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Why Free Online Classes Are Still the Future of Education

67 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
falcolas 12y ago
I spent a few days looking through online courses from a couple of different vendors, hoping to take course of online class in a new field of study, so I could round myself out or possibly find a new career field. I quickly learned that outside of the Software Development discipline, and a precious few pure science fields, there are virtually no courses available. If you'd like to look into education or humanities or any of the thousands of other degrees? All you'll find are 101 level courses, if you find anything at all. Hopefully this will improve, but I'm not holding my breath.
- christudor 12y ago
  This is exactly right. That's why I started MASSOLIT (www.massolit.io), which provides video lectures in the arts and humanities. It normally costs £5/month, but if you send me an e-mail (chris@massolit.io) I'd be happy to give you a couple of months for free...
  - odower 12y ago
    Very cool. Interested in learning more. Would like to list your courses on our site (https://curiosity.com https://curiosity.com).
akbar501 12y ago
I have mixed feelings about the MOOCs. On the positive side, the benefits are substantial. 1. Democratized access to the world's top educators, 2. Low cost distribution of education. On the negative side, the MOOCs are kind of the large classroom problem taken to the extreme. It's generally agreed that a classroom with more students per teacher is not as good as a lower student/teacher ratio. But to critique my own negativity, the people working on MOOCs are smart and motivated. It's a bit naive to think that the current MOOC is as good as they will ever get. Clearly, these are early stage products that have substantial evolution and improvement in their future. The one area in open education that needs to improve is around content licensing. If you look at most open educational content, the licenses are restricted open source (GPL like) and note unrestricted open source (MIT/BSD/Apache like). I fail to understand how making the content unrestricted would not benefit everyone.
- ibebrett 12y ago
  The thing is I'd rather take a course from a top instructor even at a massive scale, than to take a poor course made by a guy who doesn't have any real business teaching the class. There is no reason every tiny state school should be recreating a bad machine learning class (example) when you can take a good one from a good instructor. If you go to even more basic topics (intro to comp sci), the quality you will get from having a TA teach a class to a lecture hall to a top instructor teaching over a MOOC will be like night and day.
  - jrs99 12y ago
    are you assuming that a tiny state school will have worse quality teachers than a top private school? or even that someone who is not a professional teacher is worse than a teacher at a "top" school? The tiny state school might have the best machine learning class in the world.
    - ibebrett 12y ago
      Yes I am assuming that. As someone who attended a small state school compared to the level of some of the coworkers taken by classmates at the top schools it is like night and day. Trust me the machine learning class at stanford is better than the one at eastern ct state university (for example)
      - ibebrett 12y ago
        Sorry, wrote that in a rush. I meant "compared to the level of classes taken by some of my coworkers"
      - jrs99 12y ago
        do you mean level of difficulty or mastery attained by the students?
        ibebrett 12y ago
        the quality of the instructional materials, mastery, and level of difficulty yes.
HarryHirsch 12y ago
Are they now? Part of what you do at a university is build your professional network, both upwards, through your mentors, and sideways, with your peers. You also get introduced to new developments in your field, through informal, unscripted interactions, just walk down the hall and talk to the fellow in the office two doors down. That's a university. You don't get that through online courses. For a trade school, online courses work just fine. And the ruling class needs well-trained, obedient drones.
- solarmist 12y ago
  HA! I hear this all the time and it certainly didn't apply to me. This has a lot of assumptions baked into it. 1) You actually socialize with classmates (I didn't). 2) You either went to a top ranked school or stayed in the area where those graduates generally migrate to. (I didn't) 3) You did activities outside of class (I did (mainly embedded or MS talks), but were outside where I'm actually doing, so I'd call this a wash too) Only as a grad student in math (but not computer science) did I feel I got the kind of interaction that makes in person classes, lectures, interaction more valuable. Honestly I don't think I got much out of university that I couldn't have gotten online. Where I learned the most was my first three months in the industry. I learned VCS, scripting, bug tracking, code review, and about meet-ups/user groups. Basically everything important that wasn't programming.
  - mjwhansen 12y ago
    It sounds like you didn't take advantage of all of the resources available then. Just because you didn't network in college doesn't mean it isn't useful.
    - solarmist 12y ago
