5 ms·

Coursera’s Preview Mode

74 points by deepakkarki 1y ago

DaveZale 1y ago
is edX still free for auditing?
- geodel 1y ago
  I haven't logged in edX in long time but as per this article it is no longer free.
  - phyzome 1y ago
    Only parts are paywalled, I think? Looks like it's specifically tests and such (graded assignments) that are affected.
    - redbluered 1y ago
      Which are where you learn.
      - phyzome 1y ago
        Depending on the subject and the person, but agreed in the general case.
- ayhanfuat 1y ago
  They are free to audit but time limited. After a couple of months you can no longer see the course content.
darepublic 1y ago
Simple idea.. delivers value. Gets a monetary evaluation. The product is already too good.. water down the product and paywall what was previously free. All too common of an internet story
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Enshitification because greed.
rgavuliak 1y ago
> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I would disagree, I saw a lot of people, especially in the Data Science field that got up-skilled by back then free Coursera.
- brudgers 1y ago
  I both agree and disagree. In the early days, Coursera was transformative. I took some amazing courses and learned a lot. ...but the vision was always automation and as courses were rerun, the instructors were more likely to be disengaged, and live interaction via the forums fell. Finally when courses went to ongoing enrollment, there were no longer cohorts, and the experience was a correspondence course. So in the end it was not transformative. It is pretty much just Youtube plus a website plus a payment platform. A less expensive, less interactive, unaccredited version of Phoenix University. There's nothing wrong with teachers getting paid. It is the standard model. But of course the standard model is the standard model, not transformative.
  - rgavuliak 1y ago
    Interesting point
- freddie_mercury 1y ago
  The early hype of MOOCs wasn't "a few people in handful of fields will get up-skilled". If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential. Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition). From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs: 'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.' Never happened. 'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”' Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
It's the customary bait and switch.
- PontifexMinimus 1y ago
  aka enshitification
klipklop 1y ago
Never took off because employees care zero that you took a Coursera class. Might as well watch YouTube videos or take local community college classes.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  Your community college is probably accredited and people actually will care about that one. I went back and picked up an additional associate's degree pertaining to my job.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  You're right that employers don't care that you take a coursera course in the same way they don't care you watched a YouTube video. But in both cases, if you learn something from that course or video, and then go off and create something based on that, that something can be something employers care about.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    I never did university, learned mostly off Codeacademy back in 2013. I never once listed this in my resume. I instead built website using the knowledge, contributed to open source, and then listed those things. Which seemed to work. These days I don't do any personal projects or contribute to OSS, I just list my previous jobs and can ace any on the spot questions. Expecting to be able to list the completion of an online course as an achievement is kind of silly. They are very easy to skim through without learning, and are only really useful for yourself to learn, not to prove anything.
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      Absolutely. It's basically the same as putting a list of things you've read on your resume.
Grokify 1y ago
I still get substantial value out of Coursera. I started with Andrew Ng's original Machine Learning course way back when, and recently completed classes that I thought were well worth my time on Claude Code, Crew AI, AutoGen, and MCP. While not revolutionary, a recent improvement is AI-based review, which is much appreciated for it's near instant review. From a transformative perspective, I like the AWS Skill Builder SimuLearn classes. They say teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and I found the chat-based role play where you are the expert to be very interesting.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
Anyone have a resource for archived MOOCs?
OutOfHere 1y ago
MIT OCW is now what I rely on via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mitocw/courses https://www.youtube.com/@mitocw/courses
- ayhanfuat 1y ago
  https://videolectures.net/ https://videolectures.net/ also has a great archive.
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    The VideoLectures site used to be great in the distant past, but now it's hardly even loading for me.
- vintermann 1y ago
  The first, and now the best again?
__rito__ 1y ago
> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs. A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them. It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialism that is behind MOOCs not reaching their full potential. Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree. I did projects with skills that I learned via MOOCs, I answered questions in interviews with the knowledge that I started getting from MOOCs. But it was my Master’s in CS which ultimately mattered in my getting interviews. In that degree, they still teach GOFAI, "soft computig", and fuzzy set theory, "expert systems", and more things from the 80s. MOOCs matter, MOOCs are loved and studied by a serious set of students and professionals. But they still can't get you interviews for most roles in most companies. In frontier AI labs, they are now basically treating PhDs as the minimum qualification for most roles. MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative". I know the arguments about making hiring easier for companies, etc.
- zaptheimpaler 1y ago
  Yeah its infuriating to see free high quality education blamed over shitty corporate recruiting and assessment practices. If companies (particularly outside tech) did anything at all to improve hiring practices and actually evaluate skills objectively, Coursera would be very valuable. Even if this didn't happen, it was a great learning platform. Now that Coursera has replaced their CEO with an Amazon hire, it's dead now. Late-stage capitalism claims another victim.
- j45 1y ago
  MOOC was a fancy academic term for lots of videos, often long, maybe interspersed with questions. Starting was fun, finishing was another thing. Credentialing another. They helped get a lot of content out in the open. The sharing of knowledge is great and should continue, hopefully with more modern digital interactions of 2025.
robertritz 1y ago
MOOCs have always given value to a certain group (about 3% of people who are motivated to self learn) and are basically useless for everyone else. Which is why they are primarily virtue signaling devices to fluff your LinkedIn. When I started learning to code for data science I appreciated the lectures and examples. Once you reach a certain technical level these MOOCs aren't really helpful though.
recursivecaveat 1y ago
Sometimes I wonder what an MOOC-like education that went all-in on signalling/credentialism would look like. You convince some real down-on-their-luck university to lend you their name to provide eduction for lower income adults, you rent a big empty room with folding chairs in downtown where people actually live a few nights a week, a contracted PhD with a tweed jacket and a blackboard lectures in person, curriculum straight from an old edition textbook with pen-and-paper tests. What would it cost without the overhead of a whole university around it? Would adults attend?Would employers accept it? Hard to change eduction more than a little at a time, since the buyer is literally buying a "you did it" certificate for 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are justifiably risk averse. The person examining the credential also doesn't want to do individual research on every single person's eduction.
mgnn 1y ago
When did Udacity fell off the MOOC discourse? That's my first experience with MOOCs; have fond memories learning robotics with Sebastian Thrun there. I used to prefer its short lesson and frequent quiz too.
nileshtrivedi 1y ago
MOOCs are still going strong at India's NPTEL , which started distributing university-level video courses for engg in 2008: - 5m subscribers, almost 2B views on youtube - 30m enrollments - 600+ courses every semester in 22 disciplines Anyone from the world can signup. Proctored exams are optional and cost about $11 per course. Not taking VC funding and setting up local chapters for supporting students seems to have worked out well for them. Website: https://nptel.ac.in/ https://nptel.ac.in/ ACM report about this from November 2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3550473 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3550473 Former-director of IIT Madras has talked about how NPTEL came together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoGegFLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoGegFLY

