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It is truly sad to see Coursera getting greedier by the day. I can honestly say this website changed my life, I was living in a third world country and still in

It is truly sad to see Coursera getting greedier by the day. I can honestly say this website changed my life, I was living in a third world country and still in high school when I enrolled in Andrew Ng's machine learning class and thanks to that MOOC I was able to get a machine learning job building recommender systems for a Canadian company straight out of high school. There are plenty of amazing MOOCs that Coursera has completely removed from the website or are only available for people who want to pay upfront. Please don't be like Udacity Coursera. BTW you have until June 30 to download your courses.

quincyla 10y ago
If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand, instead of trying to monetize courses and certificates, people could continue to have this content for free. Unfortunately, universities don't exactly exemplify long-term thinking. Most of the content for these MOOCs is created by professors as part of their jobs, so this content is owned by their universities. I bet a vast majority of professors would prefer their MOOCs to stay open. Most of the work has been done already, and the quizzes and exercises are automated, so there's no practical reason these videos couldn't be hosted on YouTube and thrown into an open source MOOC framework like EdX's and continue to serve millions for a few hundred a month in server costs. Except that Coursera is explicitly forbidding non-private use of these courses. For what it's worth, Free Code Camp gets about 1/8 of the traffic Coursera does, and our (non-opportunity) costs are pretty minor. I don't think hosting these MOOCs would add much to the burden. If only the individual professors who created these MOOCs could give us permission to host these courses. But there's no way we're going to get anywhere with the university bureaucracies themselves.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bpesquet 10y ago
  Hi Quincy, FreeCodeCamp's a great project. However, I always wondered about your long-term goals and "business model" (if there is one). You're offering to integrate old Coursera courses into FCC. But what if you change your mind about openness further down the road ? Couldn't FreeCodeCamp become the Udacity/Coursera of tomorrow ?
  - f0urtyfive 10y ago
    I'm not him, but it looks like their curriculum is licensed in the github repo under "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License", which according to this: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Would suggest that anyone could take their curriculum and rehost it with attribution if they were to "go private".
  - quincyla 10y ago
    Our "business model" is to keep costs as low as possible and sell merchandise. We will never charge for our curriculum. We have turned down all offers of funding specifically to avoid a situation where an investor could try and force us to do otherwise. We will remain free and open source.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  just saw this comment, and checked it out. I think it is a cool project and I will circle back to it when I have more time. I was a little put out by the onboarding proces just because I signed in with my github account, but several steps made me open a browser and go to github....to open a github account. That said, I have experience developing and I suspect a beginner is your target audience. Also, it is (or seems) free so you don't owe me anything and I appreciate the work you put in to it.
- pakitan 10y ago
  > If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand Top universities already have plenty of brand recognition and get way more applicants than what they can accept. The monetary value of any additional marketing is probably very close to zero for them.
  - acjohnson55 10y ago
    I don't buy that reasoning. If that were true, they'd cease doing anything for marketing purposes. In reality, a brand and a reputation of educational leadership is something that requires continuous investment.
    - deprave 10y ago
      Correct, and top universities do that through investment in research and publication rather than populist fads. Every once in a while people call into question the value of higher education and ask whether MOOCs mark the end of traditional universities. I find it ironic that when top universities flex their muscles and start asking those people to pay up for classes - the same classes that you otherwise would have had to go through admissions and tuition to get into - they're being called money grabbers.
      - lazaroclapp 10y ago
        Maybe we should have a Coursera-like site exclusively for non-US universities, then. Meaning the courses are taxpayer funded and free for students (or, in some places, you might be paid to take them ;) ).
        freedamn 10y ago
        Why, I'd like see teaching and testing separate in that case, so the information stays accessible, while the capitalization on the students is left to those in need to submit to it. I suppose that's what you meant. The judgment on exercises that is helpful to the students in traditional universities is a factor proportional to the size of courses. On the one hand there is automatic testing, that's feasible in basic matters. Take Khan Academy for example. A test that anyone can do with advanced knowledge is a simple application. The motivation to really learn, that some get from deadlines, is learned and it's less direct than an actual want to understand a topic. In that sense, while a job doesn't need to become a passion, the drive to really dive deep into a topic comes as part of a hobby and so the tax payer would probably not want to afford that. But that is a different topic and I'm biased against taxes. In any case, costs could probably be reduced so much per student, that it needn't be the driving factor, far from the tuition that is payed now.
