I am a high school teacher, and I am quite happy to see the availability of some of these courses.
I have a student taking the Intermediate Web Development course from Udacity, and it has had a significant impact on this student. He is learning much more quickly than he could if I was directing his content, but he is still benefiting greatly from having me available to answer questions. To be honest, I am also learning by being exposed to some of what he is doing. For example, I have not used google app engine myself, but I am getting to see how gae compares to heroku, which I am more familiar with.
It is also a good introduction to some of what is expected of people in post-high school education. I definitely intend to steer more students towards some of these courses.
I have a big problem with edx and coursera courses. As I have a need to work a day job, sometimes rushed projects come in, and these two platforms are offering courses with tight schedules. It would be nice if they would adopt Udacity model, which is more loose. Also the same applies for 10gen education of mongodb which is also made into tight schedule.
The schedule of the courses is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the schedule actualy made me do the courses, as opposed to doing them "some day", i.e. never getting around to it.
On the other hand, if you are working full time and have a family, it is a real challenge to fit the required work in.
I have taken two courses from Coursera, Intro to Databases (8 weeks), and Algorithms part 1 (5 weeks). A shorter course is definitely more managable in terms of time-commitment.
I just finished Udacity's CS101 course and the lack of deadlines was good for me. I started it months ago and only found time to finish it over my Christmas break, because just watching the videos took me a whole evening per section, and then there are quizzes and homework. And that's to someone who wasn't new to CS but was doing it mainly as an introduction to Python.
I was somewhat surprised, though, to find that the final exam also has no time limits. I couldn't get one of the 12 exam questions right, but apparently I can come back at any time I feel like another go at turning that last question into a green tick. I'm not even sure if there's anything to stop me reading the "spoiler" forum questions about it first.
The course has been excellent and has some respected names behind it, so I had thought that the transcripts and certificates offered had some sort of credibility, but I guess I was wrong expecting my end grade to be any more credible than how many Codecademy badges I have. (Codecademy is good fun too!)
> I'm not even sure if there's anything to stop me reading the "spoiler" forum questions about it first.
There isn't, except your own drive.
> I had thought that the transcripts and certificates offered had some sort of credibility
The certificates as they are now are more for your self as a proof of accomplishment thing. I have heard that they may be moving towards a real closed exam provided by something like Prometric, like any number of IT certifications, that would be something that could be pointed to in a more credible manner.
It is worth noting that the material stays online, so you can always learn at your own pace - just without the certificate. I agree that it can be difficult to fit to a schedule, but one other advantage is that with a schedule the community taking the course can grow and learn at roughly the same pace, and it can help foster further discussion. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
For anyone who has taken both 'tight schedule' and 'anytime' MOOCs -- if possible, preferably relating to the same subject and difficulty -- are there any differences between the two aside from scheduling? For instance, I would imagine the discussion boards are more active at a given moment for a 'tight schedule' course, but there may be more discussions on an 'anytime' course due to accumulation.
I can totally understand as I have experienced the exact same thing. But... I do believe that this is the way to go, because, imo the difficult part for a working professional is to get into a schedule.
I am in the same boat, and in the end, I simply ended up becoming a statistic (dropped out). I agree with you on the Udacity point. I found the lack of tight schedule a blessing, actually.
I've just finished Udacity CS101 and am about to finish edX 6.00x (both are intro to cs courses).
I've done a lot of thought and research into MOOCs and normal CS bachelor's programs. Initially I was really excited about getting a CS BS for free, online. The savings would be about $40000 compared with going to my local state school.
But the luster soon dulled once I realized that it will be some time before Universities accept MOOC certificates as credit (or never). So my self-study CS degree is really nothing more than cracking open textbooks and watching youtube videos as far as an employer is concerned.
We're at a strange impasse where MOOCs are free but are limited by the weakness of being no-credit, and Universities are outrageously expensive but provide the value of being for-credit.
Up until a week ago I had signed up for 7 or 8 courses, excited to further my CS education. I've since decided to cancel them all. Coursera's Data Structures course doesn't even give you a certificate! Even if you ace the course you get nada. zip. zilch.
Sorry but that's just too much of a downside for me. If you're going to spend 10 hours a week for 3 months (what's that.. 100-120 hours) you might as well get credit for it. Sad but that's how this world works. Either University prices need to be cut in half or MOOC certificates need to count for something. Something has to give. Until then I will be wary about putting my time into MOOCs.
