[__rito__]

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype.

I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs.

A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them.

It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialism that is behind MOOCs not reaching their full potential.

Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.

I did projects with skills that I learned via MOOCs, I answered questions in interviews with the knowledge that I started getting from MOOCs. But it was my Master’s in CS which ultimately mattered in my getting interviews. In that degree, they still teach GOFAI, "soft computig", and fuzzy set theory, "expert systems", and more things from the 80s.

MOOCs matter, MOOCs are loved and studied by a serious set of students and professionals. But they still can't get you interviews for most roles in most companies. In frontier AI labs, they are now basically treating PhDs as the minimum qualification for most roles.

MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative".

I know the arguments about making hiring easier for companies, etc.

[cortesoft]

> Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.

What hiring companies want is to get good employees who can do the job they are supposed to do, and they want to have as low a false positive rate as possible (hiring someone who can't do the job is very expensive).

I am not a hiring expert, but they probably get a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.

Companies don't really care about false negative rates (not hiring a person who would do the job well) as long as they are still able to hire someone else who can't also do the job well. It sucks for the person who isn't hired, but not for the company.

[RHSeeger]

- a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.

- don't really care about false negative rates

That pretty much sums it up right there. And it's not hard at all to see _why_ this is the case.

[rustystump]

Is there data that backs this? In my anecdotal experience it is all over the place. Unless i specifically know a given program it is a total crapshoot on if it means anything.

I find pedigree to be about predictive of performance as a d20 toss.

[Aurornis]

I doubt you’ll find any public data on this because internal hiring success data is rarely ever released and MOOCs are already a rare resume item.

In my experience with hiring, though, it tracks. The number of times I’ve seen a MOOC on a resume is already a small number. Of those, it was usually 1-3 courses, not an entire program. Taking a couple courses does not compare to the repetition and layered learning of an entire program.

If someone showed up with an entire MOOC learning program and certificate of completion that I could verify then I would look into it. In my experience you don’t see this. You see people listing a couple MOOC courses right next to their other certifications. When you ask them questions about the topic they usually don’t remember much because it was a one-time course they took.

[__rito__]

I have been on the hiring side, too. And the difference between a good enough college and an elite college is the density of really good students.

If you have a fraction:

    really good students
    --------------------
     all students in CS

Then this number tends to be much higher in elite colleges than good enough colleges.

This is my personal experience.

(Past) company did hire from non-elite colleges in case-by-case basis, but one time we wanted 4-5 freshers, we did go to the elite college.

All students of elite colleges aren't better than all students of good enough colleges, but the fraction is what is different.

In a a typical CS dept of 50 students, you can find 40-45 really good ones in elite colleges versus 3-8 in good-enough colleges.

[gopher_space]

Nobody gets in trouble for a bad hire from a good school, and nobody wants to read your resume. End of story.

There aren’t any metrics in this area that weren’t pulled out of someone’s ass, and we know this because collecting them correctly is prohibitively expensive and immune to automation.

[j45]

MOOC was a fancy academic term for lots of videos, often long, maybe interspersed with questions.

Starting was fun, finishing was another thing. Credentialing another.

They helped get a lot of content out in the open.

The sharing of knowledge is great and should continue, hopefully with more modern digital interactions of 2025.

[ozgung]

Learning Neural Networks from Hinton was transformative for me. It must be transformative for the industry, they still use Coursera lecture notes for citing RMSprop. I completed the very first MOOC offerings in Fall 2011, Machine Learning by Andrew Ng, and AI by Norvig and Thrun. It’s the first time ML “clicked” for me although I had took ML course in Master’s before. Sadly no one cares about my “Statement of Accomplishment”s when hiring. I carry them with pride, knowing they effectively taught me timely and relevant knowledge from the best experts in the world.

[77pt77]

> MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative".

I remember on one of the first of these courses (AI in Berkley?), people were incensed that they would not get an official degree/certificate from the university.

Some were really mad, as if they had been defrauded or something.

Your point about certification is accurate, but I want to add another nuance.

Even if you manage to get a degree from a "good"/prestigious place, if you are "the wrong kind of person" that will only be held against you.

It's like succeeding at that is a violation of natural law and you need to be punished for the violation. It's almost religious and deeply guttural.

Of course that in places like the states, those people usually don't even get the change to graduate from those places since some excuse will be concocted during the application process.

MOOCs suffer from the online version of that.

However in places where admission is "blind" and the cost free or low this is very common.

[__rito__]

Thank you for adding the nuance to the conversation, although I would have liked some elaboration on that.

Indian IITs (and other double-I institutions or similar) offer official certificates after MOOCs [0] and they are valued in regular colleges, and engineering students are often mandated to complete a MOOC or two every semester. The difference is that the final test is a proctored, on-site exam. The tests are held in major cities across India, and also outside India in places like UAE, for example.

Most MOOCs in the NPTEL platforms are boring traditional lectures, but some are extraordinarily good and at par with what Andrew Ng, Alfredo Canziani, Karpathy, or Jeremy Howard can offer. For example: Discrete Mathematics from IIT-R [1].