74 points by deepakkarki 1y ago

DaveZale 1y ago

is edX still free for auditing?

geodel 1y ago
I haven't logged in edX in long time but as per this article it is no longer free.
- phyzome 1y ago
  Only parts are paywalled, I think? Looks like it's specifically tests and such (graded assignments) that are affected.
  - redbluered 1y ago
    Which are where you learn.
    - phyzome 1y ago
      Depending on the subject and the person, but agreed in the general case.
ayhanfuat 1y ago
They are free to audit but time limited. After a couple of months you can no longer see the course content.

darepublic 1y ago

Simple idea.. delivers value. Gets a monetary evaluation. The product is already too good.. water down the product and paywall what was previously free. All too common of an internet story

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Enshitification because greed.

rgavuliak 1y ago

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I would disagree, I saw a lot of people, especially in the Data Science field that got up-skilled by back then free Coursera.

brudgers 1y ago
I both agree and disagree. In the early days, Coursera was transformative. I took some amazing courses and learned a lot. ...but the vision was always automation and as courses were rerun, the instructors were more likely to be disengaged, and live interaction via the forums fell. Finally when courses went to ongoing enrollment, there were no longer cohorts, and the experience was a correspondence course. So in the end it was not transformative. It is pretty much just Youtube plus a website plus a payment platform. A less expensive, less interactive, unaccredited version of Phoenix University. There's nothing wrong with teachers getting paid. It is the standard model. But of course the standard model is the standard model, not transformative.
- rgavuliak 1y ago
  Interesting point
freddie_mercury 1y ago
The early hype of MOOCs wasn't "a few people in handful of fields will get up-skilled". If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential. Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition). From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs: 'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.' Never happened. 'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”' Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

It's the customary bait and switch.

PontifexMinimus 1y ago
aka enshitification

klipklop 1y ago

Never took off because employees care zero that you took a Coursera class. Might as well watch YouTube videos or take local community college classes.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago
Your community college is probably accredited and people actually will care about that one. I went back and picked up an additional associate's degree pertaining to my job.
margalabargala 1y ago
You're right that employers don't care that you take a coursera course in the same way they don't care you watched a YouTube video. But in both cases, if you learn something from that course or video, and then go off and create something based on that, that something can be something employers care about.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  I never did university, learned mostly off Codeacademy back in 2013. I never once listed this in my resume. I instead built website using the knowledge, contributed to open source, and then listed those things. Which seemed to work. These days I don't do any personal projects or contribute to OSS, I just list my previous jobs and can ace any on the spot questions. Expecting to be able to list the completion of an online course as an achievement is kind of silly. They are very easy to skim through without learning, and are only really useful for yourself to learn, not to prove anything.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    Absolutely. It's basically the same as putting a list of things you've read on your resume.