The good thing is that with the flood of students to MOOC education, employers will soon be forced to take note of the courses these MOOC students have taken. This change in attitude will take some time to effect - 10 years before significant attitude shift and then 20-30 years before a complete attitude shift.
I'd rather not wait that long, but I may not have a choice, like many other people. The strange thing is that it's rational to eschew university and study MOOCs, but it's also rational to bite the high university tuition costs and get the degree. It's a very, very interesting time for education.
For what it's worth, in my experience with programming jobs, no one really cares what your credentials are. Obviously, some places will, but you absolutely could get a job on skill alone. When I've been involved in hiring, no one paid much attention to the applicant's school - it was a side note, followed by the question, "Okay, so what can they actually do?" It's well known among developers that a lot of people with degrees are actually worthless, and many self-taught people are amazing.
It's extremely difficult to judge a software development candidate's abilities from a short interview. Every company I've worked for has used the school/degree/GPA as filtering criteria. Otherwise, it would be impossible to interview every candidate that applies for a job. This is most true for candidates without experience -- a university degree essentially becomes a proxy for ability.
With programming,the self-taught are wonderful. MOOCs are a place for those with motivation to start their learning journey. The continuity and application of that learning comes from individual drive.
You still need to join a University for the credit to be worth something. So maybe students will be able to transfer in many credits, kind of like APs.
FWIW, my state school requires 45 credits to be taken at the Uni for a bachelor's in CS so the announcement is not too too helpful for me.
> You still need to join a University for the credit to be worth something. So maybe students will be able to transfer in many credits, kind of like APs.
This is in fact exactly what I think people should do. MOOCs are not an either-or proposition. Many people do not know this, but you can take an AP exams without having actually taken the course [1]. If you do well on the AP exam, it will count as college credit. Good scores on all of the relevent AP exams can easily shave off a year, and possibly a little more.
I see MOOCs as an avenue for self-study that allows you to obtain most or the majority of your college course credits relatively inexpensively by augmenting what you have learned in the MOOC alongside traditional (and accepted) examination procedures. Then, the University environment can be better utilized for where it's really needed -- for access to research facilities, computational equipment, labs, and other technologies are extremely expensive to obtain as a single individual.
In addition, almost every University (though it's not well-advertised) offers credit-by-examination or some variation of it to skip courses. I know of two rare students from Georgia Tech who were able to obtain a 4-year BS in Computer Science in roughly 2-years through this approach. It turns out to be an extraordinary difficult feat to do, since academic performance is both a function of raw knowledge well as experience.
> I've realized there's no difference between MOOC and self-studying a textbook if the MOOCs don't provide credit.
MOOC is curated - it is much easier to learn via a MOOC than self study. THe credit/certs is only to "prove" to someone else who don't care about your actual person that you have the said skills. credit/certs are a poor proxy for skill and competency imho.
University is not about learning. Learning tends to be a means to an end to most people who attend. The end being networking and a diploma. People cheat all the time to get ahead in University, this is antithetical to learning.
MOOCs are great learning tools. However, they generally don't provide you with networking or a diploma. You can cheat doing an online, not-for-credit course, but that undermines the only benefit you get from it.
I personally think that they are great, because I can afford to value learning more than certification. However, if what you are looking for is a way to prove you're an ideal employee, I don't know if they can ever take the place of the social benefits of a flesh-based university.
I think that the discrepancy comes from the idea that University student's goal is to learn, and a University's goal is to teach. It's not. A student's goal is to get a degree and meet smart people (while learning). A University's goal is to make relationships with smart and influential people and secure funding (while teaching). The quality of teaching is a measure of prestige which attracts the smart and influential people: The cost of tuition is a filter to try and discourage any but the wealthiest (this more influential) students. The existence of scholarships are to make exceptions for the smartest students.
If you want to simply learn a subject, you have a lot of opportunities outside of a University degree structure. Auditing courses, Online courses, Self-study, work experience, non-university teaching, etc. But if you were to ask a typical university student if they would give up the possibility of earning a bachelor's degree, however they could go to school and not pay tuition but not be allowed to use University facilities outside of attending lectures, I'd wager most would turn you down.
In my view, MOOCs are really revolutionizing education because they provide options for smart willing people that are locationally or financially disadvantaged to learn from top tier professors/institutions.
Absolutely. Every time the cost of tertiary education comes up on HN (and elsewhere online) a lot of people reccommend doing the first year or two at a community college and then going to a good state college as a transfer.
