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>Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not
by romaniv 9y ago
>Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s
Before: simply getting familiar with a subject required me to jump through bureaucratic admission hoops, go through arbitrary prerequisites, pay tons of money, bend my life around some class schedule and then get mediocre lecturing from some random guy who happened to teach the subject at the nearby university at that time.
After: I can watch lectures from world-class professors and universities at any time, starting with any difficulty level, on a wide variety of subjects. I can also get free help from other people if I need to.
How is this a failure? MOOCs are one of the greatest thing that ever happened to the Internet and education.
- emodendroket 9y agoI think they are great if the alternative is nothing. I don't think they are so wonderful if, as many have proposed, they start replacing regular classes in universities people are paying to attend.
- romaniv 9y agoI would be ecstatic if I had an option to replace some of my university classes with MOOCs. The leap in quality of lecturing would be gigantic. MOOCs made me realize that most of the subjects in college I found "complicated" really weren't. I just had horrendous professors and bad books. I'm currently in the process of "fixing" my college education by watching lectures on fundamental subjects like biology (which I never had in college for some reason), chemistry (which was taught really badly) and linear algebra (taught awfully). It's astounding how many new things I'm picking up. Plus, there are classes like AI, Cryptography, Model Thinking and so on. Nothing of this sort was available to me in college at all.