      Of course, but I think there's a large percentage (minimum double digits, I'd guess probably at least in the 20's or 30's though) that were just like me and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference if they did their degree in a box, on the internet, or on a campus. At the time I didn't even know that was something your were supposed to do unless you were in a frat or a business major. To me college was a place to go and take classes and get your degree and that was pretty much it or at least that was what I was lead to believe was the only important part.
joshontheweb 12y ago
My big annoyance is with the MOOCs that still try and fit you into a schedule. Many times I have been in a course where I would have burned through the whole thing if I was allowed. But instead they feel the need to stagger the information on a weekly basis and I lose interest. Coursera is the one that comes to mind. I also don't care about getting a grade or certificate. Just give me all the lectures at once and some exercises so I can practice if I want. Gotta let go of the past.
- jrs99 12y ago
  Then your MOOC is the entire internet.
  - solarmist 12y ago
    Not really, he still want the structured learning with video lectures that has a clear path, he just wants to be able to take it and run rather than being forced to crawl/walk though the material.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    An MOOC for a subject is truly just a big wikipedia article. Text, video, audio resources curated by someone. Hopefully MOOCs will eventually be similar to epub books; open format, meta data, a collection of digital objects.
    - odower 12y ago
      We're not focused on curriculum, but rather a collection of content around a subject at https://curiosity.com https://curiosity.com. Wiki, text, video, audio...people learn different ways in different order unless they're made to do otherwise. We're focused on the always curious person. MOOCs serve a different purpose so hard to see them going more unstructured.
    - dthal 12y ago
      "An MOOC for a subject is truly just a big wikipedia article." I don't agree with this. I've taken several online courses at EdX (EE, AI) Coursera(ML, PGM) and Udacity(Web App, Hadoop), and the things that are in the online classes that are not in a Wikipedia article - other students, homework with deadlines - are a large part of the value provided.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
protonfish 12y ago
The entire concept of online classes is an anachronism - the way early automobiles resembled horse carriages. This is just schools' futile attempts at staying relevant using some token internet and marketing themselves to people indoctrinated that traditional classes were the only way to learn. Lecture is the worst way to teach, and yet people gush about putting videos of lectures online as some sort of innovation. It's sad that we can't think a little more outside of the box. An online education service I'd like to see is not teaching but certification. They could recommend learning resources and offer email and voice communication with subject matter experts for feedback and questions as needed, but the main job would be assessing your competence in a specific area and backing it up with a guarantee. You could get a card showing certification in Calculus II (expires one year after issuance) or Early American History, or whatever. But when you pass certification, you actually know the subject - not just sleepwalked through the course doing the minimal busy work. The student may use whatever learning methods that work best for themselves to achieve this and employers looking for specific experts would have confidence in the possession of that expertise.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > An online education service I'd like to see is not teaching but certification. You appear to be describing essentially the model used by Western Governors University, http://www.wgu.edu http://www.wgu.edu (their "certification" is traditional degrees, and doesn't have an expiration date, but the educational model of focusing on demonstrated competence with the institution combining assessment with assistance in the form of recommended learning resources seems to be nearly exactly what you are describing.)
  - protonfish 12y ago
    Well that's what their marketing says, and if true, then good for them. I guess I was thinking about something more atomic and a la carte. It'd be cool to have a card that said "Protonfish - certified expert in Game Theory, H. G. Wells, Franciso Tarrega, molecular biology and TCP/IP. (I am not actually an expert in these areas, but I wanna be.)
- 12y ago
mlichtenstern 12y ago
MOOCs are a great alternative / supplement to the the modern day debt peonage that often results from standard educational options. One to watch? Minerva Project, which has Miriam Rivera as COO: http://www.minervaproject.com/ http://www.minervaproject.com/ I found out about it after taking several courses on www.Novoed.com including: "Technology Entrepreneurship" with Chuck Eesley (free, two-part course offered by Stanford University), "Startup CEO" with Matt Blumberg, "Venture Deals" with Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, "The Startup Pitch" with +Chris Lipp, and "Raising Startup Capital" with Clint Korver. Miriam was previously CEO of Kauffman Fellows Academy. I've referenced these courses and the type of opportunity MOOCs present on my personal blog while addressing the "Pipeline Problem" that has come up in relation to diversity numbers at major tech cos. http://timesnewromanempire.blogspot.com/2014/08/is-entrepreneurship-answer.html#sthash.ZT6BGLvx.dpuf http://timesnewromanempire.blogspot.com/2014/08/is-entrepren...