The problem with that is not everyone has access to a good community college. If your local CCs focus on remedial education for people who are barely ready for 10th grade, let alone college, then the quality of instruction, broadness of course catalog, and peer group will reflect that.
I think one possible future for education in CS might be for people to combine electives, pre-requisites, and any remedial classes at a CC with low-level in-major classes from an MOOC.
That would reserve the expensive on-campus years of a degree for a combination of seminars, small tutorial sessions, and project work.
The most recent article on the list also notes, correctly, that at many less prestigious universities students already spend most of their time in large lectures with little faculty contact. It's not really honest to say that an MOOC can't replace contact with highly qualified faculty when most students in the American system are not getting that contact anyway.
Finally, that same article also covers the fate of people who are culturally rather than financially disadvantaged. Students who don't know how to learn, how to schedule their own time, or how to choose courses. I'm torn on this, on the one hand you could say that this is the fault of poor secondary education and that universities shouldn't have to deal with it at all. The former is certainly true but I think it's a bit of a cop-out for tertiary education to collectively shrug their shoulders and write those students off as not college-ready.
I do think that colleges play a factor in filtering for their students a general idea of what they should know and be able to do before they get a degree. I don't see any reason why there won't be a time in the future when someone puts together a course sequence online that leads to a full degree.
This is right. The best thing MOOCs have going for them are their prices. And it gets more compelling every year as traditional universities continue to price more and more students out of the market.
A lot of people use MOOCs at work. Even though some companies offer tuition reimbursement, it's usually partial and very few companies allot working time for coursework, and most working professionals are more time-poor than cash-poor. With MOOCs, people can usually sneak away 1-2+ hours per day on education and no one needs to know.
This is the first time I have heard any complaints about the acronym. Not that I particularly like it myself, but I don't think it's a big deal. The world does not revolve around NYC.
I'm in my third year as an undergrad at Yale. I have to say, all the talk of MOOCs "disrupting higher education" is a bit misleading. Top universities are not going anywhere, nor is their prestige. If that were the case, why would MIT/Harvard/Stanford/Yale publish their courses in this manner? They wouldn't.
The reason top universities are not only willing to publicly release their courses, but competing with each other to do so, is simple. The mission of these universities is to educate. Publishing courses as MOOCs accomplishes enables that mission. It also has the added benefit of creating publicity for the school.
To say that MOOCs are "disrupting higher education" implies that the universities are commoditizing their education. They are not. They are commoditizing the academic portion of their education. In my experience at Yale, the academic portion of my education has accounted for no more than 10% of it. Academics are not what universities are in the business of teaching. That's why you can't replace a university education with a set of online courses.
My daily life consists of no more than 2 hours of class. Yet I wake up at 9 and go to bed at 12. That's 13/15 hours in the day NOT spent in class. During that time is when I'm reaping the benefits of a Yale education. They are largely intangible, but very obvious in retrospect. They are skills for navigating through life. Yale teaches you strong social skills, encourages you to step outside your comfort zone, introduces you to what can only be described as an absurd network of people, and how to manage all of that in the course of a day. I've learned more about myself the past three years than I ever could have through online courses. And THAT is why MOOCs will never disrupt the traditional higher education system.
Yale, Harvard, and MIT don't need to worry (for now, anyway). The universities that need to worry are the Southeast Directional States, particularly the ones that try to do undergraduate education on the cheap. A MOOC isn't really that much different from a lecture class with 1,000 students. In both cases, your interaction with the professor is going to be minimal.
Top universities are not going anywhere, nor is their
prestige. If that were the case, why would MIT/Harvard
/Stanford/Yale publish their courses in this manner? They
wouldn't.
Do you think, if university administrators thought online courses could bring quality education to billions of people worldwide while making their costly offline courses obsolete, they would move to block academics from experimenting with online courses? That's a rather cynical view, don't you think?
Elite universities tend to teach a lot more classes in small groups anyway, an experience that can't really be replicated online the way a 200 person lecture can.
There is something very interesting to me about the rise of these courses. Everyone I've heard is expecting the jobs of the future to require higher order thinking skills: creativity, analytics, etc. Another way to put it would be thing that are on the higher end of [Bloom's Taxonomy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooms_Taxonomy)
On the other hand, these courses are aimed at the opposite end of the taxonomy: remembering, recalling, etc. There are a few conclusions I can draw from this:
1) There is an upper limit on the possible effectiveness of purely technology driven education.
