[hashhar]

I'm sad that all education endeavours eventually turn for-profit and then the goals get misaligned.

Produce as many courses at as minimum cost as possible. Enroll as many people as possible without regards for completion percentage. Create an economy where random people are incentivised to create courses and then the course quality tanks.

I wish this turns out differently.

Even Udemy and Coursera have become commericialised with edX the last major standing.

[rattray]

At least there's still Khan Academy. Very different niche, though – I sure wish they'd been the new homes of edX's content…

[whoomp12342]

fuck completion percentage, it is more than just that. consider the QUALITY of completion.

e.g. Did you show up 30% of the time? yer a graduate!

[foolmeonce]

I think good goal posts are even further away.. If you complete 100% of calculus I and then delete all access to it instead of solidifying it by going to calculus II, you will need to learn calc I again within months and the cognitive dissonance that creates will cause most people never to learn calculus.

[jasonharris555]

Mastery based credentialing is the future. Employers only care what you actually know and can do.

[adolph]

> Employers only care what you actually know and can do.

That seems to fly in the face of "who you know is more important that what you know" conventional wisdom.

[lvs]

> all education endeavours eventually turn for-profit and then the goals get misaligned.

I'm fairly certain we've been watching that mission creep in all corners of education, higher and otherwise, over the past couple of decades.

[sokoloff]

Udemy and Coursera were entirely commercial from their start, were they not?

[nosianu]

Originally Coursera only wanted money for the - for the vast majority of people useless - verified completion certificate. You had access to all course content including all the tests and could access course content long after the course had ended. So if you did not see any value in that "verified certificate" there was no reason to pay anything. You got a free certificate either way.

I saved all certificates I ever got from edX and from Coursera as PDFs to remember which courses I took. They actually look quite fancy.

- Example certificate that was free at the time: https://i.imgur.com/XFX05gx.png

- The course was part of a series, which these days is available here: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science#co...

- Here is an R-Markdown document I created for another of the courses in that series, which used peer assessment where we had to evaluate each others results: https://rpubs.com/Noseshine/74191

At the start everything was free, including all these exercises, all the assessments, and even the certificates. I knew it would not last and used the opportunity, over three years of heavy course taking, over 50 completed courses. I did not have much to spend at the time, I could definitely not have spend the current amounts.

I took over a dozen courses on Coursera alone, medicine and statistics, it was good. I just checked my (long unused) login just now, they only list two courses under completed and "forgot" the other well over a dozen others. Good thing I saved those completion certificates, although there probably is little use in remembering what courses I took - either I remember what I learned or I don't.

.

Just for fun, this was one of my favorite courses, great professor too, great content: https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience Don't know if it still is as complete, at the time it was almost 25 hours of videos alone, never mind all the reading and all the tests and exercises. It wasn't complicated though, you just had to invest the time but not nearly as much brain as for other "STEM sciency" courses.

[hatware]

> education endeavours eventually turn for-profit and then the goals get misaligned.

There are companies trying to battle the problems that come with a single bottom line, like Guild Education.

[kerkeslager]

I just cannot fathom the worldview that leads one to believe a for-profit company can solve the problem of for-profit education.

[kerkeslager]

My previous post was a bit too glib, so here's an explanation:

There's a common belief on Hacker News which verges on mental illness, that the best solution to any problem is free market capitalism. This belief is false because free market capitalism doesn't solve problems when the customer isn't the person with the problem.

The problem in this case is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's hard to get money without an education, and it's hard to get an education without money.

For-profit education cannot solve the problem, because for-profit education is the problem. If the customer is the student, then that means people without money can't be students. If you start letting people without money be students, then the customer is someone else, and the customer's incentives will always be misaligned with the student's interests in some ways. There simply isn't a way to fix this which makes any sense and still includes for-profit education.

[Joky]

> The problem in this case is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's hard to get money without an education, and it's hard to get an education without money. > For-profit education cannot solve the problem, because for-profit education is the problem.

Have you seen school that only gets paid after you start working (and based on a percentage of your salary), for example: https://www.holbertonschool.com I like the concept in that these school are somehow "investing" in the student: they only get as successful as the student is.

[kerkeslager]

This is exactly what I mean when I talk about misaligned incentives. Making money isn't the only reason people want an education, but that's the only thing Holberton is going to prepare students for, because that's how Holberton makes their money.

This is reflected in what Holberton offers: if I'm understanding correctly, they offer 7 different kinds of computer programming and 0 different kinds of pre-med, elementary education, psychology, etc. While nobody would argue that these aren't necessary components of our society, they don't fit Holberton's business model--a student with an elementary ed degree doesn't walk out of Holberton and start making close to six figures with which to pay Holberton back.

There's nothing wrong with having a more focused school, of course, but realize that the way Holberton is getting around the chicken-and-egg problem I'm talking about is by picking a field of education where there isn't a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't need a degree to work in computer programming. And in fact, you don't need to take classes at Holberton: I know two different programs that will pay you to learn computer programming, instead of you paying. This has done exactly nothing to solve the problem I'm talking about: it just avoids it.

[hackermailman]

Yes many of these schools exist like 'lambda school' where they siphon your income for x years. Holberton website is filled with dark patterns requiring personal information and logging in to see any fees so if anybody is wondering it's $85k for 2 years, 60+ hours per week (so covering own cost of living for 2 years), and they can siphon your income 17% per month for 42 months so 3.5 years. It's not clear if this is gross or net but it's almost always gross siphoning for these shady schools. There is also absolutely no proof you will be employed after or that anybody will recognize your education as you do not receive credentials.

No regionally accepted credential means don't invest your money at all, ever, no matter what they promise. You go to a plumbing trade school they give you a regionally accepted credential so you can work, never trust these outfits they end up costing the same as a state school so just go to the state school and get your credentials.

If you want to take 2 years off to teach yourself watch MIT free lectures and contribute the entire time to open source software. There you get people auditing your code, experience working as a 'team' or whatever. Nobody takes $85k from you.