[0]: https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/

[1]: https://nptel.ac.in/courses/106106183

[vintermann]

I have also taken many Coursera courses, and paid for them too. I was considering taking another, but I can't reward this sort of "leadership". Congratulations, they sold out on all their promises and in return they're about as profitable as a mid-sized construction company?

It's true, I took MOOCs because I wanted to learn things, and they were actually good at that. It was actually damn impressive how e.g. Andrew Ng's courses stripped away all difficulty which was not related to the thing you're actually trying to learn. The impact of that when you're self-directed is hard to overstate - nothing kills motivation like getting bogged down in getting software to work or confirming to some professor's favorite citation style.

Yet they seem to not understand that. They're all about my "career goals", they can't seem to comprehend that I would be there for any reason but impressing a fortune 500 company (which, from what I understand, it never does anyway).

[loco5niner]

Same here. Finally got a dev job a few years after graduating with my Computer Science degree when a boss noticed I was taking a MOOC during my slack time. Graduated just after the dot com crash.

[Aurornis]

> I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs.

> A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs.

MOOCs are great and I agree: A lot of people have benefited.

The only disappointment is relative to the impossible hype cycle that was happening when MOOCs first entered the scene. You couldn’t open a MOOC relayed article or thread without some speculation that this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen, but MOOCs have been quite valuable on their own when well executed.

The primary disappointment I’ve seen is the half-baked courses that have been put out there. The first MOOC I tried was great and well run. The next two or three felt like they assigned some undergrad student a make-work project to put some old course materials on a website but they left out key parts. I remember it almost felt intentional, like someone didn’t want to put too much of the material online or the professor had objected to sharing their materials. They just wanted to say they got in on the MOOC train.

The later generation of courses that were made for the Internet were far better executed, of course, but they weren’t as plentiful and widespread as the hype predicted.

[t_mann]

> this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen

Maybe a bit early to declare that, as the wave of college closures has shown no signs of slowing after the Covid years [0] and is expected to accelerate further [1]?

[0] https://www.2adays.com/blog/college-shutdown-surge-update-th...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91245055/higher-education-crisis...

[vintermann]

It isn't MOOCs which is killing them in any case, though. Or do you disagree?

[t_mann]

Depends on whether we're talking about MOOCs in a narrow sense or online learning more generally.

[vintermann]

So you think online learning is killing college? That doesn't sound very likely to me. Why do you think it is?

[t_mann]

It's a factor, together with high tuition fees, demographic changes, changing attitudes about credentialism (the political tide turning against liberal elite institutions), the cheap 24/7 availability of excellent learning materials online might kill "college as we know it" (in the US). US college is much more than education, it's a lifestyle, with lavish amenities, extracurriculars, varsity sports, all sorts of counselling. It's a bit of an anomaly, most universities globally are much more bare-bone. If US students start value shopping, the US college landscape might start to look more like that.

[__rito__]

This makes sense.

But if we start benchmarking the effects of anything against its its Sillicon Valley-flavored hype, then, every tech/X-train will be judged as underwhelming, not reaching its "potential".

[fc417fc802]

I never liked MOOCs because I didn't see the value add over youtube. At the end of the day I just want free and unfettered access the full list of video lectures. Accounts, course enrollment, fixed sequences, it's all just friction that gets in the way of actual learning.

They also (at least in my experience) try to force you to watch via the browser. It's far more ergonomic for me to yt-dlp a full playlist and watch it locally.

Luckily MIT OCW exists and an almost unimaginably wide variety of educational material is constantly being dumped on youtube.

[__rito__]

YouTube + a maintained webpage with slides, assignments, problem sets, midterm and final papers etc. is a fine combination.

MIT OCW is great in this regard.

But can't say that I didn't appreciate the interactive quizzes in MOOC platforms. They are really effective for me.

Fill-in-the-blanks type programming assignments are useless. But the written code can teach you.

In-video quizzes in Coursera is also good for learning, since they ask you something that you should be able to solve with video content up to time t, but they explain it later at t+1. I think the co-founder also mentions this in her TED talk. This is good. I apply it when I am teaching someone in-person.

I also did a lot of online group-studies. These are really really great. All you need is a Discord server or email group, and Google Meet. This approach is better than the usual MOOC setup.

I also deeply value cohort-based MOOCs with video meetings (like Neuromatch Academy) or without (like Complexity Explorer).

And I agree with your sentiment against 2-4 minute videos; slow web design, sometimes requiring interventions with mouse is not something I cherish in some MOOCs.

[kijin]

I could tolerate the accounts, sequences, and restricted environments if they were required for an actual diploma that is widely recognized in society. But they're not. The MOOCs are just following somebody's playbook for maximizing engagement or whatever.

[__rito__]

Didn’t notice the double-l in 'untill' till now. ;)

Edit window is gone.

[zaptheimpaler]

Yeah its infuriating to see free high quality education blamed over shitty corporate recruiting and assessment practices. If companies (particularly outside tech) did anything at all to improve hiring practices and actually evaluate skills objectively, Coursera would be very valuable. Even if this didn't happen, it was a great learning platform. Now that Coursera has replaced their CEO with an Amazon hire, it's dead now. Late-stage capitalism claims another victim.