7 ms·

I don't really like how any of the MOOCs run, and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers. They all

I don't really like how any of the MOOCs run, and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers. They all have the Same courses and the same degrees. Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees. A successful MOOC in my mind isn't one that will have some credits for an online certification for programming or nursing that can transfer to a Real school. A successful MOOC is one where I can take a course on Ulysses or Semantics or Mathematics or Plato or whatever just like I could in a real undergrad, but without the same financial and time constraints. I want to be able to spend $5000 taking classes that I find interesting, and accidentally have an English degree Or spend $5000 and really focus and get my degree in X.

a2tech 2y ago
Well I can tell you that the university of Michigan has exactly what you want. And the professors teach the same class in person as well as online (with some modification to fit the format).
derbOac 2y ago
> my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers I think part of the tricky thing is that this is what HR/employer/MBA-type cultures increasingly see a degree as. So why not just go right to that? I don't agree with this perspective, to be clear, but if you look at it from a certain viewpoint it's not too difficult to see why there would be pressure to approach with that tack. You might even go a step further and argue that if these things are failing as the article states, it might say something about the viability of that hyperspecialized perspective on degrees. Or maybe not.
mu53 2y ago
I think the only reason this doesn't happen is economics. If someone were to "fix" the education system and start giving out bachelors for less money, the value of bachelors degrees would go down. In part, because more people would have them, but also because schools have systems to prevent abuse such as fraud. If you just want to take a class, there are plenty of MOOCs that give the lectures, exercises, and tests out for free. Another reason is that different universities may emphasize different things as part of the curriculum. Lets say a philosophy degree at harvard emphasizes Greek philosophers, but a philosophy degree at UT emphasizes post modern philosophers. Taking a class at one doesn't transfer to another. Mixing classes at different universities simply doesn't work because you weren't educated at the university so why should you get a degree from that university? The way I see it is that if you just want to get educated the resources are out there, but if you want degree, you gotta go to school.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Obtaining a degree should be a separate optional examination, likely on-site, like other extern examinations. But receiving lectures and coursework equivalent / comparable to those received by regular students, such that would realistically prepare you to passing the same kind of exam (given adequate study effort from you), would be actually useful. Useful even if you don't take the exam and don't receive credits / papers. Study is not for costly signaling alone.
  - mu53 2y ago
    I agree that the education system would be better with this kind of arrangement, but it doesn't happen because of economics and american independence. What certifying body would administer the exam? A university that would miss out on $30,000 to $200,000+ on a student attending classes? A government institution influenced by politics that would likely end up creating inadequate testing leading to irrelevant examinations disregarded by most employers or anyone of substance? The only reason why exams work for trades is because it is very well defined what a plumber needs to know. Even for software engineers, certificates are useless for most because what engineers need to know is rather abstract or highly dependent from job to job
csomar 2y ago
If you can take the same degree for $5K instead of $50K, no one will be taking the $50K degree. Most people go to university for the credentials of the university.
- fragmede 2y ago
  For the wealthy, University degrees might just be a Veblen good. It might be the "same", but there will be people that judge them for getting the cheap one.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    $5k is for education, $45k is for campus life with offspring of the right families. May be a good deal from a purely rational standpoint.
  - csomar 2y ago
    If they are the same, there shouldn't be any difference between the two issued. It'd be possible to know only by asking the candidate.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees. that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation. Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities. Obvious follow up: Are there state universities using these techniques to drive down costs and be more flexible?
  - sologoub 2y ago
    The community college system does a good deal here. As an example in California, students can get a great deal of their undergrad lower division work done at a community college for a fraction of even UC or State university cost (which for instate students is already fairly low). Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    There definitely are state schools that work hard to drive costs down for in-state students. Florida is weirdly enough a good example as the sunshine state scholars program provides a reasonably approachable way for any student in the state to enter high school with the intent on going to university and graduate with the criteria to get 50%, 75%, or 100% tuition and fees covered under the sunshine state scholars program. Then you have states like Virginia who have some of the fastest rising costs of attendance in the country and where cost of attendance at state schools (which are generally supposed to be cheaper) actually ends up being comparable or even more than cost of attendance at private universities.
Edman274 2y ago