2) That ceiling will remain in place until there is an proven method of scaling up assessment of creativity and other higher order skills.
3) If you can solve 2, you're going to be very, very rich.
I think that by their nature, things like creativity are not easily assessed in a fast standardised way. These skills are usually assessed by their application - if someone produces good creative and analytical work then I can count on them having those skills. That's why artists have portfolios and hackers have GitHub accounts, right?
Of course the issue is that hiring people with those skills is harder because you can't screen them so easily - it requires people with skills equal to or greater than the applicant to spend considerable time evaluating their work product. That costs a lot more than just giving HR a minimum GPA for graduate hires.
so instead of hiring an employee, you should be putting out RFP (request for proposals), which outlines what you want produced (creative things, a film, a game, or an application for your business). You also show your budget, and you ought to get proposals, and you pick the "best" one.
I really like how The Chronicle has organized this web page about MOOCs by (a) using the timeline as the central way of ordering content and (b) providing an overview/FAQ about MOOCs on the left.
For my parents' generation, the way you showed ambition and competence at work was, after you finished your assigned stuff, to go to your boss and ask for more. If you were good, you were always asking for more things to do. This was inefficient, because it usually meant you were putting 100% CPU into grunt work for 4 years, and if the company turned on you and fired you mid-climb, you would have gained no real skills in that time.
Ambitious people don't do that anymore. They don't give their surplus time back to the boss and ask for more work. It's the mediocre, clueless ones who do that. The ambitious people use surplus time to learn the skills that will help them advance. Having a Library of Alexandria at every desk means that ambitious people can get a high-quality education and no one has to know.
I don't believe that MOOCs will obsolete the traditional liberal arts education, which is about a lot more than lecture, but MOOCs are another step, and a powerful one, in bringing through this transition in the workplace. More on this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs-disrupt...
> bringing through this transition in the workplace
God I hope not. I hope that we can as a society, move beyond the idea that if it doesn't have an application in the workplace or if you can't make money from it, it is not worth while. There is no real difference to asking for more grunt work and spending your free time to be able to do different grunt work for someone else somewhere down the line.
I do Udacity and Coursera courses for my self, for my own benefit. I'm a system administrator. I do programming courses for fun, I'm doing Introduction to Astronomy for fun. The astronomy won't help in my job, ever. The vast majority of the programming ones, though tangentially related to my job, by and large won't help there either. It doesn't matter, I didn't do them to be a better worker. I did them to enrich myself.
Work, your job, is something you do to enable you to enjoy life. Don't make it your life.
However, work is a fact of life. It can be enjoyable, or it can be drudgery. Generally, the more skills you have, the more leverage you have to push it toward the "enjoyable" end of the spectrum. If I'm going to be spending 45 hours, or even 20 hours, per week on something, I'd rather push the situation to one in which I can enjoy that time and have some autonomy. I don't mind working hard, but I don't like being subordinate, and that's what happens when you have no leverage.
Much of what inspires me to study advanced CS at 5:30 am is workplace-agnostic intellectual interest, but part of it is also the intention of qualifying myself for much better work than what I've been doing for the past few years.
I also think that there's an defeatist attitude that a lot of people take that Work Sucks because, in most jobs, it does. It doesn't have to be that way, though, and if the disproportionate leverage held by top-tier technologists continues to grow, we'll be able to build a dramatically better world-- one in which most people will be able to work 500 hours (or less) per year instead of 2000, and have 1500 more to enjoy.
If Work is going to be with us for the near future, we might as well do what we can to improve it.
It's still the case that it's a good career move to ask for more work, the key is asking for the right work. I'm not going to volunteer for photocopying duty, but any opportunity to do mentoring, supervising, or other managerial activities I'll take because those are the strengths I'm currently looking to reinforce.
Essentially you want to maneuvre your boss into assigning you to work on things which are on-the-job training for the work you want to do.
I have a student taking the Intermediate Web Development course from Udacity, and it has had a significant impact on this student. He is learning much more quickly than he could if I was directing his content, but he is still benefiting greatly from having me available to answer questions. To be honest, I am also learning by being exposed to some of what he is doing. For example, I have not used google app engine myself, but I am getting to see how gae compares to heroku, which I am more familiar with.
It is also a good introduction to some of what is expected of people in post-high school education. I definitely intend to steer more students towards some of these courses.