different presentation helps a lot with that.)
If the student only watches the content, and doesn't have the chance to be (1) tested on it, and (2) apply it over time, the learning is quickly lost.
That's my personal experience, and that's also the theory nowadays.
I mean, it's not worse than watching reality TV or sports or something. Maybe better - maybe consuming edutainment will inspire you to follow through and apply it.
It's true that testing benefits learning (Test Effect).
However the question is increasingly whether simply the cognitive load of feedback is the reason for this is coming up.
i.e. does the Testing effect reduce in efficacy when you apply it to every waking hour, every course? does it just benefit when you study one course?
There are clear links that subjects where students have a stake in the result (i.e. it is mandatory for college) lead to higher attendance and final grades, regardless of study method.
Lots of the predominant psychology applies only to motivated students or those in mandatory courses.. so basically, we can't know the state for free willed learning/edutainment.
Also, as someone who used MOOC quite often, I take only STEM courses because I'm used to any humanities subjects being of lesser quality. I'd rather read a good book about that topic than take course online.
For STEM things, I think it's usually of the same quality, and I prefer videos, so it's easier choice.
We are free to be curious and to "find ourselves". But why should we expect society to pay for it beyond a certain point? At some point it is indeed "subsidizing hobbies".
As long as things cost something, and a course costs something to create and deliver, the question of valuation in some way is valid. It's not a capitalist issue, it's an allocation of resources issue, which is something universal as long as resources are limited.
Where it works, the free market is great because it transparently shows how people actually value something. That is, it shows how we actually are and what we actually want, not what would be nice in some utopian world.
It's interesting how abstract these discussions are. Countries with free – free for the student, at least – tertiary education do exist and you can use them for comparison.
Surely you know that in those countries, education is gatekept in a different,perhaps even worse way. Sure you don't have to pay to get university education in France. But good luck entering a program you want, or reorienting later in life, after highschool. You end up with a lot of people competing for the sought after degrees, and not ever being able to even dream of "learning what you want" if you messed up your bac exam. And the requirements are very strict and inflexible for those,much more than in the US.
The same thing happens in Germany but in an even more vicious way. You are basically triaged before high school and can only manage to switch with tons of bureaucracy and difficulty. It's gotten better but it's still very much 'your path is set and is almost impossible to change after high school' for most people.
Yes they do exist. On the one hand this is great but on the other hand it also also generates waste, both in terms of resources and time.
I went to university in France when it was both free (still basically is) with no selection for entry and the amount of waste was huge for no benefit to anyone... well except for official stats because "I'm not unemployed, I'm a student"...
please elaborate on the waste you saw. i studied in germany and austria and i didn't notice waste. on the contrary, requiring payment would have excluded many of the good students. (entry is limited to qualified students however, so there is some selection. does that make all the difference? i doubt it.)
> on the contrary, requiring payment would have excluded many of the good students
How? Surely people/families in Germany/Austria, some of the richest countries in the world, can afford to pay something towards education costs... And in fact they do through their taxes, which are needed to pay for this "free" university. [obviously poor families can benefit from bursaries so this is not a relevant argument]
The waste is students picking courses just to do something or just because they are vaguely interested in them (and then they get all the benefits afforded to students, including housing subsidies). And then they give up, or they fail, or once they graduate they realise that it gets them exactly 0 job. So huge waste of resources and time and, as mentioned, sometimes a way to hide youth unemployment.
Surely people/families in Germany/Austria, some of the richest countries in the world, can afford to pay something towards education costs
rich country doesn't mean rich people. we have high taxes and lower average wages. high rent in cities. in vienna, more than 60% of people live in subsidized housing. none of them could ever afford to pay for university.
and if more than 60% of students need financial support, all we are doing is adding expensive bureaucracy. might as well just make it free instead.
That does not answer my question and it is obviously not true that people cannot afford to pay for university, not least when we haven't mentioned a price.
Every time similar topics are discussed it's odd to read some comments because they give the impression that people in the richest countries in the world have no disposable income (they can't pay for healthcare, they can't pay for higher education, they can't pay for public transport, etc). Of course there are poor people, but the majority have plenty of disposable income (that's what a rich country means).