How do you inexpensively scale the personalized work done by professors and TAs in grading your work, making sure you're not cheating or plagiarizing, and clarifying your misunderstandings when you're not "getting" the educational material? If a firm hires someone with a degree, what they're paying for is knowing that a person actually learned the material, which requires human intervention to do grading and to prevent cheating. That costs a lot of money, because technological innovations don't really make the grading or cheating prevention any cheaper. Education is the prototypical example of an industry affected by Baumol's cost disease. The cheapest part to scale is the educational material and lectures, but that's always been the case, even before MOOCs. It has been possible for more than a century to go a library for free and get access to more educational material than one person could read in a several lifetimes. What has never been cheap are teachers who care, and I don't think that MOOCs can technologically innovate so much so that they reduce the cost of a teacher that cares.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  I do think, however, that what they can leverage is community, having more sociable spaces for interactions related to each course and/or more generally. I understand some already do, but I feel like in the few classes I have tried through EdX they were not utilized well.
  - newaccount74 2y ago
    why can't online universities have TAs like real universities? Pay for a course, have someone who completed some more advanced course grade your work or provide one-on-one feedback!
hilux 2y ago
I worked in this field - I've met Anant, John Katzman, and Bonnie Ferri. The MOOCs (and any well-run university, probably the minority) have excellent data on what classes students want to take. Well over 90% of the searches on their site are for tech-related topics. And most of the remainder are probably for business. You can fantasize about a USA where people want to read Plato and accidentally get English degrees. I also think that would be great. In our current reality, only the trust-fund kids, who already know they never need to work, will want to pay for that. (I mean, their dad or grandpa is the one paying.)
- rebolek 2y ago
  I get your point. Paid school is problem and people should be free to find their purpose.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    Unpaid school is a different problem because it's society subsidizing their hobbies.
    - Hellolearning 2y ago
      A persuite of knowledge is not 'subsidizing their hobbies'. Its a captialsm valuation nothing more. What are we as humans if we don't have the resources to educate and learn and be curious? I really hope the current AI and Robot wave will lead us all to a more 'free' society
      - drawnwren 2y ago
        It’s strange to me that you can’t see the correlation between free markets and their products while simultaneously looking forward to more production from those same markets.
        Hellolearning 2y ago
        Get rid of all unnecessary things and overhead in our society and we do not have a resource issue. Focus on automatisation and we don't have a production issue. Its a man made problem, not some kind of magic rule.
wodenokoto 2y ago
Udacity pivoted from seeking to be a new way of giving university level education to the masses to job training. I think the market spoke. There are still universities that also offer online degrees, but generally on their own platform, with live streaming - not in own-paced, pre-recorded MOOCs.
mitjam 2y ago
The best MOOC Í‘ve attended was Balaji Srivivasan’s Startup Engineering, 10 years ago. Like many, I dropped out in the middle - in my case I wanted to spend more time with my little daughter. I still think it was the right decision, but I probably would not have dropped a presence course.
WWWWH 2y ago
Check out the Open University then. It’s the real thing and online. It costs and there are time constraints but they are the experts in remote teaching
pfortuny 2y ago
Not trying to be harsh but the operative word in your post is “I”.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
you want to spend 5000 $ on a mooc about plato?
- ecshafer 2y ago
  I absolutely would. Spending a couple hundred for a class to read through Plato/insert interesting topic here with an expert and a few other interested colleagues is well worth it in my mind. If after a few of those I get a degree to show off I completed this and have some baseline knowledge is worth it. I enjoy school for the most part.
  - 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
    I suppose you are quite rich then. Well, good for you and good luck with your studies of ancient Greek philosophy. And you might want to check this out: https://truthofyoga.com/p/knowledge https://truthofyoga.com/p/knowledge. Not affiliated with it. Would like to do it but can't justify almost 2000 Euro for this course. For you on the other hand it is maybe even too cheap. The guy is teaching at Oxford. Take a look at it.
paganel 2y ago
> and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers. It is my understanding that that's how most of the universities are now also run. Granted, I haven't set foot in an university in almost two decades now, so maybe my view is skewed from I what I've read online and based on the not so numerous interactions I've had with people who attend university.
mlsu 2y ago
It's because the primary purpose of these institutions is cultural filtering. The only reason we have name brand unis is to sort and filter people into a very small (i.e. 1%) cultural/economic elite. The point is for you to go "ooh, stanford" or "ooh harvard" when you meet a partner at a big law firm, VC, or hedge fund. In order for there to be a 1% there must necessarily be a 99%. The percentages are fixed; they always will be. Acceptance rates (public, reported) tend towards the filtering rate (implicit, hidden) as the college educated in the broader population tends towards 1. Look at the endowments of these institutions. They are comparable in magnitude to elite hedge funds and VCs. Of course they do top research and learning as well -- but only because they must. Under the old system, which worked simple, you'd be selected for an Ivy based on your blood relations and receive no education at all (for a recent example of this, Brett Kavanaugh: Supreme Court Justice). I guess it is an improvement on the old system that these places offer a "world-class education" ** to at least some of their students; and that some of their students are pleased to receive it. ** whatever that means. My degree isn't printed on vellum Ivy league stationary, only the coarse public Ivy stuff (public Ivy: isn't that an interesting turn of phrase?); but I received the finest education of my academic career from a California community college. My classmates were navy veterans, part time auto mechanics, and young single parents.

