[hashnsalt]

Do you think part of the problem with "online education" lies in defining what an education is really supposed to achieve? Should I be guaranteed a job at the end of this series of courses? Should I learn for leisure? Why try to build a one-size-fits-all university on the web anyways?

[ghaff]

I'm not sure it was so much "guaranteed a job at the end of this series of courses." But I do think that there was a suggestion, hope, even promise that MOOCs could replace traditional classroom education and degrees under some circumstances.

The issue is that, to a large degree, they mostly solved the easy thing. Making videos of university lectures widely available isn't hard. Neither is making other broadcast aspects of the syllabus available (e.g. in MIT OCW). A lot of good material was made available through Coursera and edX. But, frankly, a Wordpress blog with embedded videos and links would have worked nearly as well for a lot of this material.

Yes, CS somewhat uniquely benefits from the opportunity to reasonably evaluate code written for problem sets. But, for the most part, evaluation is at the multiple choice level.

[visarga]

I believe what is missing from MOOCs is personal coaching. People do better when they are observed by other people than in a void. The educational coach doesn't need to be an expert in the domain, just an expert in education. Maybe MOOCs would do better to be coupled with local study groups and educational coaches that make recommendations about what to learn next and supervise the progress of the student.

[ghaff]

This is basically the idea with blended learning models. The problem though--or one of them--is that the MOOC component mostly tackles the easy (and relatively cheap), one-to-many broadcast part of the blend.

My understanding is that a lot of schools already videotape their big lectures and many students just watch them online while doing study groups, going to recitations, working on problem sets, etc. more or less like they always have.

[markdown]

Udacity guarantees you a job within 6 months of graduating from a "Nanodegree" (or your money back). Only applies to US residents obviously.