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It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college cour

• michaelochurch 13y ago
  It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything. Course completion is a valid goal, and an important number. The point that I'm making is that a 5% completion rate is still a success, when multiplied by the massive number of people enrolling. For an individual, if you watched the first three videos of linear algebra and stopped, you didn't learn the subject and can't honestly claim you took the course. If you finished it past-deadline but did all the exercises, you're probably ready to take the next course. Udacity and Coursera are a step forward. Perfect? Far from it. Ready to replace Stanford? No, not even close. Is the world better with them than it would be without them? Absolutely. Education, in technology, is there mainly to give you a root set and confidence. If you actually want to get into machine learning, you have to start reading papers anyway. That goes whether you're a graduate student or a DIYer who's been in industry for almost a decade like me.
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • psbp 13y ago
    It seems like they have a chicken and egg problem. If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), then why bother completing them? Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course. They can't expect valid results until the utility of the product is valuable.
    • riggins 13y ago
      it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course. Same comment as michaelo. why does the completion rate matter? If 100,000 people sign up, and 5% complete the course, that's 5k people. The US is graduating around 12k CS majors per year, so 5k seems like a material number of students to educate.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), The combination of lecture, graded exercise, guided reading (usually) and time constraints that Coursera and EdX courses have is, IMO/IME, a very good combination for learning that makes them better than many other alternatives for the purposes of learning (Udacity is, comparatively, fairly bad at some parts of this.) > Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course. I think that completion is a bad metric. One of the benefits of MOOCs is that it lowers the sunk cost of entry which encourages broader enrollment, particularly enrollment by people who are experimenting with the content or less certain that outside commitments will be able to be contained in a way that allows completion. The idea that % complete is a measure of how many people are deriving an educational benefit is wrong.
• randomdata 13y ago
  > The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be perfect. It saddens me that Thrun, who I have found to be exceptionally good at the job, is more interested in schooling than learning – but I get it from a business aspect. These results dash the hopes of what Udacity hinted would become their business model.
  • psbp 13y ago
    It doesn't seem like Thrun put a lot of effort into popularizing the approach either. He gave 1.5 years and a pilot program to affirm a product that undermines years of ingrained ritual and validity? It doesn't seem like he was ever interested in changing education.
  • timr 13y ago
    "Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there." It emphasizes that lots of people on the internet want something for nothing, which has a surprise quotient of exactly zero.
    • randomdata 13y ago
      I could see paying for a quality educational service. I already pay for Netflix and only spend a fraction of the time watching it compared to what I spend on watching MOOC-style videos. Udacity isn't really there though. The videos are top notch, but the user experience is not very good.
      • saraid216 13y ago
        Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for it if you were explicitly subsidizing students who couldn't pay for it?
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• waterlesscloud 13y ago
  But it is educating more people for less money.
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  • saraid216 13y ago
    Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?
    • psbp 13y ago
      4 courses at coursera: $0 4 courses at my local state university: $5000 - Hell lets be a little bit more equitable: 4 courses at coursera with the signature track: $200 4 courses at my local community college: $400
      • _delirium 13y ago
        I think the question was about costs of providing the service, not the tuition charged to students. How much does it cost to produce and operate a MOOC, in terms of total resources put into it? It's a bit difficult to account for, because in this early stage there is quite a bit of unaccounted-for labor. For example, there is some cross-subsidy from existing universities, because much of the Coursera/Udacity curriculum-dev and teaching work is done by professors who're drawing a full-time salary from a university (not from Coursera or Udacity). Nonetheless it'd be interesting to see some kind of ballpark estimate of how many total resources it takes to put together and teach a Coursera course, if hypothetically they were actually all billed.
        • psbp 13y ago
          I couldn't imagine the costs of running an online class being more than a brick and mortar.
          • 13y ago
• MoosePlissken 13y ago
  How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? If someone finishes the class, aces the exam, and then promptly goes on living their life as an IT professional without any tangible change, was the course anything more than "infotainment"? I'm not sure how you measure "real" learning, but course completion doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.
  • mcguire 13y ago
    If you stop reading a book after 20% or 50% or 90%, have you wasted your time? Possibly not, but you haven't read the book, either. A well-designed course isn't a random bag of stuff. It has a starting point and an ending point, and skipping out before the end can certainly be regarded as a failure, at least by the instructor.
  • saraid216 13y ago
    > How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? Here's the thing: you can't tell. Why is there a final exam? Because otherwise, you can't tell. It's an exit survey. This is one of the clearest indicators that Udacity and other MOOCs aren't actually "revolutionizing" anything in education; they're just making an economic gamble on an iteration.
• nicholas73 13y ago
  I disagree strongly with this statement, having "taken" a couple of courses on Udacity. I didn't complete any of the courses, and from Thrun's point of view I'd be another example where they can improve. But this is an erroneous metric, both because students gain without completing the course assignments and because an in-person classroom only motivates you to do assignments by nature of having you pay $$$ for the credential. Unless Udacity credentials dangle you a job offer, there is much less incentive to do the work. Does that mean the class is a failure? Not at all. I found the format and interactive quizzes to be superior to the college classes I took. In addition, you got to skip around to take what you needed, and work on what you like. It doesn't fit credentialism, but as a resource it was unmatched. I didn't do any of the assignments for CS101 or CS253, which taught python and building web applications, but from there I was able to build a webapp far more complicated than their assignments required (basically I chose my own assignment). http://sudokuisland.com http://sudokuisland.com I'd never have been able to find the time and patience to sit through a university class just to build a side project, not to mention cash investment. I can honestly say that without Udacity this wouldn't have happened. For the woman quoted knocking the lack of human contact: sorry this wasn't a social club for you.
• panarky 13y ago
  Does it really matter if 10,000 enroll with an 80% completion rate, or if 160,000 enroll with a 5% completion rate? The numerator is the important metric here, not the denominator.
  • tlb 13y ago
    It matters when you think about scaling up to replace colleges. Put 5 million college students / year through that funnel and you won't have an educated citizenry.
    • panarky 13y ago
      No, but if you put 100 million students / year through that funnel, you'll achieve meaningful learning for the same 5 million students, with access to the world's best instructors, at a fraction of the cost. And the other 95 million will get more exposure to knowledge than they had before, even if they don't take it to completion. It's hard for me to find the failure here.
• agumonkey 13y ago
  You're right but I'd like to add that MOOC added a new path to my options into learning, a less atomic one, I can put the effort and complete x% before dropping out of exhaustion, and come back not long after that and gather x% more. It might better fit adult learning process as, at least I, get distracted more easily (less focus power, more things to handle, different brain). Actually that may be why Thrun is going into corporate education...
• djs1sjd 13y ago
  I spell it out with examples in another comment here, but one shouldn't assume that everyone has equal access to the foundation and motivation needed to put out the "effort" to succeed in MOOCs. The people who are really educationally disadvantaged are often that way because of some other difficult circumstances in their lives (violence, social breakdown, poor parenting, and the associated effects on motivation). I'm not referring to (typical) hacker news types here (myself included). You could give us all the extra educational access in the world and you wouldn't make a dent in educational inequalities, whether in the US, or globally.
• bitcuration 13y ago
  The problem is not the initiative, it is the product. Merely replicate the classroom form of education to web will not cut it. It is not people learn things once they are out of campus hence the high drop out rate. The most agitated group of people in term of perpetrated learning is programmers. This professor needs to get his cue from place like GitHub, even YouTube. His class content design is boring ... Desperate needs innovation.