Grokify 1y ago

I still get substantial value out of Coursera. I started with Andrew Ng's original Machine Learning course way back when, and recently completed classes that I thought were well worth my time on Claude Code, Crew AI, AutoGen, and MCP. While not revolutionary, a recent improvement is AI-based review, which is much appreciated for it's near instant review. From a transformative perspective, I like the AWS Skill Builder SimuLearn classes. They say teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and I found the chat-based role play where you are the expert to be very interesting.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago

Anyone have a resource for archived MOOCs?

OutOfHere 1y ago

MIT OCW is now what I rely on via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mitocw/courses https://www.youtube.com/@mitocw/courses

ayhanfuat 1y ago
https://videolectures.net/ https://videolectures.net/ also has a great archive.
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  The VideoLectures site used to be great in the distant past, but now it's hardly even loading for me.
vintermann 1y ago
The first, and now the best again?

__rito__ 1y ago

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs. A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them. It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialism that is behind MOOCs not reaching their full potential. Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree. I did projects with skills that I learned via MOOCs, I answered questions in interviews with the knowledge that I started getting from MOOCs. But it was my Master’s in CS which ultimately mattered in my getting interviews. In that degree, they still teach GOFAI, "soft computig", and fuzzy set theory, "expert systems", and more things from the 80s. MOOCs matter, MOOCs are loved and studied by a serious set of students and professionals. But they still can't get you interviews for most roles in most companies. In frontier AI labs, they are now basically treating PhDs as the minimum qualification for most roles. MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative". I know the arguments about making hiring easier for companies, etc.

zaptheimpaler 1y ago
Yeah its infuriating to see free high quality education blamed over shitty corporate recruiting and assessment practices. If companies (particularly outside tech) did anything at all to improve hiring practices and actually evaluate skills objectively, Coursera would be very valuable. Even if this didn't happen, it was a great learning platform. Now that Coursera has replaced their CEO with an Amazon hire, it's dead now. Late-stage capitalism claims another victim.
j45 1y ago
MOOC was a fancy academic term for lots of videos, often long, maybe interspersed with questions. Starting was fun, finishing was another thing. Credentialing another. They helped get a lot of content out in the open. The sharing of knowledge is great and should continue, hopefully with more modern digital interactions of 2025.

robertritz 1y ago

MOOCs have always given value to a certain group (about 3% of people who are motivated to self learn) and are basically useless for everyone else. Which is why they are primarily virtue signaling devices to fluff your LinkedIn. When I started learning to code for data science I appreciated the lectures and examples. Once you reach a certain technical level these MOOCs aren't really helpful though.

recursivecaveat 1y ago

Sometimes I wonder what an MOOC-like education that went all-in on signalling/credentialism would look like. You convince some real down-on-their-luck university to lend you their name to provide eduction for lower income adults, you rent a big empty room with folding chairs in downtown where people actually live a few nights a week, a contracted PhD with a tweed jacket and a blackboard lectures in person, curriculum straight from an old edition textbook with pen-and-paper tests. What would it cost without the overhead of a whole university around it? Would adults attend?Would employers accept it? Hard to change eduction more than a little at a time, since the buyer is literally buying a "you did it" certificate for 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are justifiably risk averse. The person examining the credential also doesn't want to do individual research on every single person's eduction.

mgnn 1y ago

When did Udacity fell off the MOOC discourse? That's my first experience with MOOCs; have fond memories learning robotics with Sebastian Thrun there. I used to prefer its short lesson and frequent quiz too.

nileshtrivedi 1y ago

MOOCs are still going strong at India's NPTEL , which started distributing university-level video courses for engg in 2008: - 5m subscribers, almost 2B views on youtube - 30m enrollments - 600+ courses every semester in 22 disciplines Anyone from the world can signup. Proctored exams are optional and cost about $11 per course. Not taking VC funding and setting up local chapters for supporting students seems to have worked out well for them. Website: https://nptel.ac.in/ https://nptel.ac.in/ ACM report about this from November 2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3550473 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3550473 Former-director of IIT Madras has talked about how NPTEL came together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoGegFLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoGegFLY