[freddie_mercury]

The early hype of MOOCs wasn't "a few people in handful of fields will get up-skilled".

If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential.

Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition).

From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs:

'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.'

Never happened.

'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”'

Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.

[redbluered]

Agarwal said that in public. Behind closed doors, he was completely cynical about impact. His primary goal was financial (for himself).

What happened was primarily due to personalities and misaligned incentives.

[geodel]

Well if that was the case, I'd call him full of shit masquerading as educator.

[geodel]

Exactly.

The hype was massive. Everyone was supposed to be going MOOCs way. It was supposed to restructuring education system grounds up.

Now all I have seen is many did these big data/ data science courses and joined that great enterprise IT boondoggle of data processing/analytics.