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And it's not just Stanford: * 123 coursera courses from some of the best universities in the world in the next year: https://www.coursera.org/courses https://w

by chris_p 14y ago

And it's not just Stanford: * 123 coursera courses from some of the best universities in the world in the next year: https://www.coursera.org/courses https://www.coursera.org/courses * 14 Udacity classes: http://www.udacity.com/ http://www.udacity.com/ * 6 edX courses from Harvard, MIT and Berkeley: https://www.edx.org/ https://www.edx.org/ Education is changing. About time.

prezjordan 14y ago
What's the next step from here to replacing "a college education" all together? Of course I can't walk into a job offer and explain to them how I watched coursera videos online, but I'm wondering what the path from A to B will be.
- bradddd 14y ago
  We're a long ways from that point, but you're right. There's currently a "rush" on getting educational materials as content. I think it'll take a couple more years to really polish up the content delivery strategies, but it's rapidly developing.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  The path forward will be made by the people who take these classes succeeding at various projects. Much like traditional schools increase their reputation via the achievements of their alumni, so will the MOOCs. You're seeing some success stories already, but wait until someone high profile credits their success to what they learned at Coursera or Udacity. On another front, the first traditional school has decided to award credit for a Udacity class, if the student takes a proctored test. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/education/colorado-state-to-offer-credits-for-online-class.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/education/colorado-state-t... We're just about a year out from that first Thrun/Norvig Stanford AI class. Things have moved very quickly when you put it in that perspective.
- michael_miller 14y ago
  I think the next step will be proctored exams, like edX just introduced. With proctored exams, the student can prove that s(he) really did succeed. After that, all that's needed is time. As with any cultural shift, newer generations are comfortable with things the previous generation wouldn't even dream of.
- ippisl 14y ago
  One path is people working , that need to learn something(say machine learning) for their jobs, and doing so online with the knowledge of their workplace. If the result is good , it'll warm some workplaces to online courses. Another path is using the fact that graduates of online courses can achieve a specific learning goal much cheaper and much shorter(in some jobs people don't need a full degree , only some courses). This opens a path for cheaper employees for companies and a solution for the talent crunch. Maybe some more venturesome companies will start using it. And the word will get out and it will become more common.
- icelancer 14y ago
  >Of course I can't walk into a job offer and explain to them how I watched coursera videos online... Yes you can. I would put you very close to the front of the line for my group (data science) if you told me you self-taught yourself ML using Ng's classes and could show me some samples on GitHub.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  I don't think it will ever happen "all together". For hard sciences you still need expensive labs and hands-on training. For medical schools, I'd prefer that an operating surgeon had some practical experience as well. But a good portion of the courses (that frequently happen to be taught by TAs, not professors, anyways) belong online. One finicky part at the moment is testing, which relies on honor code, so there might be a move towards professional-level testing, the type you see for major exams (GRE, TOEFL) as well as professional certifications. Since most of the testing facilities charge money, it will probably provide a good reason for universities to charge for credits as well - you can still view the course for free, but to pass a series of tests and get credit you would have to pay.
brianstorms 14y ago
"Education is changing." Exactly how? So a bunch of "courses" (i.e. video lectures and PDFs and web pages) are put online. How is this a big deal? The University of Illinois offered complete courses online, for full credit, in the 1960s. By the early 80s, thousands and thousands of students were taking online courses at Illinois. How is this throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube progress again?
- bradddd 14y ago
  I think it boils down to critical mass. There are more and more people with an increase of quality. In addition, the overall community aspect developed by remote students has really taken off. I don't think you can look at it so much as "how is this different from this" as you can just see the relative size of each. Lastly, while those technologies and offerings may have existed in the past, computers and web content have never been as accessible as they are now. And that is only going to increase.
- chris_p 14y ago
  throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube? These classes are interactive. Most of them involve are weekly quizes, midterm and final exams and automatically graded programming assignments. There are deadlines for all of these, and if your performance is good enough, you get a certificate with a grade. And they're all free and massive (coursera has millions of students). I haven't heard about the online Illinois courses before, sorry. Were they free? Were they truly massive? Were they offered to anyone, even to highschool students or unemployed bartenders in Uganda? And even if these courses aren't truly innovating, the point is they're making MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) popular and available to millions of people. I'm a highschool student from Greece. In the last year, I've learned AI, ML, NLP (although my performance wasn't good enough to get a certificate from this class), SaaS and Algorithms through MOOCs. All these from some of the world's best professors. I even was a community TA in the second offering of the SaaS class because of my performance in the first offering. Coursera (I've only taken one udacity class, and edX is new) is changing my life. Please answer honestly: Could I do these things 2 years ago? In this sense, education is changing.
- sateesh 14y ago
fpp 14y ago
It's great that access to higher education material is becoming more open. This is already a big step. Certification / getting a top-level university degree is unfortunately something completely different. Splitting those two is part of the business model of all the participating universities. Nevertheless these changes might provide the possibility for more people who want to learn (and have the abilities) to get discovered and so finally also get access to certification.

