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Coursera is not the central learning platform, its a course platform. You don't log in to see your learning graph which will give you the CS Bachelors Degree.

Coursera is not the central learning platform, its a course platform. You don't log in to see your learning graph which will give you the CS Bachelors Degree. You need to choose a course which will give you a CS Bachelors Degree. Imagine you log into Coursera and you want to have a comparable Degree. You would choose courses to learn 'nodes' of your learning graph. But you could choose which one. You could learn the security topic from a course from someone from harvard and you could learn security topic from someone in germany. You choose your language, you choose your medium. Might be that a lot of text + 1-2 explain videos help you more then a 2h lecture. Might be that you can choose between implementing a program or do a presentation. It might even be required for you to listen to a presentation from other students. Or create your own small programming tasks for others. This could become the best curated/crowd created biggest collection of educational material in the world.

senux 6y ago
I think your sentiment is great overall and I agree with it in essence. But realistically, there are way more obstacles to something like this than just creating a platform, as I'm sure you can imagine. Especially when you mentioned above, "why not start when you're a baby" which I think you meant start at a young age. kinder-gardens, preschools, schools, are not only used as a place for education, unfortunately. Parents NEED their kids to be in someone else's care for a good part of the day. The current pandemic has made that even clearer if it already wasn't. Additionally, the sheer number of people that need education is not only enormous, it's growing. Not only that, we are all different, with different needs. Some don't have computers, some don't have internet, or paper, or pens, or food. Some won't be able to learn how to read from home or learn math. Some are deaf or blind. Again, that's all before getting to higher education. Universities, despite their bad record and resistance to change, are a place where a lot of research happens. I'm not talking only about the US. Let's forget about the US for a second since the scope of your comment goes beyond that. We are talking about identifying, recording, and distributing courses from professors from around the globe. How do you decide who's good enough? How to decide who's getting paid and who's not? Most Universities and Colleges have more than one professor per subject area. Again, I agree with the sentiment but I wanted to share a larger perspective because I thought your comment was interesting and worth discussing.
- battery423 6y ago
  I thought about this as well and the benefit of such a platform would be that depending on what your role is, the platform can do different things for you: - You are a teacher -> you can make sure you teach related stuff like the rest of the world. You can share and exchange learning material, you can track your students - You are a parent -> you don't need it often but you might need to see early if your kid is struggling or you wanna have some extra material for your kid to exercise with - You are in a government position -> you can use it to get your curriculum - You are an help organization and you need stuff to print out for some remote village without internet I'm not saying that i have fixed/analysed all issues coming from it but i do see a huge benefit if we as a society centralize it more then what it is right now.

senux 6y ago

I think your sentiment is great overall and I agree with it in essence. But realistically, there are way more obstacles to something like this than just creating a platform, as I'm sure you can imagine. Especially when you mentioned above, "why not start when you're a baby" which I think you meant start at a young age. kinder-gardens, preschools, schools, are not only used as a place for education, unfortunately. Parents NEED their kids to be in someone else's care for a good part of the day. The current pandemic has made that even clearer if it already wasn't. Additionally, the sheer number of people that need education is not only enormous, it's growing. Not only that, we are all different, with different needs. Some don't have computers, some don't have internet, or paper, or pens, or food. Some won't be able to learn how to read from home or learn math. Some are deaf or blind. Again, that's all before getting to higher education. Universities, despite their bad record and resistance to change, are a place where a lot of research happens. I'm not talking only about the US. Let's forget about the US for a second since the scope of your comment goes beyond that. We are talking about identifying, recording, and distributing courses from professors from around the globe. How do you decide who's good enough? How to decide who's getting paid and who's not? Most Universities and Colleges have more than one professor per subject area. Again, I agree with the sentiment but I wanted to share a larger perspective because I thought your comment was interesting and worth discussing.

battery423 6y ago
I thought about this as well and the benefit of such a platform would be that depending on what your role is, the platform can do different things for you: - You are a teacher -> you can make sure you teach related stuff like the rest of the world. You can share and exchange learning material, you can track your students - You are a parent -> you don't need it often but you might need to see early if your kid is struggling or you wanna have some extra material for your kid to exercise with - You are in a government position -> you can use it to get your curriculum - You are an help organization and you need stuff to print out for some remote village without internet I'm not saying that i have fixed/analysed all issues coming from it but i do see a huge benefit if we as a society centralize it more then what it is right now.