The original business model of coursera/udacity was to offer the option to take most courses for free, but require people to pay for credentials.
This is not obviously a bad idea: the quality of teaching at Harvard or Stanford is probably better than that you obtain in most universities, but the one of the main added values are the network of people you meet, and the credential of having attended a very prestigious university.
However: the kind of person that takes a lot of online courses is probably already an educated professional, and for her, the main added value is the joy of learning new things, and the credentials themselves are near worthless.
I'm sure they have lots of very smart people who thought hard about how to best monetize their offerings, but, for me, I would definitely pay a flat fee per month just to be able to keep sampling every course I want.
Maybe they could've focussed on making the credentials valuable (maybe they did and it didn't work). AFAIK, if you told an employer you have a "nanodegree" in something or other, its glossed over.
Usually, you have to back it up with real-world projects. In which case why would I pay for the degree, I should just go out and build something with the stuff I learn for free.
Some NSA job listings have mentioned Coursera's (and others) Data Science specializations.
> "Completion of a data science certificate program (online or other) may replace 1 year of relevant experience. Some examples of data science certificate programs include those offered by Cloudera, Coursera, Indiana University-Bloomington, and University of California-Irvine."
Might just be an indication of how desperate they are for those positions, but it could also indicate they're doing a pretty good job educating people.
The US government has a lot of trouble hiring qualified scientists in the high-end disciplines because (a) It is not willing to pay market salaries; and (b) It artificially restricts the candidate pool to US citizens who are able (and willing) to pass security clearance. So I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be hiring data scientists straight out of community college.
NSA has a big in-house training operation. Unlike startups, they're not looking for narrow specific skills in new hires. A year of paid formal classroom training for a new hire is not unusual at NSA.
I began the JHU Data Scientist Specialization on Coursera and worked through the Data Scientists Toolbox and R Programming classes, but found them a bit lackluster in their presentation.
The course content (videos, slides) presents some basics with a large emphasis on having a "hacker ethos" to do more work and digging on your own to be successful. The quizzes and projects in the R course demanded the use of techniques that were outside of the content provided in the lecture. I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to Google. I expect a curriculum to be a self-contained unit of learning, or else I wouldn't bother with curriculum.
Contrast this to Coursera's excellent (and free) Rice University Interactive Python Programming classes that are really superb. The Rice University team put together an online Python interpreter complete with graphics capability so that students could test each other's code. The R class left peer review of students' code as "do not run the code, eyeball it and see if it looks right". I understand why they did it (execution of potentially harmful code), but Rice's solution was elegant.
I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to Google.
I'm about halfway through the JHU Data Science program and I agree that there's a fair amount of "extra" work you have to do. But still, coming into it as somebody who had never used R at all before, I've learned a ton and have definitely found it to be worth the money I've spent (I plan to actually do the entire track and get the certificate and everything).
Now that said, I probably woulnd't pay much more than what they're charging now (I think most of these classes have been $49.00 / class so far), but at that rate, I definitely feel that it's been worthwhile. And even if it isn't a formal degree, it still gives me the ability to legitimately mention JHU on my resume. So if somebody is just quick skimming my resume to make a decision on which pile to sort it into, that probably gives mine a small nudge in favor of the "look deeper" pile.
Oh, I'm pretty sure they were all aware that credential value was ultimately going to have to be a pretty important component of getting people to pay more than a token amount. But the value of credentials is much more something that others confer on the credential than something the credentialing organization can confer on itself.
Sure, the organization can attempt to explain and promote how its credential provides evidence of X, Y, Z skills or knowledge. Which works reasonably for both well-established institutions and narrow vocational training (including in IT). But it's a lot harder to make a case that random MOOC course provides evidence of much other than a generalized interest in continuing education (for which you don't really need a credential to prove).
If it were possible for a good student at _any_ school to take online courses _for credit_ at an Ivy, and perhaps to even work toward a new "dual" degree that joins both institutions, I suspect the demand would be there. They're already using borrowed money.
I agree, but I feel extremely pessimistic that typical universities will willingly accept such credits (my simple assumption being thay most universities are aimed for profit). In fact, i think most universities are focused on creating their own MOOCs to replace their own 700+ student 100-level courses instead of working towards a common MOOC offerings.
I wonder what is hidden behind the phrase "the college partnerships failed".