by chris_p 14y ago

prezjordan 14y ago

What's the next step from here to replacing "a college education" all together? Of course I can't walk into a job offer and explain to them how I watched coursera videos online, but I'm wondering what the path from A to B will be.

bradddd 14y ago
We're a long ways from that point, but you're right. There's currently a "rush" on getting educational materials as content. I think it'll take a couple more years to really polish up the content delivery strategies, but it's rapidly developing.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
The path forward will be made by the people who take these classes succeeding at various projects. Much like traditional schools increase their reputation via the achievements of their alumni, so will the MOOCs. You're seeing some success stories already, but wait until someone high profile credits their success to what they learned at Coursera or Udacity. On another front, the first traditional school has decided to award credit for a Udacity class, if the student takes a proctored test. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/education/colorado-state-to-offer-credits-for-online-class.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/education/colorado-state-t... We're just about a year out from that first Thrun/Norvig Stanford AI class. Things have moved very quickly when you put it in that perspective.
michael_miller 14y ago
I think the next step will be proctored exams, like edX just introduced. With proctored exams, the student can prove that s(he) really did succeed. After that, all that's needed is time. As with any cultural shift, newer generations are comfortable with things the previous generation wouldn't even dream of.
ippisl 14y ago
One path is people working , that need to learn something(say machine learning) for their jobs, and doing so online with the knowledge of their workplace. If the result is good , it'll warm some workplaces to online courses. Another path is using the fact that graduates of online courses can achieve a specific learning goal much cheaper and much shorter(in some jobs people don't need a full degree , only some courses). This opens a path for cheaper employees for companies and a solution for the talent crunch. Maybe some more venturesome companies will start using it. And the word will get out and it will become more common.
icelancer 14y ago
>Of course I can't walk into a job offer and explain to them how I watched coursera videos online... Yes you can. I would put you very close to the front of the line for my group (data science) if you told me you self-taught yourself ML using Ng's classes and could show me some samples on GitHub.
prostoalex 14y ago
I don't think it will ever happen "all together". For hard sciences you still need expensive labs and hands-on training. For medical schools, I'd prefer that an operating surgeon had some practical experience as well. But a good portion of the courses (that frequently happen to be taught by TAs, not professors, anyways) belong online. One finicky part at the moment is testing, which relies on honor code, so there might be a move towards professional-level testing, the type you see for major exams (GRE, TOEFL) as well as professional certifications. Since most of the testing facilities charge money, it will probably provide a good reason for universities to charge for credits as well - you can still view the course for free, but to pass a series of tests and get credit you would have to pay.

brianstorms 14y ago

"Education is changing." Exactly how? So a bunch of "courses" (i.e. video lectures and PDFs and web pages) are put online. How is this a big deal? The University of Illinois offered complete courses online, for full credit, in the 1960s. By the early 80s, thousands and thousands of students were taking online courses at Illinois. How is this throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube progress again?

bradddd 14y ago
I think it boils down to critical mass. There are more and more people with an increase of quality. In addition, the overall community aspect developed by remote students has really taken off. I don't think you can look at it so much as "how is this different from this" as you can just see the relative size of each. Lastly, while those technologies and offerings may have existed in the past, computers and web content have never been as accessible as they are now. And that is only going to increase.
chris_p 14y ago
throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube? These classes are interactive. Most of them involve are weekly quizes, midterm and final exams and automatically graded programming assignments. There are deadlines for all of these, and if your performance is good enough, you get a certificate with a grade. And they're all free and massive (coursera has millions of students). I haven't heard about the online Illinois courses before, sorry. Were they free? Were they truly massive? Were they offered to anyone, even to highschool students or unemployed bartenders in Uganda? And even if these courses aren't truly innovating, the point is they're making MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) popular and available to millions of people. I'm a highschool student from Greece. In the last year, I've learned AI, ML, NLP (although my performance wasn't good enough to get a certificate from this class), SaaS and Algorithms through MOOCs. All these from some of the world's best professors. I even was a community TA in the second offering of the SaaS class because of my performance in the first offering. Coursera (I've only taken one udacity class, and edX is new) is changing my life. Please answer honestly: Could I do these things 2 years ago? In this sense, education is changing.
sateesh 14y ago

fpp 14y ago

It's great that access to higher education material is becoming more open. This is already a big step. Certification / getting a top-level university degree is unfortunately something completely different. Splitting those two is part of the business model of all the participating universities. Nevertheless these changes might provide the possibility for more people who want to learn (and have the abilities) to get discovered and so finally also get access to certification.