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List of 600 free online courses launched by 190 universities
- stephengillie 8y agoThere is no such thing as a free lunch. How much of tuition, endowment, tax, and other funds paid for these?
- metabagel 8y agoI'm not sure what you are getting at. The mission of universities is to educate. Besides supporting their core mission, there could be ancillary benefits, such as promoting the university, testing new teaching methods, etc.
- cxseven 8y agoThis could be the product of sharing course materials they already mostly had, at a low additional cost.
- docbrown 8y agoIf i’m not mistaken—using MIT’s OWC as an example—these courses are basically carbon copies of lectures they give their students. The instructors are still teaching on the campus to IRL students. The only difference is that these are then put online for easy access a la open source projects. So, to answer your question, the money spent to produce online (o) lectures is equal to campus (c) lectures—without taking into labor hours to upload and edit. Therefore, O + C = $T.
- pkaye 8y agoAlso I think MIT OWC did some fund raising through donations and grants to pay for the online lectures.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pkaye 8y agoWhat is wrong with endowments, taxes and other funds being used to produce online content?
- anonymous5133 8y agoThe problem is people are forced, basically at risk of imprisonment/fines/jail/seizure of their property, if they don't pay their taxes. The problem is the taxes are inflated to outrageous levels to pay for these type of stuff which isn't even benefiting the local taxpayer. It is the same reason BBC restricts their content to UK only (for online services).
- pkaye 8y agoBefore we worry about that, lets stop all the tax concessions and handouts given to corporations which hardly benefit the public at large.
- metabagel 8y agoI think you are vastly overestimating how much in the way of taxpayer dollars were spent on these sorts of programs, particularly in the case of private universities, such as Harvard. This reminds me of foreign aid, which the public perceives as being a large part of the U.S. federal budget, when it's less than 1%.
- dougmwne 8y agoYes and no. Yes, someone was paid a modest salary to put together these course materials. They were not free to create. In a university setting with just a few students per teacher and layers upon layers of supporting infrastructure, these courses are expensive to deliver. Possibly even more expensive than the objective worth of the material to the students. No. We are on HN, where "does it scale?" is gospel. MOOCs scale wonderfully. Millions of people could learn Calculus or Accounting from the modest effort of a single talented teacher. With that level of scale you do not necessarily need to charge every person who takes the class and free can be a business model. We can't lock our basic professional knowledge up behind a paywall that only the rich can penetrate. In fact this is the perfect thing to spend tax dollars on, a public good with a massive potential ROI. There's a reason the govt still pays for libraries. And before my optimism gets skewered, yes MOOCs don't seem to work for everyone, but surely they suit some people's learning styles better than textbooks which is really their only low-cost competition for most knowledge domains.
- tim333 8y agoSome should do degree accreditation based on online learning to give people a lower cost option.
- stephengillie 8y agoMy Dad often talks about "challenging" a course, where you take the final test, and if you pass you get full course credit. I've never heard of a school offering this in any kind of usable capacity. At what point did this stop being offered?
- jklehm 8y agoYou can still do it. CLEP [0] is one standard way. You can also request credit by examination for courses not covered by CLEP...this requires departmental approval and paying for a custom exam to be created. [0] https://clep.collegeboard.org https://clep.collegeboard.org
- anonymous5133 8y agoCLEP hands down. I was able to graduate in less than 3 years because I started taking CLEP exams while I was in high school. I also took AP exams as well. Saved me tens of thousands in tuition fees, no joke. People ask me how I was able to graduate so quickly and with no debt. All thanks to CLEP and AP exams.
- gmiller123456 8y agoOr... There should be less emphasis on whether or not someone has a degree, and more emphasis on what they can actually do.
- heneryville 8y agoWhich is quite hard to measure. Hence the need for credentialing, such as certifications, portfolios, etc, testing, prior experience, and yes, degrees. What's odd about a degree is that it's the learning coupled with the credentialing.
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- hawktheslayer 8y agoAs someone who enjoys learning this is really enticing to me. However with the demands of my busy work/life schedule, my increasingly challenged attention span--mainly due to the number of competing free resources out there--and my wide range of curiosities I have difficulty deciding where to dedicate my precious time to. Do other people fall in a similar boat? If so any tips or tricks to break through?