I took some great courses on Udacity, Coursera, and edX back in the days when they regularly offered amazing comprehensive college courses for free.
They do still offer free courses. However, it seems that the atmosphere of free accessible education is somehow lost, with the advent of the "specializations" and "nanodegrees" and the like. Or maybe I just got older and more cynical, I'm not sure.
As a current Georgia Tech student doing the Online Master's in CS, I wonder this too because it's the primary method of delivery for lectures.
For the most part, I'm not crazy about the Udacity platform and the lectures (they're too short, the mini-quizzes aren't always that great, and the platform doesn't feel like it has been improving in the past 2 years). However, all the value and learning is coming from the interactions with other students/TAs/professors on Piazza as well as the assignments/projects we do.
If you were to ask me how I would rate each component independently, I would say that Udacity is the weakest part of the experience.
I'm also a Georgia Tech OMSCS student. I'm really enjoying the program.
I found Udacity/Piazza to be adequate as a student while using my laptop. However, my wish is for the OMSCS program to embrace mobile as a viable method of consuming course content. Which isn't the case currently and rather disappointing as I travel quite a bit.
Also an OMSCS student. Funny. On my iPad, it's less than straightforward to use Udacity on the website, and I've never been able to get the mobile app for the GT login. I have my IOS course bookmarked so I can watch the lectures on my tablet.
Another omscs student here. I feel that the udacity has played a big role in keeping the quality of omscs high.
Yes it's the professors who create great courses but the post production part of udacity is also a big factor in keeping the quality high on the courses.
Not the addressee but it's spectacular all around. There are a few classes that have a reputation for being poorly designed/maintained and a few with somewhat "unreasonable" time requirements (ie 50 hours a week for a single class). There are classes where you only interact with TAs/students (which is fine) and some where the professor is seemingly on a 24-hour modafinil drip, there to answer any question posed at any time.
For the most part it's intensive and immersive with enough learn-at-your-own-pace aspects to accommodate full-time jobs, families, hobbies, etc. I feel like I come away from every class like I've actually learned something that's embedded in me.
Udacity is what it is: a platform for watching videos with some minor ability to interact with coding examples / quizzes throughout. I have no issue with it, but agree that most of the meat of the courses come from other parts of the classes.
My hunch here, through Thrun's quotes and some in this, is that there were some aspects of CEO at this level that really didn't appeal to him. How many CEOs truly get to be personally creative in their position?
"There are a few classes that have a reputation for being poorly designed/maintained and a few with somewhat "unreasonable" time requirements (ie 50 hours a week for a single class)."
I've often wondered what on-campus students think of the program given there are a lot of competing elements to having both at an esteemed CS school. I've tried thinking about my undergrad days and how I'd feel if there were an equivalent program.
I'm an OMSCS student. Udacity is fine. It serves its purpose. Sometimes it looks like the poor instructors are getting a double whammy of Georgia heat and hot spotlights, but the lectures are pretty high quality.
I'm not too far into the program, but the courses I've seen are built around readings, projects, and Piazza (a student forum for us to talk to each other in). Piazza is where most of the interesting stuff happens. For my class, there's the professor but also 5-10 TAs who are swarming Piazza at most hours of the day responding to questions. Once a week, there are office hours for a couple hours hosted on Hangouts. There's your normal midterm and final exam, but the courses seem very much structured around deadlines rather than mandatory participation week to week.
Here! Another OMSCS Student. I think, many of us associate ourselves with Georgia Tech than Udacity, even though we have some excellent staff who are full time employed by Udacity for our courses.
The technical infrastructure from Udacity is a low key here. But the partnership, enablement and opportunity in providing 1000s of qualified students to pursue masters is a phenomenal achievement.
Forever grateful to Udacity and Sebastian Thrun for this program.
I'm not particular privy to whatever tactical insight our leadership has on Udacity, Coursera, etc... but I can tell you where edX is looking to head as a MOOC when it comes to college/university partnerships.
We have our partner-developed content. This is stuff like Harvard's CS50, MIT's 6.00.1x, etc. High quality content. People are very eager to take the courses -- they're developed by professors, TAs, etc, from these schools, and, to be honest, there's a lot of front-loaded name recognition -- but there's also a good chunk of learners who go on to pay for a verified certificate. On the flipside, we've talked to major businesses (tens of thousands of employees) who say they're willing to treat these certificates, the output of these courses, in line with their campus equivalents. That's pretty huge for someone looking to beef up their resume.
