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No stress and pressure because nobody asks anything of you as a student. It's entertainment, not education. It's like watching TLC or the History Channel. I ge
by bphogan 11y ago
No stress and pressure because nobody asks anything of you as a student.
It's entertainment, not education. It's like watching TLC or the History Channel. I get that. And that's totally cool.
Where things get messy is when people try to pass this off as a replacement for a formal degree.
And as for "learning how to learn...", may I ask how you learned how to learn? Your description sounds very similar to other people who have obtained a formal degree somewhere and already learned how to do that and have a natural drive to get better. I don't think everyone has that. Not everyone values learning.
- wobbleblob 11y agoTLC and the History Channel serve bullshit like Ancient Aliens. Who still watches a 20th century medium like TV? I don't. On Coursera, colleges showcase some of their most famous professors, they cite sources, offer background material. The courses serve as advertisement for a college, so they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they served rubbish. What course did you do on Coursera that gave you such a low opinion of it? I had a formal education, and liked it so little that it turned me off the field. After working in a completely unrelated field for years, I got another formal education to get a degree relevant to my job. A MOOC is not a replacement for a degree, and doesn't compete with you at all. It's a way to check a university out. Did you know Alberta is a great place to study dinosaurs? Did you know Kopenhagen is a great place to study earth sciences? Thanks to Coursera, you can now find out. Twenty years ago, there was no way for such information to reach me, or for me to act on such information. Or for me to study such a field, because there isn't a career in it outside academics, and we weren't that well off.