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...accredited schools hold a monopoly on the American education system. Puzzling—is it not MIT OpenCourseWare? Perhaps its success is owed to its association w
by doctorpangloss 14y ago
...accredited schools hold a monopoly on the American education system.
Puzzling—is it not MIT OpenCourseWare? Perhaps its success is owed to its association with the visible, well-known brand.
Coursera on the other hand: Maybe a few adults have heard of it. We should wish them the best, but much more than accreditation would be needed to legitimize online education.
- xiaoma 14y agoOn thing that helps mitigate the problem quite a bit is that courses on Coursera are usually taught by professors of world famous schools such as Berkeley or Stanford, and sometimes the teachers themselves are famous. E.g. their functional programming in Scala course is taught by the creator of Scala.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoI realized that the more famous the professor and the more famous the school, the less effective they were at actually teaching. Now there are definitely some gems, but in general, teaching ability is highly detached from research capability. Now, all of these famous schools have dedicated lecturers that run the high-volume entry level courses; they are professional teachers and really focus their efforts on running classes. I can imagine future online courses being developed in a similar manner.
- prostoalex 14y agoTheir co-founder is some sort of well-read fella http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/ http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/ I think it's just approaches to commercialization - Coursera wanted to step up as a commercial entity, and thus probably cannot use the Stanford name.