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If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY Times? A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs: Nothing has more potential to lift mor

If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY Times? A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs: Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity. Then Sebastian Thrun admitted that Udacity had a "lousy product" in this interview: http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-u... Friedman is a cheerleader for employers. Employees are warned that average isn't good enough. One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.

sehr 13y ago
Shocking! Former Stanford professor doesn't see the same results & progress with remedial state students. The entire concept of MOOC's must be doomed. Basing an entire industry's future off of the shortcomings of one man's idea and expectations is a bit silly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
bertil 13y ago
I won’t try to defend Friedman, but I believe you misunderstood what Thrun was trying to say: he is a very conceptually accurate guy, and him saying it is a bad ‘product’ doesn't mean the general concept is flawed, but that his ambition to market the whole of superior education as a video class has, with testing proven to show issues, with engagement in particular. He is far from abandoning the idea, but reacted by switching Udacity towards a for-pay, vocation certification platform. Having the best professors use video (or radio) to openly broaden the audience of their abstract teachings is a concept that has been widely tried since, well, I’d say 1530 with the College de France, but the recordings where a bit different then — anyway: it’s the principle of almost every high-brow show. Those tend to have less of an audience than we’d like, or need considerable adaptation — but Udacity was one attempt that was remarkable in mainly one way: how little the class was adapted for anything but highly intelligent and motivated twenty-somethings with fresh brains. Look at what Dan Ariely is doing for an great example of how to preserve the internet support and have an engagement comparable to a physical class.
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  Thrun's criticism was pretty general--it went beyond his product. Thrun was sufficiently critical of his own vision of education for the masses as to cast doubt on Friedman's sweeping implicature that, among all the approaches to poverty that have been and that might be tried, this technology has the greatest potential. Given the 1% retention rate, MOOCs might "unlock a billion more brains" if there were 100 billion of them to unlock.
  - bertil 13y ago
    With one billion brain interested, he can still train 50 million (actual retention numbers are closer to 5%) new people every semester. That’s still a lot more than the Ivy league. As to Friedman… Well, this is HN, a polite society, so let me skip that part.
    - ChristianMarks 13y ago
      OK 50 million. Friedman still stands corrected. (Me too, but at least my percentages are within the same order of magnitude.)
analog31 13y ago
>>> One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers. It has occurred to me that management is basically an information processing task. Why shouldn't it be automated? I think a reason is that managers are kept around to manage information that can't be committed to a stored record. An example would be details of the decision making process for who gets laid off during a downturn.
- ams6110 13y ago
  The hardest part about management is not the rote processes of information collection and distribution. It's all the human elements of the team that you're managing. A good manager is a cheerleader, coach, and scorekeeper all in one. This requires individually tailored approaches to each member of the team and doesn't strike me as something easily automated.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  An example would be details of the decision making process for who gets laid off during a downturn. We know something about the hypothetical manager's decision making process: the typical manager would include the constraint that he should be excluded from the collection of employees to be laid off. An automated improvement on this algorithm would unlock tremendous benefits to principals, and in the case of publicly owned companies, to shareholders.
clarkm 13y ago
It's strange the he uses the phrase "Average is Over" without mentioning Tyler Cowen, the economist (and occasional NYT contributor) who published a book with that title just a couple months ago.

sehr 13y ago

Shocking! Former Stanford professor doesn't see the same results & progress with remedial state students. The entire concept of MOOC's must be doomed. Basing an entire industry's future off of the shortcomings of one man's idea and expectations is a bit silly.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

bertil 13y ago

I won’t try to defend Friedman, but I believe you misunderstood what Thrun was trying to say: he is a very conceptually accurate guy, and him saying it is a bad ‘product’ doesn't mean the general concept is flawed, but that his ambition to market the whole of superior education as a video class has, with testing proven to show issues, with engagement in particular. He is far from abandoning the idea, but reacted by switching Udacity towards a for-pay, vocation certification platform. Having the best professors use video (or radio) to openly broaden the audience of their abstract teachings is a concept that has been widely tried since, well, I’d say 1530 with the College de France, but the recordings where a bit different then — anyway: it’s the principle of almost every high-brow show. Those tend to have less of an audience than we’d like, or need considerable adaptation — but Udacity was one attempt that was remarkable in mainly one way: how little the class was adapted for anything but highly intelligent and motivated twenty-somethings with fresh brains. Look at what Dan Ariely is doing for an great example of how to preserve the internet support and have an engagement comparable to a physical class.

ChristianMarks 13y ago
Thrun's criticism was pretty general--it went beyond his product. Thrun was sufficiently critical of his own vision of education for the masses as to cast doubt on Friedman's sweeping implicature that, among all the approaches to poverty that have been and that might be tried, this technology has the greatest potential. Given the 1% retention rate, MOOCs might "unlock a billion more brains" if there were 100 billion of them to unlock.
- bertil 13y ago
  With one billion brain interested, he can still train 50 million (actual retention numbers are closer to 5%) new people every semester. That’s still a lot more than the Ivy league. As to Friedman… Well, this is HN, a polite society, so let me skip that part.
  - ChristianMarks 13y ago
    OK 50 million. Friedman still stands corrected. (Me too, but at least my percentages are within the same order of magnitude.)

analog31 13y ago

>>> One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers. It has occurred to me that management is basically an information processing task. Why shouldn't it be automated? I think a reason is that managers are kept around to manage information that can't be committed to a stored record. An example would be details of the decision making process for who gets laid off during a downturn.

ams6110 13y ago
The hardest part about management is not the rote processes of information collection and distribution. It's all the human elements of the team that you're managing. A good manager is a cheerleader, coach, and scorekeeper all in one. This requires individually tailored approaches to each member of the team and doesn't strike me as something easily automated.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ChristianMarks 13y ago
An example would be details of the decision making process for who gets laid off during a downturn. We know something about the hypothetical manager's decision making process: the typical manager would include the constraint that he should be excluded from the collection of employees to be laid off. An automated improvement on this algorithm would unlock tremendous benefits to principals, and in the case of publicly owned companies, to shareholders.

clarkm 13y ago

It's strange the he uses the phrase "Average is Over" without mentioning Tyler Cowen, the economist (and occasional NYT contributor) who published a book with that title just a couple months ago.