> "in vienna, more than 60% of people live in subsidized housing"
This does not mean that this is a necessity it shows some issues with the housing market and housing policy, not that people are "poor". In fact, if the majority of people in a rich European city get housing subsidies it seems quite clear that this has nothing to do with poverty and not being able to afford it, but is a policy/market disfunction issue.
To go back to France, in France every student gets housing subsidies. This does not mean that they need it, it's just that the choice of policy has been to dish out subsidies without consideration of need.
subsidized housing is only available to those with limited income. in vienna that is below 60k€ per year for a single home, and below 90k€ for a couple, which means 45k€ income per person. if we take the cost of public schools in the US which ranges from 10k to 20k USD per year, it should be pretty clear that those expenses are unaffordable. if they could afford them they probably would not be eligible for subsidized housing.
the majority have plenty of disposable income (that's what a rich country means)
no, it doesn't.
rich country means a high GDP, but we put most of that into public infrastructure, public healthcare (so, yes, we can all pay for healthcare because everyone has insurance) and public transport, and we don't need to pay for education. if education were taken out of the mix then those with lower income would be excluded.
It's interesting that you chose Germany as an example of ease of access to the education you want. Maybe if you managed to get into a Gymnasium and didn't fuck up when you were like... 10? Sure. Otherwise yeah, good luck getting into university for the degree you want.
in my time bafoeg was 50% loan, and it would only cover living expenses and study material. if university cost actual money, financial support for it would be another thing entirely.
the point is: does charging for university and then giving financial support to those who need it really change anything other than causing more bureaucracy and risking that some people can't go because they don't qualify for financial support yet shy away from the expense?
reducing taxes so that people have more money so they can afford paid education is not going to lead to more students but less.
Maybe if you managed to get into a Gymnasium and didn't fuck up when you were like... 10
not true. there is also the gesamtschule which delays the decision to make the abitur until you are in 10th grade.
40% of students in germany qualify for university (and another 10% for fachhochschule). that is much higher than the university admission rates in the US.
And then, what happens after that decision? How free are you to get the education you want after that? If you pick a path and then want something harder or better, say going into médecine in school. How hard is it going to be? And aren't 10th graders around like 14 years old?
Again, that's just as bad as paying for education. At least with money you can work or take a loan and chose the path you want even at age 20 or 25, you're not locked in by a choice that was made when you were a teenager. Yes, I know you also have to get good grades in the US or Canada, but at least here in Canada you can basically almost always go back to university, take a few perp courses and be eligible to apply even for medecine.
If you pick a path and then want something harder or better, say going into médecine in school. How hard is it going to be?
the abitur i got from the gesamtschule is just as good as the abitur someone got from a gymnasium. if i want to get into medicine or some other highly popular field all i need is good grades in the last 3 years of school.
a 10th grader is 16 years old because first grade starts at 6 years.
those 10th graders that don't continue school go into an apprenticeship, of which there are many choices available. germany has 12 years of compulsory education (9 or 10 years of school and 3 years of either school or professional education)
and no, that is not the same as paying for education.
loans are way harder to get in germany as the banks are much more conservative. getting a loan for school would be practically impossible.
And I guess that makes sense for Germany. Where I live, loans are basically guaranteed and almost free for students especially if you are graduating in a degree with good job prospects. This allowed my dad to basically switch paths entirely when he was like 40, as it paid for his entire spendings during his degree and he could do it easily in north America. It was basically impossible for him to do something similar in France.
in my time there were two ways to university. gymnasium or gesamtschule. i understand that it was somehow possible to switch from other schools if you had very good grades, but it wasn't natural or obvious. at the gesamtschule i believe only the worst students were denied to continue, and i think about a third of all students actually did continue after 10th grade in my year. (i don't remember the specifics as i actually went on to be an exchange student for grade 11, and i came back to school for grade 12)
i don't know if switching schools became easier or harder, but today i would only send my children to a gesamtschule where it was certain that they would not be under undue pressure in order to be able to continue after 10th grade. in my opinion the three-tiered system might as well be abolished because evaluating 9 year old children whether they might be capable of passing the abitur some 9 years later is absolutely dumb and misguided, and forcing them to switch schools will also hurt their socialization as they lose touch with some friends and have to find new ones.