- nborwankar 10y ago
  Perhaps this is a good point in history to create an open repository of problems authored by contributors with some sort of CC license. Basing it on the material of existing MOOC courses would provide focus and relevance. Also long term insurance against changes in openness of MOOCs. Problems need to be original authorship and not copied from textbooks for obvious reasons. Thoughts?
  - zodiac 10y ago
    I think so too - are you thinking of building such a thing? I noticed you had some open data science ipython notebooks on GitHub.
- edraferi 10y ago
  Hadn't heard of FCC before, just checked it out. I really like the idea of parntnering with nonprofits to solicit practical capstone exercises. Seems like a good way to croas the production deployment barrier.
krmboya 10y ago
Did udacity block access to any of the earlier courses though? I can still access all free courses I've ever found on the site (and with the videos available on youtube)
- markdown 10y ago
  Not only did they not block them, they've added more free standalone courses alongside their paid "Nanodegree" courses.
jaked89 10y ago
Coursera is willing to have the same amount of money you're willing to keep. How are they greedier than you? Expecting a service without giving anything in return is the definition of "greedy".
- latenightcoding 10y ago
  You just don't get it. I can afford to pay for a MOOC and I would consider it, but there are millions of people who can't afford it. Coursera's about page used to say this: "committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it". Now they have removed every instance of the word "free" https://www.coursera.org/about/ https://www.coursera.org/about/ Nothing wrong with being a for-profit company, but they went from optional paid certificates to deleting old MOOCs and making new ones exclusive for those willing to pay, every day their monetization tactics get more aggressive. Also check this video from 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM
  - togosub 10y ago
    Despite the changes, the financial aid option (100% off) is still running. https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Apply-for-Financial-Aid https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Ap...
  - jaked89 10y ago
    So? They have changed their business model. They're entitled to do so. If you care so much about the poor, you might as well subsidize a MOOC for them, instead of demanding Coursera to do so.
    - StevePerkins 10y ago
      And people are "entitled" to criticize them on the Internet. Sheesh, people really over-dramatize Hacker News threads. We aren't a legislative chamber debating a bill. We're an assortment of techno-hipster liberals and wannabe-entrepreneur libertarians, commenting on (often trivial) current events over coffee on a Saturday morning. The moral outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage gets comical after the first couple recursions.
logingone 10y ago
thanks to that MOOC I was able to get a machine learning job building recommender systems for a Canadian company straight out of high school This amazes me. Are you leaving out more significant details? I cannot begin to imagine this happening where I live, in London. Being hired based on a MOOC? Did you go on to do some impressive projects which got you the job?
- latenightcoding 10y ago
  I had a couple of cool personal projects, but what really impressed them was that I sent them a minimum viable product of what they were trying to build. It was a music company so I put my hacky Perl skills to work and crawled youtube, songkick, musicbrainz and made a small music discovery website with cool features such as predicting the popularity of an artist based on social media metrics. I was like "I can do that look lol". They called me for an interview, I showed them my notebook full of ML notes and they asked me to start on Monday.
  - visarga 10y ago
    So, even better than showing a degree issued from a prestigious and expensive school is to show your previous work.
  - markdown 10y ago
    Did they pay for the flight to Canada and accommodation for the interview, or did you?
  - sofaofthedamned 10y ago
    Excellent, you're a great example of how this stuff should work!
TheArcane 10y ago
Did coursera come up with an official statement yet?
- znpy 10y ago
  That would be an interesting read.
- Coursera 10y ago
  You can now find a response from us below.
markdown 10y ago
> Please don't be like Udacity Huh? Udacity has numerous free courses. They've never made a free course non-free. Any new paid course is developed with new material, and they're still churning out free courses. Here's one of the gems from the early days of Udacity - Peter Norvig's Design of Computer Programs: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--cs212 https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--... And here's one of the early machine learning courses: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-machine-learning--ud120 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-machine-learning--ud...
fizzbatter 10y ago
If i may ask, the Ng course - how much prior knowledge did you have in the course?

