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It would be interesting if they published stats on completions for each model. I know that in the end I stopped doing the pgm-class work after about week 7 prec

It would be interesting if they published stats on completions for each model. I know that in the end I stopped doing the pgm-class work after about week 7 precisely because there were due dates and I had conflicting priorities. As a point of comparison I started the ML-class long after it had expired worked my way through 50% of the material, did all the assignments and learned enough to solve the problems I needed. Did some cool projects for a few months and realized that I needed the other 50% to solve some new problem that I had, went back and did that. One the reason we have the idea of a novel, text book, etc is because of restriction on printing. The reason we have the idea of an 'album' in music is again because of limitation on that media (it's not cost effective to produce a bunch of singles and you can't fit much more than an hour of music on a single album due to constraints of traditional media). Likewise the idea of a semester/quarter long course are essentially based on the limitations of various resources. Ideally we'll see the length and structure of courses change with time. Why have the idea of a course at all? Why not just a directed graph of prerequisite lectures? (Khan does a decent job of this) We're starting to see it form organically, but I think the best situation would be goal directed learning where you pick out a point on the graph and say "I want to be here, doing this" and then you fill in all the prereq nodes until you're there. This also allows us to think about knowledge and learning in much more creative ways, rather than choosing to major in art or computer science, you could say I want to use genetic algorithms to create generative art, now how do I get there?

SiVal 14y ago
I agree with you on this. I've noted previously how similar these (current) online class models are to the early movies, in which they simply filmed plays. It took a while to realize that some of the constraints that had been baked into the older format no longer applied. My biggest pet peave is the whole notion of a monolithic college "degree". Being forced to sell your car to pay $5000 (you do the math) for a class in interpreting Winnie-the-Pooh from a marxist-feminist perspective in order to get an engineering degree is maddening. If employers began accepting a la carte credentials, classes would move toward their real market values in a system of open competition. Monopolistic "tying" (if you want this important class, you'll have to also pay for this useless class) would break down and people could be much more strategic and fine-grained about what courses they took and what they were willing to pay for them. And I would have to believe that most employers would rather have a candidate who had taken the $5000 the university had earmarked for the support of their staff marxists and applied it to about three more engineering classes, one tech writing class, and an accounting class.

SiVal 14y ago

I agree with you on this. I've noted previously how similar these (current) online class models are to the early movies, in which they simply filmed plays. It took a while to realize that some of the constraints that had been baked into the older format no longer applied. My biggest pet peave is the whole notion of a monolithic college "degree". Being forced to sell your car to pay $5000 (you do the math) for a class in interpreting Winnie-the-Pooh from a marxist-feminist perspective in order to get an engineering degree is maddening. If employers began accepting a la carte credentials, classes would move toward their real market values in a system of open competition. Monopolistic "tying" (if you want this important class, you'll have to also pay for this useless class) would break down and people could be much more strategic and fine-grained about what courses they took and what they were willing to pay for them. And I would have to believe that most employers would rather have a candidate who had taken the $5000 the university had earmarked for the support of their staff marxists and applied it to about three more engineering classes, one tech writing class, and an accounting class.