the system should be replaced with a highschool like system that allows everyone a chance at passing the abitur, and only those that specifically opt to learn a trade instead should be able to leave school earlier, and even those should be offered a short path to an abitur test if they complete their apprenticeship.
on the other hand there is no problem entering university in germany at 40. it's free, so what should stop you? i actually did become a student again at age 30 for a short time. noone suggested that that would be wrong.
getting a loan for that is an entirely different matter. conservative thinking and ageism suggests that nobody has good job prospects starting a new career at that age. but you can do it if you get a part time job (actually, if you switch your current job to part time, which is something you are allowed to do by law in germany) and then use the remaining time to study. if classes are still structured the way they were in my time then you can study at your own pace. it may take a bit longer, but then i also expect that at 40 you are more driven to focus on getting stuff done so i don't think part time study will double the time you need to complete your studies.
why are people downvoting that comment? are you disputing the facts stated? those are the numbers i found on a quick search. if they are wrong, then please share references to correct them.
And what generates revenue is exactly what I described: what we want and value and thus are willing to pay for.
I don't see what's naive there. On the contrary this is absolute realism. And furthermore this goes hand in hand with individual liberty. Alternatives have been tried, and they failed...
Because we as a society are the only reason who holds us back.
We use capitalism to control resources etc. but only thanks to controled capitalism / politics we are keeping pure capitalsim under control (like minimum wage, labor laws etc.).
We could create a new system. A system which determines how many resources we as society can produce on one side and want we need + want on the other side. Than we optimize our system for this.
Which would mean we would get rid of everything we don't need and optimize everything we can.
We don't need thousends of different companies doing simliar things just different with their own overhead. Capitalism needs this to control itself.
It’s strange to me that you can’t see the correlation between free markets and their products while simultaneously looking forward to more production from those same markets.
I think this is one of those wordcel arguments that sounds nice but probably has no bearing on actual reality.
If we live in a world where human effort has no marginal utility, we also live in a world where human life has no value. If we don't, you're in a world where you're competing with other humans for some set of resources. Regardless of whether you believe that you are competing with them, others are competing with you.
I think competition is perhaps one of the most basic rules of reality.
> Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees.
that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation.
Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.
> that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost
That's one big reason for sure.
The other, I suspect (and I'm sure there are more), is that it's also rather difficult to provide the same level of quality of courses to the masses than say select few undergrads.
Some of the best courses I took in my uni (T20) were the upper level electives where it was taught by the professors who cared about the topic, had interesting teaching materials/presentation, readily available support resources (TA's/office hours/department support), and so on.
Also keep in mind - Georgia Tech's program is a master's degree - and these programs don't affront the same level of prestige and opportunities in the same way the other programs do (BS/BA, PhD, MBA, MD, JD).
> it's also rather difficult to provide the same level of quality of courses to the masses than say select few undergrads.
I agree
> master's degree - and these programs don't affront the same level of prestige and opportunities in the same way the other programs do (BS/BA, PhD, MBA, MD, JD).
I'd throw MBA in there too (unless from the top dozen biz schools, Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Booth, Kellogg, Sloan, Haas etc.)
It's also important to see university departments as groups of people who often will end up working together for decades, and therefore leadership will see internal politics everywhere. What does doubling your student body do to said politics? Better to minimize growth and keep people happy than deal with the risks of what happens when you end up with far more staff.
A lot of similar fun is occurring as the all the student body that isn't trust fund babies really wants to study topics that will pay well, which in many universities, might not even have a lot of political weight, or even their own dean. See all the universities where you can end up taking CS classes in 8 different unrelated departments, but where they really, really don't want to admit that 50%+ of the student body is programming, as building a proper umbrella for this, which then has so many students, takes a lot of power away from incumbents.
These universities have turned from "growing our mission of education" (in which, wouldn't you want the largest number of people possible to benefit from some of the best minds in the world who work for you?) to "sustaining our business".
> Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities.
Obvious follow up: Are there state universities using these techniques to drive down costs and be more flexible?
Community colleges for sure -- I would argue they have taken up the mantle of truly educating, especially those from lower income brackets, and are free for lower income students in many states. They also have good transfer pathways to a four-year university. It's by far the most affordable way to get a bachelor's degree.