- projectramo 8y agoFinish one thing before you start the next. If you cannot do that, have, at most 3 projects at a time. No matter how small, finish first. That is the whole secret. If you force yourself to do this, you might even start thinking ahead before you start new stuff. Or you might finish stuff faster because you want to get to the thing you really want and realize how rewarding it was to finish.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- indigochill 8y agoI think the key thing for me is something my dad told me when I was griping about school as a kid: "It's about having options." Ever since then, I've targeted my educational investments in a way that points me towards the sorts of options that I want to have. This "gimme options" perspective also helps keep you going when learning sucks, because not having the kinds of options you want sucks more. Having some experience living with limited options can really drive home the fear that serves to get you into the mood to keep learning.
- YinglingLight 8y ago>can really drive home the fear Instead of coming from a place of scarcity I'd view it from a place of plenty. "gimmie options" -> Talent Stack The more wide and experienced your Talent Stack is, the 'luckier' you'll become in life.
- Dowwie 8y agoYou're going to have to give it priority over other interests .
- jatsign 8y agoWhy do so many sites have UX like this one, where after you start reading, the text gets grayed out and you have to click a button "Read Full Story"? It's annoying to the user - if I want to read more, just let me scroll. It can't save that much bandwidth to send just part of the story. Is it to measure user engagement?
- seddin 8y agoYou could say it is good, since most web site visitors tend to stay in a site less than 30 seconds, imagine how much bandwidth is being saved.
- anonymous5133 8y agoOnly reason I could see it being done is to improve loading time. Most users these days will bounce back if the page takes more than few seconds to load.
- QuotedForTruth 8y agoI always figured it was something about ad views. Seems you could charge more for an ad view right after that break than if the break didnt exist. You've now confirmed that user is actively reading and will actually see the ad. But maybe ads are click based anyways?
- repsilat 8y agoI thought it was about being able to see the footer if you wanted to.
- madacoo 8y agoSomething that works well for me is disabling javascript and making use of Firefox's read mode. Tends to let me get straight to the content in a legible way without much of the cruft getting in the way.
- tdhoot 8y agoThere are some reasons on StackOverflow. There's an answer by someone from QZ specifically, who says it's only shown when you visit from an outside referrer and it's so you can skip all the content if you're not interested and jump to other interesting articles. https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/82966 https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/82966
- rb808 8y agoSo this is just a list of the courses on edX and coursera, via description pages on course-central.com, listed line by line on qz.com. Presumably people get paid for every click, rather than just look at the original sites. The modern web sucks.
- avinassh 8y agoand they all link to course central pages, rather than directly to the courses. so that now course central gets clicks, cookies will be saved for ads and tracking. Plus, they use another site for redirection, possibly for affiliate sales and even more tracking. The items in list are just added, randomly. For example, Machine Learning with Python: from Linear Models to Deep Learning [0] course actullay starts on June 2019. It's not really 'launched'. [0] - https://www.edx.org/course/machine-learning-with-python-from-linear-models-to-deep-learning https://www.edx.org/course/machine-learning-with-python-from...
- anonymous5133 8y agoAgree. This looks like spam to me.
- mymythisisthis 8y agoYup, the current web sucks. I'm not sure what the future of it will be, I'm not optimistic.
- gymshoes 8y ago
- bnt 8y agoWait, isn’t this list a ripoff from freeCodeCamp?
- bnt 8y agoHad to dig through my inbox to find it (originally published on Oct 10) https://medium.freecodecamp.org/190-universities-just-launched-600-free-online-courses-heres-the-full-list-3d9ad7895f57 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/190-universities-just-launch...
- wltprgm 8y agoHe is actually that guy who compiled this list, I don't know why every month freeCodeCamp founder shared his article on the Facebook page
- bnt 8y agoAh, I didn't do my due diligence before commenting.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- javinpaul 8y agoIf anyone is interested, here is some more list for free programming courses https://hackernoon.com/5-free-r-programming-courses-for-data-scientists-and-ml-programmers-5732cb9e10 https://hackernoon.com/5-free-r-programming-courses-for-data... https://hackernoon.com/10-free-courses-to-learn-docker-for-programmers-and-devops-engineers-7ff2781fd6e0 https://hackernoon.com/10-free-courses-to-learn-docker-for-p... http://www.java67.com/2018/02/5-free-python-online-courses-for-beginners.html http://www.java67.com/2018/02/5-free-python-online-courses-f... https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/01/5-free-git-courses-for-programmers-to-learn-online.html https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/01/5-free-git-course... http://www.java67.com/2018/01/top-5-free-angular-js-online-courses-for-web-developers.html http://www.java67.com/2018/01/top-5-free-angular-js-online-c... I have also shared a lot of curated list of free resources, which you can find on my blog http://javarevisited.blogspot.com http://javarevisited.blogspot.com