The next evolution of what we're doing by partnering with these institutions are things like Arizona State University's Global Freshman Academy or MIT's MicroMasters. ASU's Global Freshman Academy is taking your entire "freshman" year on edX, and getting real credit from it. MIT's MicroMasters (in Supply Chain Management) is taking a semester online, which makes you eligible for taking the rest of the degree (which is two semesters total) on campus. These cost money; they aren't entirely free like the standard courses on edX. However, they're deeply discounted and this is what our learners say they want.
Many people want credentials, they want them from top colleges and universities, and they want them targeted to specific fields. Ultimately, these people just don't feel confident figuring out which courses to take, and they want to be told which courses to take to get them to a specific place: better comprehension of X, better chances of job in a given field, etc. This is what is precipitating a lot of the advent of the specializations/nanodegrees, as you say.
I feel somewhat the same. I took a couple Udacity courses that were great and quite a few from Coursera. Coursera's free offerings are now partially gutted by restricting non-paying students from taking tests and submitting assignments.
I think the big mistake was offering something for free and then asking money for it. The first backlash was with the (unverified) certificates and the latest with the tests and assignments.
It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that they are focused on making money they seem to lose users.
I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff.
It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some revenue, sooner or later. What they did seems like a sensible business decision to me. They focused and succeeded with the marketing and branding initially (Coursera became almost synonymous with online courses) and they are collecting the revenue from it now.
> I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it.
I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one.
The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.
(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that's another topic.)
But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule ("yadda yadda people can't learn if they're not forced"), the course materials are often available only during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they're also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can't even find the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They're just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.
You know how real revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561770 - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.
>>> The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.
Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well!
If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.
Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods.
I do agree with you that we sometimes feel entitled to something and we shouldn't. However, I remember when Udacity started and it was all ah, yes, oh, uh, free courses, free education, access for everyone.
Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.
Yeah and especially Coursera is still waving the banner of "free education for everyone" (and asking to pay to support it...) while employing more and more dark patterns to prevent you from getting viewing the for free.
Agree. They are running a business so can charge if/what they want. I just think they were a little clumsy how they made the transition. It was particularly annoying for people mid-way through a specialization to find out that the rest of the courses in the specialization would be crippled.
Coursera built its PR engine on the premise of bringing high quality top-university education to the world for free. They gave keynotes to large audiences, did press tours, and even used a .org domain. Very feel-good, and they capitalized on the resulting publicity and good will to raise a lot of money.
No one would have whined much about add-ons for a cost. But to restrict what was originally part of the core free experience - the experience they built their reputation on - is why any backlash now is entirely of their own making.
Who would have guessed that the new online education revolution™, where effectiveness is measured in similar status/signaling games, would pander to the status quo?
That being said, there's an amazing wealth of knowledge on the internet completely free to consume not locked behind any particular walled garden awaiting those who dare step out of their comfort zones of consumption/absorption, but its not nicely packaged in the latest fad de jour… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The issue here is that going through a professional institution is the difference between being a 'self taught amateur' and a 'well studied professional'. Even if both people are equally capable, the one with the paperwork is going to have a far easier time getting a job through traditional channels.
Even if you plan on being an entrepreneur, your first media coverage is either going to say 'the Harvard graduate' or 'the self taught .. '. So it's an indicator even then. For Apple and Microsoft, 'college dropout' featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow. Nothing is ever simple, but just being accepted is probably enough even if you don't finish.
I feel like this has become less and less true in engineering and software in the past decade. A portfolio of projects with varying complexity speaks equally or more about your ability to code or build things. Google and other companies have come out and said they haven't found strong correlations between degrees (with GPA measurement included) and being a better engineer.
> 'college dropout' featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow.
'Standing out' is irrelevant in this context unless your business is entirely based on you being a famous figure in the press. Gates and Jobs are famous because of the incredible companies they built, not the other way around. The press needed to paint a story, so they went with the college dropout narrative. However their success, and the success of every company/founder is entirely independent of founder social validation.
So does nothing exist for people to strive for between/beyond wanting to work at places that embody the banality of …Even if both people are equally capable, the one with the paperwork is going to have a far easier time getting a job through traditional channels. and Even if you plan on being an entrepreneur…, or such a between state like that just unimaginable?
the one with the paperwork is going to have a far easier time getting a job through traditional channels.