Some flagship state schools (example [0]) offer free tuition for lower income students providing they maintain a certain GPA.
But middle class families have a hard time as they are usually above the threshold for aid, and yet tuition (and housing) is a huge financial burden.
There definitely are state schools that work hard to drive costs down for in-state students.
Florida is weirdly enough a good example as the sunshine state scholars program provides a reasonably approachable way for any student in the state to enter high school with the intent on going to university and graduate with the criteria to get 50%, 75%, or 100% tuition and fees covered under the sunshine state scholars program.
Then you have states like Virginia who have some of the fastest rising costs of attendance in the country and where cost of attendance at state schools (which are generally supposed to be cheaper) actually ends up being comparable or even more than cost of attendance at private universities.
The community college system does a good deal here. As an example in California, students can get a great deal of their undergrad lower division work done at a community college for a fraction of even UC or State university cost (which for instate students is already fairly low).
Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.
Oregon State has a large offering of online undergrad and grad programs: https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/. There were 11,430 ecampus students in Fall 2023 [1].
The ecampus tuition (~13K/year) is still substantial compared to the in-person tuition for out-of-state students (~38K/year), and nearly identical to the in-person tuition for in-state students (~14K/year) [2].
The State of New York is offering free tuition at any SUNY school for all students who reside in the state with incomes up to $125,000 for dependent students; $60,000 for married students with no dependents; $30,000 for independent single students with no dependents.
This will make a huge difference in the market for degrees.
> that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation.
Huh? Many selective universities already make their educations free for many undergraduates.
The MOOCs charged money because they failed to solicit donations.
> Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%.
This is true.
> Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State)
The thing is, the best state institutions are operated like there are small elite academies within a larger, public body.
yes, but not their _degrees_, which is what I said. Sure, Harvard can give all of its classes online away for free, why? Because the actual value you get from attending Harvard is not the education. When you go to get a job, company X doesn't care that you "took some classes at Harvard", they do care that you "graduated from Harvard".
It's because the primary purpose of these institutions is cultural filtering. The only reason we have name brand unis is to sort and filter people into a very small (i.e. 1%) cultural/economic elite. The point is for you to go "ooh, stanford" or "ooh harvard" when you meet a partner at a big law firm, VC, or hedge fund.
In order for there to be a 1% there must necessarily be a 99%. The percentages are fixed; they always will be. Acceptance rates (public, reported) tend towards the filtering rate (implicit, hidden) as the college educated in the broader population tends towards 1.
Look at the endowments of these institutions. They are comparable in magnitude to elite hedge funds and VCs.
Of course they do top research and learning as well -- but only because they must. Under the old system, which worked simple, you'd be selected for an Ivy based on your blood relations and receive no education at all (for a recent example of this, Brett Kavanaugh: Supreme Court Justice).
I guess it is an improvement on the old system that these places offer a "world-class education" ** to at least some of their students; and that some of their students are pleased to receive it.
** whatever that means. My degree isn't printed on vellum Ivy league stationary, only the coarse public Ivy stuff (public Ivy: isn't that an interesting turn of phrase?); but I received the finest education of my academic career from a California community college. My classmates were navy veterans, part time auto mechanics, and young single parents.
How do you inexpensively scale the personalized work done by professors and TAs in grading your work, making sure you're not cheating or plagiarizing, and clarifying your misunderstandings when you're not "getting" the educational material? If a firm hires someone with a degree, what they're paying for is knowing that a person actually learned the material, which requires human intervention to do grading and to prevent cheating. That costs a lot of money, because technological innovations don't really make the grading or cheating prevention any cheaper. Education is the prototypical example of an industry affected by Baumol's cost disease.
The cheapest part to scale is the educational material and lectures, but that's always been the case, even before MOOCs. It has been possible for more than a century to go a library for free and get access to more educational material than one person could read in a several lifetimes. What has never been cheap are teachers who care, and I don't think that MOOCs can technologically innovate so much so that they reduce the cost of a teacher that cares.
