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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 dis

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.
    - ojbyrne 12y ago
      I have taken that specific course, and yes, it is very good. But I don't think it's always the case that professors at top schools are always better than TAs at small colleges. Top professors are almost always research-oriented and some let their teaching skills suffer. My counter example would be the Algorithms course from Princeton with Robert Sedgewick. I would rate that as basically "just ok."
  - HarryHirsch 12y ago
    The top-20 schools have the pick of the litter, they can choose whomever they like from applicants all over the world. That leaves all other schools to choose from a thoroughly picked-over pile. As a university teacher the most important thing you have to do is to pitch the level right. Anything that isn't a top-level school suffers from the tyranny of low expectations, and the cliff after the first 20-25 schools in the rankings is really quite steep. There are no public ivies.
    - hga 12y ago
      "There are no public ivies." Yet somehow the University of California at Berkeley has one of the 4 best computer science programs in the world, and it's better than all but 3 programs at private schools (Stanford, CMU and MIT).
      - ibebrett 12y ago
        Yes for sure, I am not trying to pick on public schools, its just that VAST majority of schools are not top level, and there are thousands of bad computer science classes being taught.
  - dthal 12y ago
    I disagree. I took Andrew Ng's ML class, and I have a CS(-ish) degree from a tiny state school. Only one of my professors was near Ng's level as an instructor. Also, tiny state schools have a hard time getting and keeping instructors who are knowledgeable about in-demand topics, or higher-level topics. We didn't have a machine learning class at all, although it was touched on in the AI survey class.
- slurry 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's an excluded middle here.
  - ibebrett 12y ago
    Yes I agree, there are great classes all over the place, and there might be some gems where you least expect it, but for the most part the quality of the classes are going to go down as you go to worse and worse schools.
OneOneOneOne 12y ago
All good points though I think the last regarding licensing is debatable. I am not certain these courses would exist at all if it were not for a profit motive. MOOCs like Udacity and Coursera have a fair amount of funding... http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursera http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursera http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity
- akbar501 12y ago
  That was poor communication on my part. I should have been explicit with the open content I was referring to. Specifically, I meant the content from Khan Academy, CK12, and the like. Not the for profit companies.
AndyNemmity 12y ago
I don't think a benefit of a MOOC is democratized access to the world's top educators. I think that the same level of education is available online, and it is already democratized. The critical component is someone putting together the order in which you learn it. Perhaps that requires top educators, but I don't think it really does. What MOOCs do that really benefits me is removes the wasted time of discovery with an ordered process that makes sense. My daughter does Khan Academy. The information she is learning isn't particularly novel, however the order and structure is. That's the key. Google searching for the same topics will get you great information as well, but you need to know what to search for. You need to include that search time through each part. You need to filter out bad material. That's my view at least.
dthal 12y ago
"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." Actually, I'm starting to get worried about this. I took the first version of Andrew Ng's ML class in late 2011, and I'm taking a different Coursera class now, and there hasn't been much improvement that I can see in the basic offering. Specifically, one area where online classes should be able to outperform traditional classes is in the handling of pre-requisite material (since in a MOOC it isn't necessary for all of the students to see the same material, some could start at different points), but there hasn't been any work or progress in that direction at all. That may explain why almost all online classes are intro-level.
belorn 12y ago
Let me get this right. If we prevent student from knowing source code in CS then education will improve? Or, if we allow students from remixing music and images in art studies, then their education is going to get worse? Or if we allow students to take apart technical diagrams and improve on them, then their education is surely going down the hill? Please enlighten us how such restrictions would help a student who want to learn, experiment and improve their skills. It might help akbar501 businesses if he could take something under bsd/mit and slap proprietary restrictions on them, but I do not count that as "benefiting education". Thats like me asking people to send me money in order to "benefit the economy".

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.
  - ojbyrne 12y ago
    I have taken that specific course, and yes, it is very good. But I don't think it's always the case that professors at top schools are always better than TAs at small colleges. Top professors are almost always research-oriented and some let their teaching skills suffer. My counter example would be the Algorithms course from Princeton with Robert Sedgewick. I would rate that as basically "just ok."
- HarryHirsch 12y ago
  The top-20 schools have the pick of the litter, they can choose whomever they like from applicants all over the world. That leaves all other schools to choose from a thoroughly picked-over pile. As a university teacher the most important thing you have to do is to pitch the level right. Anything that isn't a top-level school suffers from the tyranny of low expectations, and the cliff after the first 20-25 schools in the rankings is really quite steep. There are no public ivies.
  - hga 12y ago
    "There are no public ivies." Yet somehow the University of California at Berkeley has one of the 4 best computer science programs in the world, and it's better than all but 3 programs at private schools (Stanford, CMU and MIT).
    - ibebrett 12y ago
      Yes for sure, I am not trying to pick on public schools, its just that VAST majority of schools are not top level, and there are thousands of bad computer science classes being taught.
- dthal 12y ago
  I disagree. I took Andrew Ng's ML class, and I have a CS(-ish) degree from a tiny state school. Only one of my professors was near Ng's level as an instructor. Also, tiny state schools have a hard time getting and keeping instructors who are knowledgeable about in-demand topics, or higher-level topics. We didn't have a machine learning class at all, although it was touched on in the AI survey class.
slurry 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's an excluded middle here.
- ibebrett 12y ago
  Yes I agree, there are great classes all over the place, and there might be some gems where you least expect it, but for the most part the quality of the classes are going to go down as you go to worse and worse schools.

OneOneOneOne 12y ago

All good points though I think the last regarding licensing is debatable. I am not certain these courses would exist at all if it were not for a profit motive. MOOCs like Udacity and Coursera have a fair amount of funding... http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursera http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursera http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity

akbar501 12y ago
That was poor communication on my part. I should have been explicit with the open content I was referring to. Specifically, I meant the content from Khan Academy, CK12, and the like. Not the for profit companies.

AndyNemmity 12y ago

I don't think a benefit of a MOOC is democratized access to the world's top educators. I think that the same level of education is available online, and it is already democratized. The critical component is someone putting together the order in which you learn it. Perhaps that requires top educators, but I don't think it really does. What MOOCs do that really benefits me is removes the wasted time of discovery with an ordered process that makes sense. My daughter does Khan Academy. The information she is learning isn't particularly novel, however the order and structure is. That's the key. Google searching for the same topics will get you great information as well, but you need to know what to search for. You need to include that search time through each part. You need to filter out bad material. That's my view at least.

dthal 12y ago

"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." Actually, I'm starting to get worried about this. I took the first version of Andrew Ng's ML class in late 2011, and I'm taking a different Coursera class now, and there hasn't been much improvement that I can see in the basic offering. Specifically, one area where online classes should be able to outperform traditional classes is in the handling of pre-requisite material (since in a MOOC it isn't necessary for all of the students to see the same material, some could start at different points), but there hasn't been any work or progress in that direction at all. That may explain why almost all online classes are intro-level.

belorn 12y ago

Let me get this right. If we prevent student from knowing source code in CS then education will improve? Or, if we allow students from remixing music and images in art studies, then their education is going to get worse? Or if we allow students to take apart technical diagrams and improve on them, then their education is surely going down the hill? Please enlighten us how such restrictions would help a student who want to learn, experiment and improve their skills. It might help akbar501 businesses if he could take something under bsd/mit and slap proprietary restrictions on them, but I do not count that as "benefiting education". Thats like me asking people to send me money in order to "benefit the economy".