quincyla 10y ago

If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand, instead of trying to monetize courses and certificates, people could continue to have this content for free. Unfortunately, universities don't exactly exemplify long-term thinking. Most of the content for these MOOCs is created by professors as part of their jobs, so this content is owned by their universities. I bet a vast majority of professors would prefer their MOOCs to stay open. Most of the work has been done already, and the quizzes and exercises are automated, so there's no practical reason these videos couldn't be hosted on YouTube and thrown into an open source MOOC framework like EdX's and continue to serve millions for a few hundred a month in server costs. Except that Coursera is explicitly forbidding non-private use of these courses. For what it's worth, Free Code Camp gets about 1/8 of the traffic Coursera does, and our (non-opportunity) costs are pretty minor. I don't think hosting these MOOCs would add much to the burden. If only the individual professors who created these MOOCs could give us permission to host these courses. But there's no way we're going to get anywhere with the university bureaucracies themselves.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bpesquet 10y ago
Hi Quincy, FreeCodeCamp's a great project. However, I always wondered about your long-term goals and "business model" (if there is one). You're offering to integrate old Coursera courses into FCC. But what if you change your mind about openness further down the road ? Couldn't FreeCodeCamp become the Udacity/Coursera of tomorrow ?
- f0urtyfive 10y ago
  I'm not him, but it looks like their curriculum is licensed in the github repo under "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License", which according to this: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Would suggest that anyone could take their curriculum and rehost it with attribution if they were to "go private".
- quincyla 10y ago
  Our "business model" is to keep costs as low as possible and sell merchandise. We will never charge for our curriculum. We have turned down all offers of funding specifically to avoid a situation where an investor could try and force us to do otherwise. We will remain free and open source.
vonklaus 10y ago
just saw this comment, and checked it out. I think it is a cool project and I will circle back to it when I have more time. I was a little put out by the onboarding proces just because I signed in with my github account, but several steps made me open a browser and go to github....to open a github account. That said, I have experience developing and I suspect a beginner is your target audience. Also, it is (or seems) free so you don't owe me anything and I appreciate the work you put in to it.
pakitan 10y ago
> If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand Top universities already have plenty of brand recognition and get way more applicants than what they can accept. The monetary value of any additional marketing is probably very close to zero for them.
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  I don't buy that reasoning. If that were true, they'd cease doing anything for marketing purposes. In reality, a brand and a reputation of educational leadership is something that requires continuous investment.
  - deprave 10y ago
    Correct, and top universities do that through investment in research and publication rather than populist fads. Every once in a while people call into question the value of higher education and ask whether MOOCs mark the end of traditional universities. I find it ironic that when top universities flex their muscles and start asking those people to pay up for classes - the same classes that you otherwise would have had to go through admissions and tuition to get into - they're being called money grabbers.
    - lazaroclapp 10y ago
      Maybe we should have a Coursera-like site exclusively for non-US universities, then. Meaning the courses are taxpayer funded and free for students (or, in some places, you might be paid to take them ;) ).
      - freedamn 10y ago
        Why, I'd like see teaching and testing separate in that case, so the information stays accessible, while the capitalization on the students is left to those in need to submit to it. I suppose that's what you meant. The judgment on exercises that is helpful to the students in traditional universities is a factor proportional to the size of courses. On the one hand there is automatic testing, that's feasible in basic matters. Take Khan Academy for example. A test that anyone can do with advanced knowledge is a simple application. The motivation to really learn, that some get from deadlines, is learned and it's less direct than an actual want to understand a topic. In that sense, while a job doesn't need to become a passion, the drive to really dive deep into a topic comes as part of a hobby and so the tax payer would probably not want to afford that. But that is a different topic and I'm biased against taxes. In any case, costs could probably be reduced so much per student, that it needn't be the driving factor, far from the tuition that is payed now.
nborwankar 10y ago
Perhaps this is a good point in history to create an open repository of problems authored by contributors with some sort of CC license. Basing it on the material of existing MOOC courses would provide focus and relevance. Also long term insurance against changes in openness of MOOCs. Problems need to be original authorship and not copied from textbooks for obvious reasons. Thoughts?
- zodiac 10y ago
  I think so too - are you thinking of building such a thing? I noticed you had some open data science ipython notebooks on GitHub.
edraferi 10y ago
Hadn't heard of FCC before, just checked it out. I really like the idea of parntnering with nonprofits to solicit practical capstone exercises. Seems like a good way to croas the production deployment barrier.