I do think, however, that what they can leverage is community, having more sociable spaces for interactions related to each course and/or more generally. I understand some already do, but I feel like in the few classes I have tried through EdX they were not utilized well.
why can't online universities have TAs like real universities? Pay for a course, have someone who completed some more advanced course grade your work or provide one-on-one feedback!
I think the only reason this doesn't happen is economics. If someone were to "fix" the education system and start giving out bachelors for less money, the value of bachelors degrees would go down. In part, because more people would have them, but also because schools have systems to prevent abuse such as fraud.
If you just want to take a class, there are plenty of MOOCs that give the lectures, exercises, and tests out for free.
Another reason is that different universities may emphasize different things as part of the curriculum. Lets say a philosophy degree at harvard emphasizes Greek philosophers, but a philosophy degree at UT emphasizes post modern philosophers. Taking a class at one doesn't transfer to another. Mixing classes at different universities simply doesn't work because you weren't educated at the university so why should you get a degree from that university?
The way I see it is that if you just want to get educated the resources are out there, but if you want degree, you gotta go to school.
Obtaining a degree should be a separate optional examination, likely on-site, like other extern examinations.
But receiving lectures and coursework equivalent / comparable to those received by regular students, such that would realistically prepare you to passing the same kind of exam (given adequate study effort from you), would be actually useful. Useful even if you don't take the exam and don't receive credits / papers. Study is not for costly signaling alone.
I agree that the education system would be better with this kind of arrangement, but it doesn't happen because of economics and american independence.
What certifying body would administer the exam? A university that would miss out on $30,000 to $200,000+ on a student attending classes? A government institution influenced by politics that would likely end up creating inadequate testing leading to irrelevant examinations disregarded by most employers or anyone of substance?
The only reason why exams work for trades is because it is very well defined what a plumber needs to know. Even for software engineers, certificates are useless for most because what engineers need to know is rather abstract or highly dependent from job to job
> my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers
I think part of the tricky thing is that this is what HR/employer/MBA-type cultures increasingly see a degree as. So why not just go right to that?
I don't agree with this perspective, to be clear, but if you look at it from a certain viewpoint it's not too difficult to see why there would be pressure to approach with that tack. You might even go a step further and argue that if these things are failing as the article states, it might say something about the viability of that hyperspecialized perspective on degrees. Or maybe not.
Well I can tell you that the university of Michigan has exactly what you want. And the professors teach the same class in person as well as online (with some modification to fit the format).
If you can take the same degree for $5K instead of $50K, no one will be taking the $50K degree. Most people go to university for the credentials of the university.
Check out the Open University then. It’s the real thing and online. It costs and there are time constraints but they are the experts in remote teaching
The best MOOC Í‘ve attended was Balaji Srivivasan’s Startup Engineering, 10 years ago. Like many, I dropped out in the middle - in my case I wanted to spend more time with my little daughter. I still think it was the right decision, but I probably would not have dropped a presence course.
> and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers.
It is my understanding that that's how most of the universities are now also run.
Granted, I haven't set foot in an university in almost two decades now, so maybe my view is skewed from I what I've read online and based on the not so numerous interactions I've had with people who attend university.
Udacity pivoted from seeking to be a new way of giving university level education to the masses to job training.
I think the market spoke. There are still universities that also offer online degrees, but generally on their own platform, with live streaming - not in own-paced, pre-recorded MOOCs.
I absolutely would. Spending a couple hundred for a class to read through Plato/insert interesting topic here with an expert and a few other interested colleagues is well worth it in my mind. If after a few of those I get a degree to show off I completed this and have some baseline knowledge is worth it. I enjoy school for the most part.
I suppose you are quite rich then. Well, good for you and good luck with your studies of ancient Greek philosophy.
And you might want to check this out: https://truthofyoga.com/p/knowledge. Not affiliated with it. Would like to do it but can't justify almost 2000 Euro for this course. For you on the other hand it is maybe even too cheap. The guy is teaching at Oxford. Take a look at it.
Worked for 2U. It was the most incomprehensibly incompetent place you could imagine. Terrible people with zero real skills all backstabbing each other.
> Terrible people with zero real skills all backstabbing each other.
You know, without you saying another word, I feel like I know them, down to being able to describe their clothes, haircuts and of course powerpoint decks. It's like some bad business school archetype that just re-appears by itself in nature.