a2tech 2y ago

Well I can tell you that the university of Michigan has exactly what you want. And the professors teach the same class in person as well as online (with some modification to fit the format).

derbOac 2y ago

> my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers I think part of the tricky thing is that this is what HR/employer/MBA-type cultures increasingly see a degree as. So why not just go right to that? I don't agree with this perspective, to be clear, but if you look at it from a certain viewpoint it's not too difficult to see why there would be pressure to approach with that tack. You might even go a step further and argue that if these things are failing as the article states, it might say something about the viability of that hyperspecialized perspective on degrees. Or maybe not.

mu53 2y ago

I think the only reason this doesn't happen is economics. If someone were to "fix" the education system and start giving out bachelors for less money, the value of bachelors degrees would go down. In part, because more people would have them, but also because schools have systems to prevent abuse such as fraud. If you just want to take a class, there are plenty of MOOCs that give the lectures, exercises, and tests out for free. Another reason is that different universities may emphasize different things as part of the curriculum. Lets say a philosophy degree at harvard emphasizes Greek philosophers, but a philosophy degree at UT emphasizes post modern philosophers. Taking a class at one doesn't transfer to another. Mixing classes at different universities simply doesn't work because you weren't educated at the university so why should you get a degree from that university? The way I see it is that if you just want to get educated the resources are out there, but if you want degree, you gotta go to school.

nine_k 2y ago
Obtaining a degree should be a separate optional examination, likely on-site, like other extern examinations. But receiving lectures and coursework equivalent / comparable to those received by regular students, such that would realistically prepare you to passing the same kind of exam (given adequate study effort from you), would be actually useful. Useful even if you don't take the exam and don't receive credits / papers. Study is not for costly signaling alone.
- mu53 2y ago
  I agree that the education system would be better with this kind of arrangement, but it doesn't happen because of economics and american independence. What certifying body would administer the exam? A university that would miss out on $30,000 to $200,000+ on a student attending classes? A government institution influenced by politics that would likely end up creating inadequate testing leading to irrelevant examinations disregarded by most employers or anyone of substance? The only reason why exams work for trades is because it is very well defined what a plumber needs to know. Even for software engineers, certificates are useless for most because what engineers need to know is rather abstract or highly dependent from job to job

csomar 2y ago

If you can take the same degree for $5K instead of $50K, no one will be taking the $50K degree. Most people go to university for the credentials of the university.

fragmede 2y ago
For the wealthy, University degrees might just be a Veblen good. It might be the "same", but there will be people that judge them for getting the cheap one.
- nine_k 2y ago
  $5k is for education, $45k is for campus life with offspring of the right families. May be a good deal from a purely rational standpoint.
- csomar 2y ago
  If they are the same, there shouldn't be any difference between the two issued. It'd be possible to know only by asking the candidate.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees. that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation. Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities. Obvious follow up: Are there state universities using these techniques to drive down costs and be more flexible?
- sologoub 2y ago
  The community college system does a good deal here. As an example in California, students can get a great deal of their undergrad lower division work done at a community college for a fraction of even UC or State university cost (which for instate students is already fairly low). Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  There definitely are state schools that work hard to drive costs down for in-state students. Florida is weirdly enough a good example as the sunshine state scholars program provides a reasonably approachable way for any student in the state to enter high school with the intent on going to university and graduate with the criteria to get 50%, 75%, or 100% tuition and fees covered under the sunshine state scholars program. Then you have states like Virginia who have some of the fastest rising costs of attendance in the country and where cost of attendance at state schools (which are generally supposed to be cheaper) actually ends up being comparable or even more than cost of attendance at private universities.

Edman274 2y ago

How do you inexpensively scale the personalized work done by professors and TAs in grading your work, making sure you're not cheating or plagiarizing, and clarifying your misunderstandings when you're not "getting" the educational material? If a firm hires someone with a degree, what they're paying for is knowing that a person actually learned the material, which requires human intervention to do grading and to prevent cheating. That costs a lot of money, because technological innovations don't really make the grading or cheating prevention any cheaper. Education is the prototypical example of an industry affected by Baumol's cost disease. The cheapest part to scale is the educational material and lectures, but that's always been the case, even before MOOCs. It has been possible for more than a century to go a library for free and get access to more educational material than one person could read in a several lifetimes. What has never been cheap are teachers who care, and I don't think that MOOCs can technologically innovate so much so that they reduce the cost of a teacher that cares.

