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I would agree with and extend your remarks that getting a title of nobility from a brick and mortar uni gives you a vocational meal ticket, so you can motivate
by VLM 11y ago
I would agree with and extend your remarks that getting a title of nobility from a brick and mortar uni gives you a vocational meal ticket, so you can motivate grinders by asking if they like money of if they like eating food, and then they'll grind away for letters on a transcript.
But in MOOC land I get nothing. I did the complete automata class mostly to see if there's much new since I did a brick and mortar version some decades ago, and the "reward" was not exactly fulfilling. I'm not expecting Ullman to fly out and shake my hand, or my phone to ring off the hook from recruiters seeing I jumped thru some hoops, but something more would have been nice? Actually, anything would have been nice?
Since the grind factor was aggressively burned out of me, I haven't completed a single course. I did watch the videos and did the assignments for computational neuroscience and one of the multi-class algo series and the functional programming and the famous AI class.
There's a lot of talk about how grinders don't grind therefore grinders suck or grinding sucks. However what really sucks is the playground presented to the grinders. Its not their fault they aren't being given something worth grinding.
By analogy most MMORPGs that tanked and died, tanked and died because the grind experience sucked. Its not the fault of the grinders that the businessmen couldn't or wouldn't present something as enjoyably grindable as WoW or Eve.
To some extent the whole market segment of MOOCs smells like a freshmen psych class lab experiment, "what happens to grind performance when you leave all the annoyance factors of grinds in place but remove all the rewards, with the hypothesis that almost every rat in the box stops grinding"
- brudgers 11y agoI completed a bunch of MOOC's. I've also worked on a bunch and not completed them while still learning. At some point, the learning took precedence and that's fine. I am profoundly grateful that there are free courses at the other end of the internet and feel lucky to have lived to seen the time in which it happened.
- ghaff 11y agoIt's not clear what you're looking for exactly but, if anything, MOOCs (Coursera at any rate) have cut back on issuing completion certificates in the absence of paying a fee. Their problem, one of them anyway, is that certificates basically aren't worth anything as a certification mechanism in most cases so very few are willing to pay for them. And, I expect, that if you start from the assumptions that 1.) MOOC certificates aren't worth anything as a real-world "vocational meal ticket" beyond the value of the underlying education and 2.) Companies offering MOOCs are not going to become unicorns and probably won't even return investors money-- you probably end up with something that isn't designed to mirror a university course.
- VLM 11y agoI know that's the conventional top down narrative and I think you presented it well. I'm proposing that as a bottom up narrative, they continue to include extensive grind barriers such as peculiar scheduling and pacing, someone else designing arbitrary barriers in terms of assignments with firm due dates, etc. Yet the reward has been cut out as per reasons in the top down narrative, etc. So from the bottom up perspective you're left with a stereotypical grind game where the reward has been removed, and from that theoretical model, the dropout rate makes sense. Then when people sign up and get something out of partial participation, it makes no sense to use a successful grind game metric measurement when its a failed grind game therefore the players aren't cooperating because they feel no need to do so. Because "MOOC as a grind game" has failed, a MOOC is a place to learn, not a place to jump thru hoops or not get a reward other than making someone else's completion metric result look good. You can run a grind game without a vocational meal ticket reward model. WoW and Eve do just fine. My suggestion would be to use advanced technology to abandon the grind game aspects, assuming higher completion rates are inherently valuable. Even if completion rates are not valuable, removal of pointless grind will result in better operating conditions for the students. Why must class schedules correspond vaguely to the northern hemisphere agricultural growing season? If you're not teaching project management, why are due dates so important? Why is there (typically) only one very fixed learning track if more exist or there is a "chose two from column B and three from column C" aspect inherent in the field itself? All of that would be very difficult to implement at Harvard in 1640, but due to technological advances would not be very challenging to implement today.
- ghaff 11y agoMaybe. I'd just say though that one person's "designing arbitrary barriers in terms of assignments with firm due dates, etc." is another's structured approach to learning. After all, there are plenty of learning opportunities if you want total flexibility. Of course, as you suggest, there are potentially ways to gamify and provide incentives for learning that don't as closely mimic traditional course structures.