For a workplace to be very white means they are self-selecting whiteness for their employees instead of hiring in a way that gives equal opportunity to all people. In other words, they have (probably unconscious but still inexcusable) racism in their hiring practices. Reasonable people would agree this is a bad thing.
The US is a white-majority country where the power and money are disproportionately in the hands of white people.
When a company (in education!) that makes lots of noise about diversity obviously favors hiring white people, it's noteworthy.
If we were in some brown-majority country where white people were excluded from money and power, yes, that would be noteworthy. Call it out! The US, despite what Trump tells his MAGA followers, is not that country.
Can anybody who has enrolled in an online-only degree program comment on the experience?
I retired last year from teaching full-time at a conventional university. All of my teaching was in-person until the last few years, which were online because of the pandemic. My impression, after I got used to the new format, was that online is fine for small discussion-based seminars but that it is harder to keep students engaged in larger classes, especially students who are new to university study.
I really liked the potential of online at first—it was exciting to lead meaningful academic discussions among students located in several countries—but as time passed I started to wonder about how well it can really work for university education.
I am halfway through an online degree in ICT. We had a Instructional Design course that went over the differences. There is a textbook that has a chapter on it called Trends in Instructional Design but it is pricey. My position is adult learning works better online to reorganize cognitive schemas but children benefit from social learning theory. It is something like 1-5% complete MOOCs, they really need some kind of personal feedback. But generative AI may change this too. Look at Math Academy for example (Skycak has a book about it) (and they don't use gen AI for the tutoring either). https://www.justinmath.com/books/
I've been following classcentral for a few years. They make money from affiliate commissions but as far as I can tell it hasn't stopped them from producing decent quality coverage of the MOOC industry. I like their occasional writeups of new MOOCs coming out though it's been a while since I took one because I'm currently wrapping up a full time masters.
MitX math and science classes are (were?) outstanding. The few I tried from other participating universities were a grade below in quality. Then EdX/MitX just... stopped publishing new content. I learned (re-learned?) math and science from these and Khan; fundamentally changed my life. Too good of a resource to last? At least Khan's still kicking.
2U did no due diligence. A minimum might have been to contact the author of the platform to check on IP issues (or anything else). This never happened. Lots of other things never happened either.
What they bought had little resemblance to what they thought they were buying. They got fleeced by MIT and Harvard. Wasn't the first and won't be the last.
MOOCs have provided incredible value to society and it's unfortunate that we're only able to view them through the lens of profit/loss. I wish that universities would have committed to providing these products despite cost just as a halo project to improve their public image.
As a member of the Open edX technical oversight committee, and a long time core contributor, I’d like to comment on the future of Open edX — the open source project. I’m not an employee of Axim or 2U though, so I can’t say anything about their plans.
As OP explained, Axim is the only “cash-rich entity” to have emerged after the edX acquisition. They retained control of the open source Open edX project, and are now in charge of its maintenance and improvement. That is with the support of many open source contributors, of course.
For those who don’t know, Open edX is the piece of software on which runs edX.org, but also MITx and many other open online learning platforms around the world. It’s a big software project that has managed to carve a niche in a complex ecosystem.
The analysis that Axim is mostly a grant-giving organisation is very far from the reality. Yes, Axim is allocating part of its endowment to grants, though I don’t have much insight into this aspect of their mission. What I do know, is that Axim is also investing a very substantial amount of time and money in the development of the open source project, and that is no trivial feat. You can make your own opinion by checking the project activity on GitHub and the Open edX forum.
To put things simply, the open source project is undergoing an important transition where we have fewer dedicated engineers (because of the layoffs at 2U) but much better project management and focus (because the project roadmap is no longer dictated by edX). There’s also a lot of internal debate of where the project should be headed, strategically speaking (I have my own opinion, which you can find elsewhere). None of this would be possible without Axim and its financial independence.
This transition is long and complicated, and it’s not one we can accelerate just by throwing money at it. Also, I like to think of education as a complex ecosystem that improves in incremental steps. AI and personalised learning might play a role in that process, but they are most certainly not a panacea. It would be meaningless to invest these $735 million in such a narrow scope. Instead, it makes much more sense to to build a stable foundation for the future of open online learning.
