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Online education isn't any more free to provide than anything else. And not all courses will scale equally well either. For instance, would a data mining course

by rch 15y ago

Online education isn't any more free to provide than anything else. And not all courses will scale equally well either. For instance, would a data mining course include several thousand cpu hours per student? One would hope they are working towards a sustainable model for efficiently allocating education services, and doing so will require reasonable fees for some courses.

eob 15y ago
Yes, you're right. I'm not criticizing their decision. With the cost of a college education skyrocketing, and "open source" education in its infancy, the moves and adaptations of the big players are just interesting to watch, is all I meant. I believe the next 10 years will birth new forms of socially-acceptable higher education, which is a pretty big deal, since the system we have to day is pretty ancient. MIT, with it's strict "information should be free" policy. Stanford, with a mixed bag approach. Harvard, with it's extension school. Johns Hopkins, with it's satellite campuses in other countries.. The big schools are all trying out different strategies to offer a variety of bundles for students looking for education.
softwaregravy 15y ago
Actually, I don't see this as out of line or inconsistent at all. Providing free education classes, particularly the introduction levels, increases awareness, acclimatizes students to learning online, and they learn how to do it. (They being Stanford. They work out hiccups over servers, videos, tests, whatever in the free courses.) If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model. On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.

by rch 15y ago

eob 15y ago

Yes, you're right. I'm not criticizing their decision. With the cost of a college education skyrocketing, and "open source" education in its infancy, the moves and adaptations of the big players are just interesting to watch, is all I meant. I believe the next 10 years will birth new forms of socially-acceptable higher education, which is a pretty big deal, since the system we have to day is pretty ancient. MIT, with it's strict "information should be free" policy. Stanford, with a mixed bag approach. Harvard, with it's extension school. Johns Hopkins, with it's satellite campuses in other countries.. The big schools are all trying out different strategies to offer a variety of bundles for students looking for education.

softwaregravy 15y ago

Actually, I don't see this as out of line or inconsistent at all. Providing free education classes, particularly the introduction levels, increases awareness, acclimatizes students to learning online, and they learn how to do it. (They being Stanford. They work out hiccups over servers, videos, tests, whatever in the free courses.) If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model. On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.