We're definitely in the minority, but some of us in hiring positions actively discriminate against the didn't-learn-until-college demographic for software developers.
So, you believe software should be treated differently from the norm in just about every other category of engineering (and even science for the most part)?
Of course there's nothing wrong with an early interest in computers and programming. However, "actively discriminating" as you put it has the effect of effectively selecting for males from a background that enables an early interest in computers.
Which, in a lot of ways, really highlighted the failure of MOOCs promoting themselves as expanding the reach of top-level education to underserved audiences. (As did Open Courseware and its ilk previously.) The problem (well, one of them) is that MOOCs didn't really help students with weak groundings in the basics and, perhaps, middling to low motivation.
Instead, if you read the stats, they largely (though not exclusively) have ended up providing ongoing professional education to a range of motivated learners who already have undergrad and advanced degrees.
The main problem is that great courses require great faculty to create and manage them semester by semester. Udacity and the like are built on the premise that we can scale up a professor's reach by orders of magnitude. But you can't do that without losing quality. The state of online course software is such that in most cases it's a hindrance, rather than a help. Software should make our jobs easier, but for professors building an online course versus building a traditional lecture/paper/chalkboard sort of course, technology far too often gets in the way and makes their jobs harder.
The assumption that classes should be taught on a semester ("seat time") basis, with everyone starting and stopping at the same time, is a professor-centric view of the world.
A student-centric view would use technology to help students have an educational experience around their own schedule and needs (e.g., varied pace; reinforcement or skipping where appropriate).
It's a structured learning view of the world rather than professor- or student-centric.
The issue is that, if you take away all structure, you also tend to take away most real-time interactions (which admittedly are a serious weakness of MOOCs anyway) and you end up with an experience that's not much different from reading a book and/or watching online video talks/lectures/documentaries/etc. or, indeed, just doing some project. Of course, there's nothing wrong with learning that way. But, at some point, you then go--why bother with this MOOC thing anyway if I just want to learn something?
There must be other ways to provide structure than one built around a fixed schedule oriented around when a professor is delivering lectures, no?
Simple ideas:
- Rolling start dates
- Weekly collaboration days/times where all students who happen to be at a shared point in the course, or a shared point in their understanding of the material, discuss
These have their own drawbacks, too, but they're possible. Especially if the network is big enough. Once you have a bunch of students doing this, you then go--why bother affiliating with one particular university if I can get the classes I need no matter where I sit?
Fair enough. Part of the problem is that the things (like collaboration) that do depend on some sort of synchronization are also the things that probably work worst in MOOCs. I've pretty much given up on MOOC forums beyond anything related to technical or other issues with some aspect of the course. As actual discussion forums, I find them near worthless for a variety of reasons.
An idea floated around the time of their very first courses was that they'd double as a recruiter, like Stockfighter now (by my vague impression of both). I wonder what happened to that.
I feel it's a failed graft. MOOC cannot play nice enough with current education system without causing too much interferences, hence the no parternships.
Professor Thrun changed my life, I and many tens of thousands around the world graduated from his classes, gaining an education that would have been impossible for many of us.
I am forever in his debt for his tireless work as an educator and his work on SLAM & Self Driving Cars.
Being taught by practitioners at the cutting edge of research like Thrun, Norvig, Ng, & Hinton is the education I dreamed of. I hope that Udacity develops into a full research vehicle and offers its own qualifications, the UKs Open University is a good model for this.
But "accessibility issues" could completely change the way people learn. What if each student could access the kind of instruction one gets at Philips Exeter or Princeton University?
Or what if the tailored aspect of private instruction could be scaled up? For example, if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to have a tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000 tutors. But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a given math problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one math teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million students at a personalized level.
Or, one could make a cost-effective way to learn from the absolute top practitioners in a field. Most people cannot afford private basketball lessons with an NBA basketball coach, for example. But let's say such a coach watched 10,000 people play basketball for five minutes each, and recorded five minutes of feedback for each person (about one year of full-time work). Then, you could upload a video of you playing, you could algorithmically analyze the user's playing style, and match them to the person in the set of 10,000 that matches them best. The five minutes of feedback might be really useful to that person, and can be delivered at scale.