67 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

falcolas 12y ago

I spent a few days looking through online courses from a couple of different vendors, hoping to take course of online class in a new field of study, so I could round myself out or possibly find a new career field. I quickly learned that outside of the Software Development discipline, and a precious few pure science fields, there are virtually no courses available. If you'd like to look into education or humanities or any of the thousands of other degrees? All you'll find are 101 level courses, if you find anything at all. Hopefully this will improve, but I'm not holding my breath.

christudor 12y ago
This is exactly right. That's why I started MASSOLIT (www.massolit.io), which provides video lectures in the arts and humanities. It normally costs £5/month, but if you send me an e-mail (chris@massolit.io) I'd be happy to give you a couple of months for free...
- odower 12y ago
  Very cool. Interested in learning more. Would like to list your courses on our site (https://curiosity.com https://curiosity.com).

akbar501 12y ago

I have mixed feelings about the MOOCs. On the positive side, the benefits are substantial. 1. Democratized access to the world's top educators, 2. Low cost distribution of education. On the negative side, the MOOCs are kind of the large classroom problem taken to the extreme. It's generally agreed that a classroom with more students per teacher is not as good as a lower student/teacher ratio. But to critique my own negativity, the people working on MOOCs are smart and motivated. It's a bit naive to think that the current MOOC is as good as they will ever get. Clearly, these are early stage products that have substantial evolution and improvement in their future. The one area in open education that needs to improve is around content licensing. If you look at most open educational content, the licenses are restricted open source (GPL like) and note unrestricted open source (MIT/BSD/Apache like). I fail to understand how making the content unrestricted would not benefit everyone.

ibebrett 12y ago
The thing is I'd rather take a course from a top instructor even at a massive scale, than to take a poor course made by a guy who doesn't have any real business teaching the class. There is no reason every tiny state school should be recreating a bad machine learning class (example) when you can take a good one from a good instructor. If you go to even more basic topics (intro to comp sci), the quality you will get from having a TA teach a class to a lecture hall to a top instructor teaching over a MOOC will be like night and day.
- jrs99 12y ago
  are you assuming that a tiny state school will have worse quality teachers than a top private school? or even that someone who is not a professional teacher is worse than a teacher at a "top" school? The tiny state school might have the best machine learning class in the world.
  - ibebrett 12y ago
    Yes I am assuming that. As someone who attended a small state school compared to the level of some of the coworkers taken by classmates at the top schools it is like night and day. Trust me the machine learning class at stanford is better than the one at eastern ct state university (for example)
    - ibebrett 12y ago
      Sorry, wrote that in a rush. I meant "compared to the level of classes taken by some of my coworkers"
    - jrs99 12y ago
      do you mean level of difficulty or mastery attained by the students?
      - ibebrett 12y ago
        the quality of the instructional materials, mastery, and level of difficulty yes.

HarryHirsch 12y ago

Are they now? Part of what you do at a university is build your professional network, both upwards, through your mentors, and sideways, with your peers. You also get introduced to new developments in your field, through informal, unscripted interactions, just walk down the hall and talk to the fellow in the office two doors down. That's a university. You don't get that through online courses. For a trade school, online courses work just fine. And the ruling class needs well-trained, obedient drones.

solarmist 12y ago
HA! I hear this all the time and it certainly didn't apply to me. This has a lot of assumptions baked into it. 1) You actually socialize with classmates (I didn't). 2) You either went to a top ranked school or stayed in the area where those graduates generally migrate to. (I didn't) 3) You did activities outside of class (I did (mainly embedded or MS talks), but were outside where I'm actually doing, so I'd call this a wash too) Only as a grad student in math (but not computer science) did I feel I got the kind of interaction that makes in person classes, lectures, interaction more valuable. Honestly I don't think I got much out of university that I couldn't have gotten online. Where I learned the most was my first three months in the industry. I learned VCS, scripting, bug tracking, code review, and about meet-ups/user groups. Basically everything important that wasn't programming.
- mjwhansen 12y ago
  It sounds like you didn't take advantage of all of the resources available then. Just because you didn't network in college doesn't mean it isn't useful.
  - solarmist 12y ago
    Of course, but I think there's a large percentage (minimum double digits, I'd guess probably at least in the 20's or 30's though) that were just like me and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference if they did their degree in a box, on the internet, or on a campus. At the time I didn't even know that was something your were supposed to do unless you were in a frat or a business major. To me college was a place to go and take classes and get your degree and that was pretty much it or at least that was what I was lead to believe was the only important part.

