4 ms·

There is no such thing as a free lunch. How much of tuition, endowment, tax, and other funds paid for these?

metabagel 8y ago
I'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 ago
This could be the product of sharing course materials they already mostly had, at a low additional cost.
docbrown 8y ago
If 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 ago
  Also I think MIT OWC did some fund raising through donations and grants to pay for the online lectures.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pkaye 8y ago
What is wrong with endowments, taxes and other funds being used to produce online content?
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  The 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 ago
    Before we worry about that, lets stop all the tax concessions and handouts given to corporations which hardly benefit the public at large.
  - metabagel 8y ago
    I 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 ago
Yes 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.

I'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 ago

This could be the product of sharing course materials they already mostly had, at a low additional cost.

docbrown 8y ago

If 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 ago
Also I think MIT OWC did some fund raising through donations and grants to pay for the online lectures.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pkaye 8y ago

What is wrong with endowments, taxes and other funds being used to produce online content?

anonymous5133 8y ago
The 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 ago
  Before we worry about that, lets stop all the tax concessions and handouts given to corporations which hardly benefit the public at large.
- metabagel 8y ago
  I 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 ago

Yes 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.