tourmalinetaco 2y ago
I do think, however, that what they can leverage is community, having more sociable spaces for interactions related to each course and/or more generally. I understand some already do, but I feel like in the few classes I have tried through EdX they were not utilized well.
- newaccount74 2y ago
  why can't online universities have TAs like real universities? Pay for a course, have someone who completed some more advanced course grade your work or provide one-on-one feedback!

hilux 2y ago

I worked in this field - I've met Anant, John Katzman, and Bonnie Ferri. The MOOCs (and any well-run university, probably the minority) have excellent data on what classes students want to take. Well over 90% of the searches on their site are for tech-related topics. And most of the remainder are probably for business. You can fantasize about a USA where people want to read Plato and accidentally get English degrees. I also think that would be great. In our current reality, only the trust-fund kids, who already know they never need to work, will want to pay for that. (I mean, their dad or grandpa is the one paying.)

rebolek 2y ago
I get your point. Paid school is problem and people should be free to find their purpose.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Unpaid school is a different problem because it's society subsidizing their hobbies.
  - Hellolearning 2y ago
    A persuite of knowledge is not 'subsidizing their hobbies'. Its a captialsm valuation nothing more. What are we as humans if we don't have the resources to educate and learn and be curious? I really hope the current AI and Robot wave will lead us all to a more 'free' society
    - drawnwren 2y ago
      It’s strange to me that you can’t see the correlation between free markets and their products while simultaneously looking forward to more production from those same markets.
      - Hellolearning 2y ago
        Get rid of all unnecessary things and overhead in our society and we do not have a resource issue. Focus on automatisation and we don't have a production issue. Its a man made problem, not some kind of magic rule.

wodenokoto 2y ago

Udacity pivoted from seeking to be a new way of giving university level education to the masses to job training. I think the market spoke. There are still universities that also offer online degrees, but generally on their own platform, with live streaming - not in own-paced, pre-recorded MOOCs.

mitjam 2y ago

The best MOOC Í‘ve attended was Balaji Srivivasan’s Startup Engineering, 10 years ago. Like many, I dropped out in the middle - in my case I wanted to spend more time with my little daughter. I still think it was the right decision, but I probably would not have dropped a presence course.

WWWWH 2y ago

Check out the Open University then. It’s the real thing and online. It costs and there are time constraints but they are the experts in remote teaching

pfortuny 2y ago

Not trying to be harsh but the operative word in your post is “I”.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

you want to spend 5000 $ on a mooc about plato?

ecshafer 2y ago
I absolutely would. Spending a couple hundred for a class to read through Plato/insert interesting topic here with an expert and a few other interested colleagues is well worth it in my mind. If after a few of those I get a degree to show off I completed this and have some baseline knowledge is worth it. I enjoy school for the most part.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
  I suppose you are quite rich then. Well, good for you and good luck with your studies of ancient Greek philosophy. And you might want to check this out: https://truthofyoga.com/p/knowledge https://truthofyoga.com/p/knowledge. Not affiliated with it. Would like to do it but can't justify almost 2000 Euro for this course. For you on the other hand it is maybe even too cheap. The guy is teaching at Oxford. Take a look at it.

paganel 2y ago

> and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers. It is my understanding that that's how most of the universities are now also run. Granted, I haven't set foot in an university in almost two decades now, so maybe my view is skewed from I what I've read online and based on the not so numerous interactions I've had with people who attend university.

mlsu 2y ago

It's because the primary purpose of these institutions is cultural filtering. The only reason we have name brand unis is to sort and filter people into a very small (i.e. 1%) cultural/economic elite. The point is for you to go "ooh, stanford" or "ooh harvard" when you meet a partner at a big law firm, VC, or hedge fund. In order for there to be a 1% there must necessarily be a 99%. The percentages are fixed; they always will be. Acceptance rates (public, reported) tend towards the filtering rate (implicit, hidden) as the college educated in the broader population tends towards 1. Look at the endowments of these institutions. They are comparable in magnitude to elite hedge funds and VCs. Of course they do top research and learning as well -- but only because they must. Under the old system, which worked simple, you'd be selected for an Ivy based on your blood relations and receive no education at all (for a recent example of this, Brett Kavanaugh: Supreme Court Justice). I guess it is an improvement on the old system that these places offer a "world-class education" ** to at least some of their students; and that some of their students are pleased to receive it. ** whatever that means. My degree isn't printed on vellum Ivy league stationary, only the coarse public Ivy stuff (public Ivy: isn't that an interesting turn of phrase?); but I received the finest education of my academic career from a California community college. My classmates were navy veterans, part time auto mechanics, and young single parents.