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This will probably be downvoted like crazy here, but I thought we were against for-profit education? Pretty sure everyone was up in arms when University of Pho

• baby 6y ago
  I was extremely surprised, and disappointed, when Coursera started charging money for classes. It was really a revolution when it started. Yet, I still believe coursera is amazing and I’ll buy some shares just to fund the idea. I guess that was the original intention of the market.
  • cromka 6y ago
    Felt exactly the same. I hope Khan Academy will evolve into what Coursera originally promised to become.
    • baby 6y ago
      I don't see Khan Academy or Brilliant as being the same as Coursera.
      • 3eto 6y ago
        I hope you’re right and Khan Academy won’t ever be the same as Coursera, I hope they will remain free and can grow into becoming better than Coursera, perhaps educators on Coursera will start sharing their courses for free on Khan Academy.
        • cromka 6y ago
          What I meant was that I hope that it would evolve into "what Coursera originally promised to become".
  • riffraff 6y ago
    are they actually charging for classes now, or just certificates?
    • duderoso 6y ago
      just the certificate. and you also get access to some extra things like the autograder in some classes. But otherwise, nothing is different.
      • rubin55 6y ago
        Actually, I was doing some updated courses a while ago, which I started a few years back and wanted to finish. I could follow the videos and reading material, but I could not do the end—of-week quizzes without paying. This really put me off.
      • f6v 6y ago
        It’s vastly different for many courses. The exercises are often paywalled, which means you can’t put your skills to the test.
        • ghaff 6y ago
          And at that point, you're just watching videos and, while people learn in different ways, you may be just as well or better off picking up a book and taking advantage of resources like MIT OCW.
          • baby 6y ago
            Entitled much?
    • baby 6y ago
      I'm not sure if there are courses that you can't take without paying, I remember that they sometimes made it really difficult to figure out if you could access the course for free (I believe it's better now). Honestly it's hard to complain, because all the stuff is still there. It's just not as utopian and revolutionary as it once seemed to be. Or maybe it is and I should stop complaining. I just wished it was like wikipedia.
  • 3eto 6y ago
    I'll be taking the other side of your trade and shorting the stock, every time I win I'll donate the cash to educational nonprofits.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    >It was really a revolution when it started. Many people thought it was anyway. In practice, it ended up being mostly another source of lecture videos used by motivated professionals with generally solid fundamentals. For which, frankly, there were already a lot of resources out there.
    • baby 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean by that. First, at the time you couldn't find stuff like that online. I'm talking, legit course from legit professors for free. Then about the audience? I personally was a student when Coursera became a thing and I got into my masters by taking the course on cryptography. I have many student friends at the time who learned a lot through other courses.
• pfranz 6y ago
  I 100% share your concerns. What you and I hate is the predatory, indenturing nature of for-profit colleges that don't provide marketable skills--what currently exists. The certificate from UoP, Coursera, or the receipt from a Ruby on Rails book all have the same market value when applying for a job, but I hope everyone here has bought and got value from a tech book. I honestly don't know what makes universities work. Their "mission" to educate in the US has definitely crept towards for-profit. Seeing endowments grow multiple times over but their student body stay the same size. Over the past few decades they've teased by publishing course materials online, but have usually been very protective. I can't imagine this not changing over the next few decades. Like you point out, entry level stuff scales really well. Maybe "graduate level" material costs a premium or its a loss-leader as a way add prestige? University undergrad often has "filter classes" which always seemed like a money grab because otherwise their admissions and onboarding departments aren't doing their job. Graduate classes were always much smaller and hard for people to afford.
• SkyPuncher 6y ago
  Imo, for-profit degrees have always been the actual problem. Paying to take a single class has never been the problem with for-profit education.
• sammorrowdrums 6y ago
  I'm one of the faces of the Coursera ads (they interviewed me about career change from drummer to deveoper). I feel exactly the same. When it was free, and when for profit institutions were experimenting more too, it felt like a revolution. The Stanford 'Startup Engineering' course on Coursera was only offered back then and it was amazing. Andrew Ng's ML, Prinston's Algorithms, all free including certificate. I used Udacity CS101, Google Python Class and loads of other free resources and changed my life. It was true when I said Coursers changed my life. What has been slightly sad as it took Coursera years to start seriously advertising with my face, and even when they interviewed me they were almost beyond recognition. It makes me sad I just happened to learn CS and software development during the online education wild west. That's what I dreamed of for everyone. Top level education for everyone, for free. I didn't care about certificates. I had knowledge and projects I could prove. It may not all be doom and gloom, but when people ask me for recommendations after seeing advert, I sigh a little, because situation isn't as great as it was. https://youtu.be/Z1lqnyEp38o https://youtu.be/Z1lqnyEp38o
  • sammorrowdrums 6y ago
    What they don't really go into in edited interview properly is that early on it also felt like open courses online could end paying for mediocre teaching, you could basically skip around doing best-in-class courses from top teachers and experts in their fields, and it didn't matter if you had no money in the world, just internet and a computer.