krmboya 10y ago

Did udacity block access to any of the earlier courses though? I can still access all free courses I've ever found on the site (and with the videos available on youtube)

markdown 10y ago
Not only did they not block them, they've added more free standalone courses alongside their paid "Nanodegree" courses.

jaked89 10y ago

Coursera is willing to have the same amount of money you're willing to keep. How are they greedier than you? Expecting a service without giving anything in return is the definition of "greedy".

latenightcoding 10y ago
You just don't get it. I can afford to pay for a MOOC and I would consider it, but there are millions of people who can't afford it. Coursera's about page used to say this: "committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it". Now they have removed every instance of the word "free" https://www.coursera.org/about/ https://www.coursera.org/about/ Nothing wrong with being a for-profit company, but they went from optional paid certificates to deleting old MOOCs and making new ones exclusive for those willing to pay, every day their monetization tactics get more aggressive. Also check this video from 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM
- togosub 10y ago
  Despite the changes, the financial aid option (100% off) is still running. https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Apply-for-Financial-Aid https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Ap...
- jaked89 10y ago
  So? They have changed their business model. They're entitled to do so. If you care so much about the poor, you might as well subsidize a MOOC for them, instead of demanding Coursera to do so.
  - StevePerkins 10y ago
    And people are "entitled" to criticize them on the Internet. Sheesh, people really over-dramatize Hacker News threads. We aren't a legislative chamber debating a bill. We're an assortment of techno-hipster liberals and wannabe-entrepreneur libertarians, commenting on (often trivial) current events over coffee on a Saturday morning. The moral outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage gets comical after the first couple recursions.

logingone 10y ago

thanks to that MOOC I was able to get a machine learning job building recommender systems for a Canadian company straight out of high school This amazes me. Are you leaving out more significant details? I cannot begin to imagine this happening where I live, in London. Being hired based on a MOOC? Did you go on to do some impressive projects which got you the job?

latenightcoding 10y ago
I had a couple of cool personal projects, but what really impressed them was that I sent them a minimum viable product of what they were trying to build. It was a music company so I put my hacky Perl skills to work and crawled youtube, songkick, musicbrainz and made a small music discovery website with cool features such as predicting the popularity of an artist based on social media metrics. I was like "I can do that look lol". They called me for an interview, I showed them my notebook full of ML notes and they asked me to start on Monday.
- visarga 10y ago
  So, even better than showing a degree issued from a prestigious and expensive school is to show your previous work.
- markdown 10y ago
  Did they pay for the flight to Canada and accommodation for the interview, or did you?
- sofaofthedamned 10y ago
  Excellent, you're a great example of how this stuff should work!

TheArcane 10y ago

Did coursera come up with an official statement yet?

znpy 10y ago
That would be an interesting read.
Coursera 10y ago
You can now find a response from us below.

markdown 10y ago

> Please don't be like Udacity Huh? Udacity has numerous free courses. They've never made a free course non-free. Any new paid course is developed with new material, and they're still churning out free courses. Here's one of the gems from the early days of Udacity - Peter Norvig's Design of Computer Programs: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--cs212 https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--... And here's one of the early machine learning courses: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-machine-learning--ud120 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-machine-learning--ud...

fizzbatter 10y ago

If i may ask, the Ng course - how much prior knowledge did you have in the course?