In a nutshell: don’t give up on Open edX just yet, the best things are yet to come :)
The presentation we made in July at the Open edX 2024 conference with my colleague Faqir Bilal should be available on youtube soon-ish. The tl;dw is that we should focus on a different market vertical, which is residential/blended/hybrid learning.
RIP. I always wondered what was going on with edX. They were great back in the day. I was introduced to the Stanford CS curriculum through them. At least MIT OCW lives on! Don't see that going anywhere ... unless somehow they sell to some shitty private company and invest the profit into nothing.
if the original eDx can take the $800M and make a new open and free ed content platform (like the original idea of MOOCs before vultures like 2U starting trying to monetize it), then I'd say its a win for Harvard and MIT. 2U going bankrupt may also be a win.
The original non-profit edX sold its brand and most assets to 2U. The remaining non-profit entity was temporarily renamed “The Center for Reimagining Learning.” Last year, this organization was officially named Axim Collaborative and appointed a new CEO. ... Axim appears to have become primarily a grant-giving organization. Besides supporting Open edX, there’s little evidence of using its “substantial resources” for innovation as initially promised. ... Axim’s current assets exceed the total amount edX spent during its entire non-profit phase.
A nonprofit built something, sold it for a lot more than it cost to create it, and now has the cash which it is legally required to spend furthering its mission. This seems generally reasonable to me, though of course Axim may end up spending its millions poorly.
I don’t know how this transaction went down, but it’s very likely they didn’t purchase the organization itself, but rather its assets. The surviving organization would then dispose of the resulting cash in a mission-oriented fashion and shutdown thereafter.
I suppose it's possible a non-profit board member is taking illegal/fraudulent kickbacks. Quite an accusation though. i guess there are "misaligned incentives" if a board member is willing to act illegally or fraudulently.
non profit salaries of board members can be extremely high, the aggregate reporting on this is poor despite the public filings, as the filings say the same things in wildly different ways
I think the weirdest meme in the non profit world is how many act poor, or actually are undercompensated, but the answer to why is “its a non profit soo….” as opposed to “the board chooses to underpay me soo…”
additionally, many things can be done with assets. even if a non profit does not directly buy a board member’s investments, it can use its funds to pump that investment. for example, buy 2 houses on the board member’s block at inflated prices, so the board member can sell their own house at a huge profit. can do the same with anything especially illiquid things like art with small float. can do it with small stocks that are easy to pump too. can do it with crypto that wont be scrutinized for pumping. as long as the transactions aren't directly to the restricted party it meets all regulations.
It's not quite an accusation but mainstream practice. Agarwal, in the early days, earned more than everyone else combined, and took credit for the work of others. After the sale, he was offered a coushy job at 2U.
Funneling nonprofit money into private pockets is like an art at MIT. How many professors are millionaires? How many would be without MIT?
And, almost to demonstrate the digital divide, almost every MOOC there is lacking true Accessibility, therefore making it even harder for blind and visually impaired people to piggy-back on existing education infrastructure.
Attention span is dropping like a stone. I think MOOCs should re-format more like Tik Tok and web video games. Maybe have an interactive AI professor as a guide.
I didn't know edx was bought by a company that went on to go bankrupt. I have two courses on edx that I consider exceptional, and worry I might lose access to them.
- Due to the nature of MOOC, the assignments are largely either multiple-choice questions or programming assignments that merely asked students to fill in some blanks in some functions (there are a few exceptions of course). What a descent US university does really well is challenging students with tough yet insightful and inspiring assignments. That's how students learn deeply and retain the knowledge, at least for me. Merely listening to lectures and ticking off a few ABCDs hardly helps real learning.
- Lack of feedback. A university course assigns TAs, gives tutorials and office hours, grades assignments with detailed feedbacks, and it is so much easier to form study groups and have high bandwidth discussions. MOOCs try their best to offer such help, but they don't work as well or at least not as conveniently.
- Many courses are watered down. For instance, Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera is far less rigorous than that (229? I forgot) offered in Stanford? The course is great for students to gain some intuition, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for one to build solid ML foundations.