joshontheweb 12y ago

My big annoyance is with the MOOCs that still try and fit you into a schedule. Many times I have been in a course where I would have burned through the whole thing if I was allowed. But instead they feel the need to stagger the information on a weekly basis and I lose interest. Coursera is the one that comes to mind. I also don't care about getting a grade or certificate. Just give me all the lectures at once and some exercises so I can practice if I want. Gotta let go of the past.

jrs99 12y ago
Then your MOOC is the entire internet.
- solarmist 12y ago
  Not really, he still want the structured learning with video lectures that has a clear path, he just wants to be able to take it and run rather than being forced to crawl/walk though the material.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  An MOOC for a subject is truly just a big wikipedia article. Text, video, audio resources curated by someone. Hopefully MOOCs will eventually be similar to epub books; open format, meta data, a collection of digital objects.
  - odower 12y ago
    We're not focused on curriculum, but rather a collection of content around a subject at https://curiosity.com https://curiosity.com. Wiki, text, video, audio...people learn different ways in different order unless they're made to do otherwise. We're focused on the always curious person. MOOCs serve a different purpose so hard to see them going more unstructured.
  - dthal 12y ago
    "An MOOC for a subject is truly just a big wikipedia article." I don't agree with this. I've taken several online courses at EdX (EE, AI) Coursera(ML, PGM) and Udacity(Web App, Hadoop), and the things that are in the online classes that are not in a Wikipedia article - other students, homework with deadlines - are a large part of the value provided.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

protonfish 12y ago

The entire concept of online classes is an anachronism - the way early automobiles resembled horse carriages. This is just schools' futile attempts at staying relevant using some token internet and marketing themselves to people indoctrinated that traditional classes were the only way to learn. Lecture is the worst way to teach, and yet people gush about putting videos of lectures online as some sort of innovation. It's sad that we can't think a little more outside of the box. An online education service I'd like to see is not teaching but certification. They could recommend learning resources and offer email and voice communication with subject matter experts for feedback and questions as needed, but the main job would be assessing your competence in a specific area and backing it up with a guarantee. You could get a card showing certification in Calculus II (expires one year after issuance) or Early American History, or whatever. But when you pass certification, you actually know the subject - not just sleepwalked through the course doing the minimal busy work. The student may use whatever learning methods that work best for themselves to achieve this and employers looking for specific experts would have confidence in the possession of that expertise.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> An online education service I'd like to see is not teaching but certification. You appear to be describing essentially the model used by Western Governors University, http://www.wgu.edu http://www.wgu.edu (their "certification" is traditional degrees, and doesn't have an expiration date, but the educational model of focusing on demonstrated competence with the institution combining assessment with assistance in the form of recommended learning resources seems to be nearly exactly what you are describing.)
- protonfish 12y ago
  Well that's what their marketing says, and if true, then good for them. I guess I was thinking about something more atomic and a la carte. It'd be cool to have a card that said "Protonfish - certified expert in Game Theory, H. G. Wells, Franciso Tarrega, molecular biology and TCP/IP. (I am not actually an expert in these areas, but I wanna be.)
12y ago

mlichtenstern 12y ago

MOOCs are a great alternative / supplement to the the modern day debt peonage that often results from standard educational options. One to watch? Minerva Project, which has Miriam Rivera as COO: http://www.minervaproject.com/ http://www.minervaproject.com/ I found out about it after taking several courses on www.Novoed.com including: "Technology Entrepreneurship" with Chuck Eesley (free, two-part course offered by Stanford University), "Startup CEO" with Matt Blumberg, "Venture Deals" with Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, "The Startup Pitch" with +Chris Lipp, and "Raising Startup Capital" with Clint Korver. Miriam was previously CEO of Kauffman Fellows Academy. I've referenced these courses and the type of opportunity MOOCs present on my personal blog while addressing the "Pipeline Problem" that has come up in relation to diversity numbers at major tech cos. http://timesnewromanempire.blogspot.com/2014/08/is-entrepreneurship-answer.html#sthash.ZT6BGLvx.dpuf http://timesnewromanempire.blogspot.com/2014/08/is-entrepren...