Any one being cynical about Coursera is definitely having a perspective of the traditional college/school structure, i.e assignments, exams and grades equals knowledge. That need not be true, because any one would be enrolling in the courses just to get their curiosity fueled and gain some knowledge which or else they would have absolutely no access to. I have been enrolling in at least two courses a month and i make a point to finish all the lectures and understand them before enrolling for more, but i have had no time to actually do the assignments and take the quizzes. Ill not get a certificate of completion i.e iam a drop out, but i have access to knowledge and i free to choose what i want to learn.
Some of the cynicism around Coursera (and Udacity) isn't around the way the education is delivered, but the business model.
Both Coursera and Udacity are for-profit businesses, and both have yet to reveal (or decide) how they want to make that profit. Many current for-profit providers of education are not particularly well respected (University of Phoenix, Kaplan, etc). Some non-profit universities are understandable a little hesitant to work with Coursera and Udacity without a better understanding of how exactly they propose to make money (both have many suggestions, but nothing concrete as of yet).
This cynicism is one reason why some universities have decided to "go it alone" (MIT/Harvard/Berkeley being the most notable with edX).
To be clear, I'm not saying this is my viewpoint: I think very highly of both Coursera and Udacity. I just wanted to point out that some of the cynicism stems not from the idea of open access to teaching and knowledge, but from the worries over working with for-profit companies to achieve that aim.
My guess is that they're running it free as a sort of massive beta test, once they've got the format sorted they'll start including paying courses - quite possibly as follow up to free ones (for example Scala I is free, Scala II costs you money).
And, personally, I'm very grateful to them for hosting such excellent free courses at the moment - the quality has generally been pretty high on the ones I've done, and the format is excellent. If they start making money off it, good for them.
How would that work online? Cheating is already a problem - there's nothing to stop you googling for the answer to a given assignment, or getting your clever best friend to help you out.
I wonder if it's part of a strategy of creating a huge userbase and alot of content and data all of which will help you lead the field in the future(and be the most profitable). And nothing helps more to create this sorts of things than "free".
My own experience with watching lectures is that I feel I understand everything as I listen to them, but once a week passes I have trouble explaining anything but the basic gist of what I learned. My experience with assignments is that they force me to acknowledge just how incomplete my understanding of what I learned was. With programming in particular, I feel like lectures are an important framework that help guide your learning, but that most of the actual learning takes place in the assignments.
I am taking the scala course and I find assignments very interesting, they have also developed a cool task in sbt ( scala ) to submit the assignments from sbt console itself , they are also focusing on writing unit tests from the first program.
I understand your point of view: just watching the lectures offers an interesting high level overview.
However, the weekly quizzes offer a great learning experience. After watching the lectures for a week, keep taking the quiz over and over again until you really understand the material. Each time you take a quiz you get (mostly) different questions.
For some of the classes you also get a lot of additional material in the homework assignments.
The Atlantic recently had an interesting POV that puts a positive spin on the high dropout rates of MOOC courses[1].
Essentially claiming that it is a by-product of the great fact that these courses are free and therefore have a low barrier to entry - in contrast to traditional higher education.
That and you need to sign up if you just want to have a (short) peek at the content. One also picks up more than one book in the bookstore before buying, if any.
Also, the real value in these courses is that they are the real deal. They should be hard, and thus not for everybody.
Yea, my dropout rate is around 80%. I'll sign up for 4-6 courses that sound interesting, watch the first few lectures all of them, perhaps do the first homework, and then decide which ones (if any) I feel I have the time and interest to complete.
There seems to be a fair amount cynicism around the business model (rather, the lack thereof) for these MOOC services. I personally believe that an interesting monetization model lies in examinations. EdX seems to be exploring proctored examinations with Pearson, but if someone can come up with a credible, non-game-able, non-proctored alternative, there's a lot of value to be created/captured.
Completing one of these courses along with the accompanying assignments only takes you so far. Grades in a rigorous examination, however, represent a credential, which in turn sets up much needed (by the candidates taking the course) signaling. Eventually, a lot of employers might end up becoming sensitive to this signaling. A crude example of this can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353543
If (and when) someone does crack this puzze and if employers in turn, react to this change, I see a lot of universities more than breaking a sweat. This latent potential is what, IMHO, most analysts / investors are really upbeat about.
I was involved in distance education at our local university for a number of years and we vetted remote proctors. In the rare case where getting a proctor to watch the student didn't pan out, I've seen webcam + screensharing used as an accepted alternative. Seems like this approach could be improved upon and scaled.
Udemy [www.udemy.com] has quite a nice range of courses and many of our teachers are making good money by selling their courses using our platform (teachers keep 70% of the revenues from paid courses on our platform).
Andrew Ng, who founded Coursera, is a professor of machine learning at Stanford - I am taking his course right now. I wonder whether, once Coursera has been around for a while, he might use his machine learning knowledge to predict such things as how likely a person is to drop out of a course or to do well in a course, or to compare people based on the university they attended or other factors. Could be really interesting.
As much as I love Coursera, their statistics so far have shown that most of the students actually benefiting from their courses already have degrees and many even have graduate degrees.
It's still great that people are pursuing more knowledge; however, I'd much rather see MOOCs find a way to penetrate the percentage of the population that has less access to education.
I'm taking Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPoPenn) and I'm thoroughly impressed by the fact that the professor, Al Filreis and his staff of TAs maintain a strong presence in the forums. The discussion format videos are excellent and the team is doing a super job of making this voluntary learning experience an extremely valuable one. The coursera.org platform is easy enough for my Mom to use. Now, as far as I can see, the only barriers to entry are background skills and commitment.
Yeah, the ModPo class is impressive thus far. They are producing a ton of content in the video roundtables, and the prof seems to have endless enthusiasm for the online forums. It's a tough subject to teach remotely, but they're really pulling it off.
Impressive! Coursera keeps growing at a rapid pace. As always, the limit will be the time you have to put into it - there are already interesting courses there to keep me busy for a year (if I had the time ;-))
I also noticed that they have a profile page for students now. This may not be brand new (although I hadn't seen it before), but it's useful and looks good.
Great to see Coursera growing with more universities, especially internationally. I'm really enjoying the courses that I'm studying - it is without a doubt a force for good.
