[Artoemius]

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.

[canistr]

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.

[jonkiddy]

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.

[amttc]

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.

[aashu_dwivedi]

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.

[dikaiosune]

How would you rate the rest of the experience?

[nkozyra]

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?

[CardenB]

"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)."

As a current Georgia Tech student, I welcome you.

[nkozyra]

Thanks, I'm more than halfway finished :)

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.

[kageneko]

I was accepted to the program the year that the online masters was announced. At first, I was not amused.

However, I really really enjoyed my time actually being on campus. There were a few classes I took that would have been very difficult to do online, such as mobile & ubiq computing, where I got to spend quite a bit of time in the prototyping lab. I also had the chance to socialize a bit with professors and do some research with them. And personally, I don't do as well with online classes. I think it's really useful to have both kinds of programs. They're different experiences and they appeal to different people. Having both campus and online programs gives more opportunities to innovate in education.

[canistr]

Interestingly enough, I recall Thrun mentioning some failures with a university partnership on This Week in Startups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHkbKXhihLk

[amttc]

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.

It's been good thusfar.

[orsenthil]

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.

[qntmfred]

this was the primary failure they're referring to

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/18/citing-disapp...

[mathattack]

Interesting. I would have thought the paid experience would be beyond the technical glitches of the free experience.

[tobz]

(edX employee here)

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.

(sorry, a little long-winded)

[geomark]

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.

[uulbiy]

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.

[gedrap]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

[gedrap]

>>> 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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

But that's what happens in the physical world in face of competition (and that's the "great promise of capitalism", btw.) - prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure that will inflate them (like enough layers of middlemen).

But anyway, I don't mind Coursera or others trying out any business model they want. But them talking about a "mission to ensure access to education to everyone", etc.? This is getting dishonest. I'm criticizing them for saying they're doing this for humanity, while in fact getting further and further away from this goal every day.

[threesixandnine]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[jnbiche]

Meanwhile, Khan Academy, who really does believe in free education for everyone, is getting better and better...

[geomark]

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.

[erdojo]

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.

[cinquemb]

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)_/¯

[RyanZAG]

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.

[tyrael71]

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.

[cinquemb]

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?

[bunni]

Small businesses without an HR department.

[cinquemb]

Its funny that these suggestions are antithesis to the typical argument surrounding why people should get "higher" education when faced with the reality of the modern day d̶i̶t̶c̶h̶ ̶d̶i̶g̶g̶i̶n̶g̶ job market… go figure that exploration and the pursuit of knowledge would come in second to these games…

[vox_mollis]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[nipst]

I believe the failure was a reference to the failed partnership with San Jose state.. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/18/citing-disapp...

[ghaff]

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.

[skywhopper]

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.

[robbiemitchell]

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).

[ghaff]

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?

[robbiemitchell]

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?

[ghaff]

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.

[argonaut]

They need to make money? We should be thankful they haven't resorted to advertising or selling our information.

[abecedarius]

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.

[agumonkey]

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.

[mathattack]

The specializations and nanodegrees sell brand, and perhaps motivation. (I am more likely to complete what I have paid for and can brag about)