6 ms·

Coursera raises $16M

88 points by NonEUCitizen 15y ago

pitt1980 15y ago
"Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Dr. Koller said that this would actually improve the learning experience." wonder how that would work
- evoxed 15y ago
  This will be especially interesting considering how many of the people taking advantage of these courses are outside of the US and primarily-English speaking countries. Check the box if English is your second language? We'll see how the crowdsourced evaluation model goes, but then maybe they've got some tricks up their sleeves to rescue it from [potential] disaster. Edit: The first thing I can think of is an advanced rubric that would allow almost anyone to break down an essay and feed the results into their own grading algorithm. A sizable group of writing teachers are clenching their teeth...
- signa11 15y ago
  > wonder how that would work one possibility might be to have multiple students grade a students work, and final score then weighted by the 'judging-student's' score on the same topic ?
  - pitt1980 15y ago
    yeah, wonder if you could do something like, here's 3 essays, rank them from best to worst fancy algorythm fit all the essays onto some sort of generous curve grade seems like essay a > than essay b > than essay c would get you better results than having each grader come up with a number from 1 - 100 or a letter from A to F, as everyone has different norms as to what they think should count as a 90 (or an A) or whatever
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nickik 15y ago
A year ago I was talking about how cool something like this would be. I knew it had to happen but it happend faster then I thought.
ilcavero 15y ago
I don't understand what's the need to constraint these courses in X weeks duration when one of the advantages of this presentation is to allow self paced study. I started the PGM course and found it interesting but cannot spend +10 hours per week on it just to get an email certificate in the end. I can do Kahn academy classes anytime I want right? why in coursera do I have to pretend I'm taking a college class?
- ig1 15y ago
  Because some people work better with deadlines, without deadlines they might keep putting of working on it.
- SatvikBeri 15y ago
  Psychology. The vast majority of people show significantly better results with specific deadlines. Here's one study showing the difference: http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenbroch.pdf http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenb...
  - ilcavero 15y ago
    what you say is true, but also that getting a good grade is a strong motivator and that is not available unless you follow the deadline regime. Perhaps what is needed are more slow paced courses that you could fast track and finish faster if you wish to do so.
  - 0ren 15y ago
    There could be other time-based methods to encourage students, rather than hard deadlines. For instance, suppose the class had a bag with unlimited (or large) number of question, and required each student to score 100 points to pass. Students would have unlimited number of attempts at quizzes/assignments, but their score decays with time (think HN submission ranking decay). That is, if you worked hard and scored 70, but then you were busy/away for a month, your score drops to, say, 50. So you are encouraged to finish the questions in a timely manner, but on the other hand, you can also make up for that missed month by putting more work when you are back. With this method or a something similar, you do not "lose everything" when you miss a deadline. IMHO, "losing everything" for missing a deadline is part of the reason for the (exponential?) decay in the number of students participating in Coursera's PGM class[1,2]. [1] Based on PGM's "quiz's highest score" statistics, the total numbers of participating students are 6950, 3500, 2650 for week1, week2 and week3 respectively (other weeks' stats are not complete as of this writing). [2] Another interesting stats is the ratio of perfect scores to all other scores: 25.2%, 34.3%, 49%. This could suggest that the deadline system filters out most students but the very top ones (assuming uniform difficulty of quizzes, and uniform quality of lecture videos/slides, etc.). This may not be what you want from an educational perspective. And, yet it may actually be what you want to support a business plan similar to Udacity- discovering talent. (see my comment below)
brosephius 15y ago
I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to take a class and earn a certificate. On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while employed at a university?
- DennisP 15y ago
  MITx is planning free courses and pay to get a certificate. Udacity is planning free everything while making money by hooking top students up with recruiters. Coursera doesn't seem to have decided yet.
  - rudasn 15y ago
    Can you link to the source for that info?
    - 0ren 15y ago
      Regarding Udacity's business plan: In June Thrun "took the next step: cofounding KnowLabs... He pulled in David Stavens... as CEO… Thrun decides that KnowLabs will build something called Udacity… Stavens is thinking about potential business models. Though Thrun cringes at the notion of charging students, people might eventually pay for add-ons—say, TA services, study aids, or offline materials. He also considers other revenue streams. Near the end of the term, he emails his top 1,000 students, the ones with perfect or near-perfect scores on homework and tests. The subject: Job Placement Program. Thrun solicits résumés and promises to get the best ones into the right hands at tech companies, including Google. A recruiter who places a hire typically earns 10 to 30 percent of an engineer’s first-year salary, which might be $100,000. Stavens figures he could charge much less. After all, KnowLabs discovers talent in the course of doing business."[1] [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/
    - DennisP 15y ago
      I didn't have links saved, but googling turns up, for example, this: "While the certificates for this course will be free, students will have to pay a modest fee for credentials in future courses expected to begin this fall." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment-for-first-interactive-online-course-pilot-certificates-will-be-free/35396 http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment... 0ren found a good link for udacity.
chrisaycock 15y ago
Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, iTunes U, YouTube University, OpenCourseWare... Seems like we need a service just to keep a handle on all the content out there.
- debacle 15y ago
  OpenEducationFormat?
- RobPfeifer 15y ago
  We're working on it :)
- kqr2 15y ago
  Class Central has a pretty good list. http://www.class-central.com/ http://www.class-central.com/