  • golergka 6y ago
    If it provided such an enormous value to you, what's wrong with paying for it?
    • sammorrowdrums 6y ago
      Also I would probably consider a pay-it-forward model of being able to sponsor others doing the courses that have subsequently brought me value, now that I have actually got some value from doing them.
    • sammorrowdrums 6y ago
• theptip 6y ago
  I don’t get why we’d dismiss a cheaper option out-of-hand. Easy to steel-man this one; * economy of scale means it’s cheaper for the same quality * egalitarian access means you don’t need X gpa to get the top classes * online means the TAM / impact is way bigger * lack of actual degree for most courses means you are spending your dollars on actual learning and not merely paying to signal middle-class membership I’m not necessarily buying in to all of these but I think there’s clearly enough to justify the business on its surface. Haven’t dug into the biz metrics though. Anecdotally a friend did Open University which is probably equivalent to the full degrees offered at Coursera, but less convenient. They spent years grinding out a degree after work. They are a data scientist now. So this path is valuable and increases access to (I’d argue overly) credentialed jobs.
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    Open University is an incredibly interesting idea to me, and apparently a respected University in the UK at least, but even with that it just doesn’t feel right. For someone who did not take the traditional path to schooling, wanting to go back open access is amazing, but if the primary value of the credential is correlated with selectivity, I can’t help but feel off. It effectively feels like pay to play and to the average person who hasn’t heard of the school/program, does it signal more than a for-profit. I also couldn’t be sure, not being familiar with how UK programs are generally structured, but a lot of the programs looks extremely superficial, and wide, like what you would get from a low tier AS program at a bad community college. This is kinda the same feeling I had with certain degree options through Coursera as well.
    • theptip 6y ago
      OU is legit. My pal did Physics, then got into an engineering masters at a good university, then did a data science for grads transition course. Flexible course curriculum but it seems they give you the stamp you need to get to the next level, and perhaps more importantly, the flexibility to do it at your own pace. It may be that as you say you can pick your curriculum to be shallow, I don’t know the details I’m afraid. I think a lot of roles just care about box-ticking; degree in CS or related STEM field. The recruiter doesn’t care where from if you tick the box. In some sense it’s BS, and Coursera may be the cheapest way to hack the system here. My friend found it really rewarding and empowering to get his degree even though he took a detour to get it, so i can at least provide a third-hand vouching for the quality of OU from an educational content perspective, as well as passing the bar for credentialism too. Caveat Emptor, I don’t have any positive or negative testimonials on Coursera for getting a job. And I’d actually suggest in software that you can get into the field without a degree much more easily than other STEM fields. But if you’re not in a tech hub then the credential might help you to get a foot in the door if you are otherwise struggling to see a way to do so.
• matheusmoreira 6y ago
  > student loans That's the root cause of the problem. I seriously doubt the integrity of any system can survive the injection of trillions of dollars into the market. Schools want to capture as much of it as possible and that means raising tuition, dumbing down classes to make sure students don't drop out as well as creating fun but useless courses. It actually makes no difference whether students are learning anything useful or even if they're learning anything at all. They just need them to be enrolled in order to get those loans.
• higerordermap 6y ago
  I am firmly of the opinion that industry should fund public education in their respective sectors. If every talented person gets best and practical-focused education possible, that's a plus for the industry. Commoditization of high quality education makes sense to them.
• blockyhead 6y ago
  It's crazy to me to demand education should not cost anything. Competition is a good thing and the best way to drive prices down. Just because bad actors defraud their clients, doesn't mean all business should be outlawed.