> if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to have a tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000 tutors. But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a given math problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one math teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million students at a personalized level.
Not quite. There may be 20 different types of mistake you could make on the problem (I would make a lower estimate, personally), but you can make them in several different places, and the influence of a mistake will be felt in the rest of the problem.
Udacity deals with this currently by never assigning complicated problems that might see a mistake in one step show up in a later step; this isn't quite ideal as instruction, but it makes it possible to automate handling the assignments.
I'm not sure math is a good example, but for grading small code exercises there are systems that map "equivalent" solutions on each other, ignoring whitespace/variable names/simple equivalent operations. This allows the tutors to spend more energy on the long tail of "strange" solutions which needs more individual attention.
It depends on how you look at it. Thanks to Wikipedia (this was back in 2002-2006) I was able to bypass the problem that half of my university lecturers were researchers first, and teachers a distant second.
Key computer science concepts went from being incomprehensible to being remarkably easy, and I didn't need to spend a small fortune on textbooks either. So to some extent, a revolution has already happened.
I remember a huge controversy while I was in college over whether it was even possible to get reliable information off wikipedia. At the time, my primary use for wikipedia was math articles, so I found this somewhat amusing. The math articles were fine.
Accessibility definitely, but I think it's naive to assume that just because the centralized teacher-student model of education has been around for a long time necessarily means it will never be supplanted.
I think the evolution of education is probably technology supporting traditional teaching, along with some way of easily varying the curriculum or the learning mode to accommodate different learning styles.
For that to happen I would guess that making designing curricula, lesson plans and activities easier to do would be a good start.
Agree, technology will (and already has to some extent) revolutionize learning on your own, but there still is a lot of value in going to a class, learning together with real people and listening to an experienced teacher. It is kind of similar as to why virtual meetings will never fully supplant real life meetings. Our mind just reacts differently in real conversations and i think peer pressure actually makes some sense in a learning environment.
It's similar to how i feel about working at home after years of doing it and now working in an office again. It's just a different feeling of commitment to a project.
Real gains in educational technology will come from mediating in-person social interactions (focused on knowledge building rather than general purpose interactions, of course).
In many instances, the teacher actually knows what should be done to improve the learning of a student - but is logistically constrained from providing that level of service (Bloom's 2 sigma problem). The low hanging fruit is removing those constraints.
We will need better tools for understanding the knowledge/abilities of our students in a much more refined manner.
I think just about everyone would be delighted if recorded lectures completely replace traditional giant lectures.
But I agree, there's much more to the structure of education that technology can help with, but not supplant. Universities aren't going away (or radically changing) any time soon.
Happy to see that they are doing so well. I was so excited when I joined (one of) their first class(es), A.I. At the time I was still a university student and had a hard time going to class, seeing how far technology was ahead of our teaching methods. Learning online is a much better method for me.
So maybe it's not that learning online is a better method but that you found better teaching material and online is obviously a easier method to do so?
No, I mean it's a much better method. I can start when I want (not Monday morning, 8 am), I can make a break when I want (if just to google something that I didn't understand), I can repeat stuff that I didn't understand at first, and I can continue with homework directly after the lecture (I don't have to switch rooms and thereby mental context).
> Thrun, who will remain as president and chairman of Udacity, said that he will continue to work full-time at Udacity, but he will take on a role focused on what he is passionate about—innovation.
Just personal interpretation whenever someone says he or she is focusing on innovation without too much information: "I am not sure what I want to do, I am going to pretend I know what I want to do with the company's money here."
A bit too cynical, I think. This kind of arrangement, where one of the cofounders steps down to let someone else run the company, is very very common. Especially when the person stepping down is more technical/scientific. Remember that Thrun used to be a professor and used to do/lead research at Google.
I disagree, I'd say it means there's too much day to day running of the org that their key people aren't able to focus on the longer term. That's pretty common.
This is not obviously a bad idea: the quality of teaching at Harvard or Stanford is probably better than that you obtain in most universities, but the one of the main added values are the network of people you meet, and the credential of having attended a very prestigious university.
However: the kind of person that takes a lot of online courses is probably already an educated professional, and for her, the main added value is the joy of learning new things, and the credentials themselves are near worthless.
I'm sure they have lots of very smart people who thought hard about how to best monetize their offerings, but, for me, I would definitely pay a flat fee per month just to be able to keep sampling every course I want.