88 points by NonEUCitizen 15y ago

pitt1980 15y ago

"Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Dr. Koller said that this would actually improve the learning experience." wonder how that would work

evoxed 15y ago
This will be especially interesting considering how many of the people taking advantage of these courses are outside of the US and primarily-English speaking countries. Check the box if English is your second language? We'll see how the crowdsourced evaluation model goes, but then maybe they've got some tricks up their sleeves to rescue it from [potential] disaster. Edit: The first thing I can think of is an advanced rubric that would allow almost anyone to break down an essay and feed the results into their own grading algorithm. A sizable group of writing teachers are clenching their teeth...
signa11 15y ago
> wonder how that would work one possibility might be to have multiple students grade a students work, and final score then weighted by the 'judging-student's' score on the same topic ?
- pitt1980 15y ago
  yeah, wonder if you could do something like, here's 3 essays, rank them from best to worst fancy algorythm fit all the essays onto some sort of generous curve grade seems like essay a > than essay b > than essay c would get you better results than having each grader come up with a number from 1 - 100 or a letter from A to F, as everyone has different norms as to what they think should count as a 90 (or an A) or whatever

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nickik 15y ago

A year ago I was talking about how cool something like this would be. I knew it had to happen but it happend faster then I thought.

ilcavero 15y ago

I don't understand what's the need to constraint these courses in X weeks duration when one of the advantages of this presentation is to allow self paced study. I started the PGM course and found it interesting but cannot spend +10 hours per week on it just to get an email certificate in the end. I can do Kahn academy classes anytime I want right? why in coursera do I have to pretend I'm taking a college class?

ig1 15y ago
Because some people work better with deadlines, without deadlines they might keep putting of working on it.
SatvikBeri 15y ago
Psychology. The vast majority of people show significantly better results with specific deadlines. Here's one study showing the difference: http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenbroch.pdf http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenb...
- ilcavero 15y ago
  what you say is true, but also that getting a good grade is a strong motivator and that is not available unless you follow the deadline regime. Perhaps what is needed are more slow paced courses that you could fast track and finish faster if you wish to do so.
- 0ren 15y ago
  There could be other time-based methods to encourage students, rather than hard deadlines. For instance, suppose the class had a bag with unlimited (or large) number of question, and required each student to score 100 points to pass. Students would have unlimited number of attempts at quizzes/assignments, but their score decays with time (think HN submission ranking decay). That is, if you worked hard and scored 70, but then you were busy/away for a month, your score drops to, say, 50. So you are encouraged to finish the questions in a timely manner, but on the other hand, you can also make up for that missed month by putting more work when you are back. With this method or a something similar, you do not "lose everything" when you miss a deadline. IMHO, "losing everything" for missing a deadline is part of the reason for the (exponential?) decay in the number of students participating in Coursera's PGM class[1,2]. [1] Based on PGM's "quiz's highest score" statistics, the total numbers of participating students are 6950, 3500, 2650 for week1, week2 and week3 respectively (other weeks' stats are not complete as of this writing). [2] Another interesting stats is the ratio of perfect scores to all other scores: 25.2%, 34.3%, 49%. This could suggest that the deadline system filters out most students but the very top ones (assuming uniform difficulty of quizzes, and uniform quality of lecture videos/slides, etc.). This may not be what you want from an educational perspective. And, yet it may actually be what you want to support a business plan similar to Udacity- discovering talent. (see my comment below)

brosephius 15y ago

I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to take a class and earn a certificate. On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while employed at a university?

DennisP 15y ago
MITx is planning free courses and pay to get a certificate. Udacity is planning free everything while making money by hooking top students up with recruiters. Coursera doesn't seem to have decided yet.
- rudasn 15y ago
  Can you link to the source for that info?
  - 0ren 15y ago
    Regarding Udacity's business plan: In June Thrun "took the next step: cofounding KnowLabs... He pulled in David Stavens... as CEO… Thrun decides that KnowLabs will build something called Udacity… Stavens is thinking about potential business models. Though Thrun cringes at the notion of charging students, people might eventually pay for add-ons—say, TA services, study aids, or offline materials. He also considers other revenue streams. Near the end of the term, he emails his top 1,000 students, the ones with perfect or near-perfect scores on homework and tests. The subject: Job Placement Program. Thrun solicits résumés and promises to get the best ones into the right hands at tech companies, including Google. A recruiter who places a hire typically earns 10 to 30 percent of an engineer’s first-year salary, which might be $100,000. Stavens figures he could charge much less. After all, KnowLabs discovers talent in the course of doing business."[1] [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/
  - DennisP 15y ago
    I didn't have links saved, but googling turns up, for example, this: "While the certificates for this course will be free, students will have to pay a modest fee for credentials in future courses expected to begin this fall." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment-for-first-interactive-online-course-pilot-certificates-will-be-free/35396 http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment... 0ren found a good link for udacity.

chrisaycock 15y ago

Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, iTunes U, YouTube University, OpenCourseWare... Seems like we need a service just to keep a handle on all the content out there.

debacle 15y ago
OpenEducationFormat?
RobPfeifer 15y ago
We're working on it :)
kqr2 15y ago
Class Central has a pretty good list. http://www.class-central.com/ http://www.class-central.com/