• 3eto 6y ago
  People underestimate the value of free. There are millions of kids and people of all ages going to extremes to access the internet to learn new stuff. I met a kid in a remote village who would cycle for miles every weekend they were not working to seat in a public library to learn on the internet, for that kid a course costing 1 penny would be too expensive and no one in the family had a credit card to begin with. Sal Khan deserves all the praise and more, Khan Academy is now in multiple languages, his videos are literally changing people’s lives. MIT’s edX used to be free, they are now monetising the courses and will withdraw access after their self imposed artificial course time has run out if you don’t pay them, this also creates a second class of students, the ones with money get special privileges and get graded and the poor ones don’t and offering ‘financial aid’ doesn’t work if you really want to reach far and wide, how many will close the site when they see it costs thousands of dollars for a course? In a sense edX is way more disappointing than Coursera. But just like I stopped recommending Coursera when they started restricting access to their courses I look forward to shorting their stock when they go public and donating the profits to educational nonprofits.
  • dmurray 6y ago
    Coursera's upsell advertising (I'm working through, and recommend, Dan Grossman's Programming Languages right now) seems to have switched away from advertising the vocational benefits of their certificates to making it sound like a charity. It used to be "get this certificate to get 6x more LinkedIn views". Now, 50% of the ads I get are "support Coursera's mission to bring people education for free".
  • paulcarroty 6y ago
    > But just like I stopped recommending Coursera when they started restricting access to their courses Same story, now I recommend Freecodecamp & Khan Academy. Some of Stanford free courses are very good too.
  • cute_boi 6y ago
    Yup I am tired with this strategy. Start with free tell them you are doing novel thing -> Becomes Popular -> Start milking money I am thankful to Khan Academy for this exact reason. Everyone is equal in their eyes and doesn't discriminate people based on how rich they are. European and American people don't realize how much privileged they are.
• Findeton 6y ago
  I'm totally in favour of for-profit education. Obviously teachers need to earn money/eat. Unregulated education tends to have a wide variety to choose from, from free to very expensive, and that's a good thing.
  • cinntaile 6y ago
    Not for profit doesn't mean what you think it does. Teachers at not for profit schools earn a wage, just like at for profit schools. It means that the excess can be siphoned off to stock owners instead of being reinvested in the school.
    • yunesj 6y ago
      > the excess can be siphoned off to stock owners instead of being reinvested in the school Yes, but the excess isn’t siphoned away to random people. It’s paid to the investors in exchange for creating the school.
      • cinntaile 6y ago
        Can you clarify your argument, I don't get where you are going with this? Also once Coursera is on the stock market then you and I can own it and we didn't create the school.
• yunesj 6y ago
  > I thought we were against for-profit education? Jeeze, not everyone on HN has the same viewpoint! These categories of schools just have different funding mechanisms and thus different incentive structures. Compared to private nonprofits, for-profits can crowdfund creation of the school, but give up some ownership. On the other hand, public nonprofits are controlled by politicians and the general public. > why did [many people] think that one for-profit is bad, and the other gets a free pass I suppose for most people it was a value judgement, rather than an ideological one. The same reason why someone might dislike McDonald’s, but still like Veganburg. Bang-per-buck, many Coursera classes are a better value than those at other schools, whether they are for-profit, private nonprofit, or public.
• fibers 6y ago
  > This will probably be downvoted like crazy here, but I thought we were against for-profit education? Well you are on one of the hotbeds of the internet where the mantra is 'monetize everything and see what sticks' sooo
• say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  Have you used Coursera before? You don't have to pay to take a course. You pay for the certification of completion. Regarding for-profit education, does anyone here think that a government-backed education platform would have achieved what Coursera did in the last 10 years? Don't kid yourself. It wouldn't have been remotely close in quality and content and would have been a feeding trough for the political class. It wouldn't have even been granted funding.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    In a lot of cases these days, auditing a class doesn't give you access to anything other than the video lectures--so no autograded assignments, quizzes, etc. So basically no different than a bunch of YouTube videos.
• gojomo 6y ago
  Who's the "we" who are supposedly against for-profit education? And, why would someone's negative impression of one particular for-profit education outfit – one whose abuses were strongly associated with a particular set of misguided incentive-misaligning government loan subsidies – turn them off against all for-profit educators? Would either of the following formulations make sense: "I thought we were all against for-profit investor Bernie Madoff, why do people like for-profit investor Warren Buffett?" "I thought we were all against for-profit medical hype like Theranos, why do people like for-profit BioNTech's mRNA vaccine?" You shouldn't erase all the other salient differences between people & projects under some broad, & assumed derogatory, "for-profit" label.
• cabaalis 6y ago
  > but I thought we were against for-profit education? So it just .. shouldn't be allowed? Free markets allow you to set your price for your abilities and have agency over your future. If I want to charge people something to teach them something, I don't want a group of hackers telling me I can't.
• mupuff1234 6y ago
  Can't say I'm against for-profit education as long as there is a government funded affordable option.