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Author is making biased observations, probably based on his experience. Parental pressure, peer pressure, shame are all wrong reasons for going to college to ge

Author is making biased observations, probably based on his experience. Parental pressure, peer pressure, shame are all wrong reasons for going to college to get a degree. The lectures I watched on Khan Academy, Coursera or EdX beat almost all lectures I attended at college. For me there isn't a "big difference between watching a video online and actually being there". Many times I learned more from watching Youtube videos than attending lectures at universities/colleges. Hands-on learning courses on codecademy or codeschool are much better than in-person corporate trainings I attended, that companies I worked with spent thousands of dollars on.

tjl 11y ago
Most of the Coursera and EdX lectures are actually college lectures, just put online. I know as a TA, it can be hard to answer some questions via e-mail, so I'm assuming it would be difficult to do in a web forum as well. I once spent several e-mails trying to explain something to a student and after failing, asked them to come to my office and explained it in five minutes in a way they understood. So, while there might not be the difference for a lecture, it's the things around the course that can make the experience better. I know Khan Academy has some problems (at least in the past) with some of its material. One example is discussed in, http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/12/khan/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/12/khan/ I can verify what he's saying is correct as I used to be involved in teaching the same material. I first learnt C++ in an in-person corporate training session and it was excellent. I think it all depends.