I still doubt that online courses could be ever a replacement for that good old one on one classroom session... the discussions and interactions between good students and professors... I find there's no faster way to learn than when an expert explains something to you in person, you can ask questions there and then... clarify them and move on. In an online lecture if I get stuck... I'll have to pause, clarify my question searching on google(sometimes not easy), then get back to the rest of the lecture.
Pitting online courses against one-on-one sessions with good professors is great if you have that privilege.
I'm currently in Nepal, where I have spent some time teaching kids QBasic, one on one, so they can pass their grade 10 school leaving exam.
You read that right: QBasic. The curriculum and pedagogy here is so ancient, most students would be vastly better off learning from Khan Academy than from their teachers. Lucky students get the hell out of the country rather than study at a university here. Those stuck here would be better served with MOOCs.
It may not but its enabling people to learn new things. The most difficult part which i find if i want to learn things on my own is the direction. Its like when you are reading a book you can not just read different chapters from different places, you may go to other places for references. What online platform like Coursera provides is direction.
P.S. Yeah i also doubt that it could ever be replacement for one on one classroom session.
My thought is that a Ferrari is better than a Toyota. But a Toyota is about 90% as good as a Ferrari and it serves 1000x more people. And in some ways (safety, gas mileage) a Toyota does outperform a Ferrari.
loved your analogy... but you see I use Toyota all the time... just that if I have a choice between a Toyota and a Ferrari, I'll go with Ferrari if I have the resources. Anyways I love Coursera, I am taking a lot of classes there. Remember a lot of quality of a course depends on how well the teacher conveys it whether its a lecture hall or an online course.
From my experience with edX, online courses are the Ferrari in your analogy.
1. It is easier to concentrate on a video of a lecture. My friends aren't sitting next to me, the recorded audio projects the information clearly, and noisy neighbours are no longer an issue. The recorded video means everyone can "sit close" to the lecturer, and the ability to pause, rewind and rewatch lectures means I'm more likely swallow it in it's entirety.
2. The ability to participate from any location and at any time means I'm never late and never hungover.
3. Getting your questions answered via email means it can be read multiple times verbatim. Plus the professor is likely to give you a more in-depth response when he can answer in his own time.
4. My couch, lounge chair, and bath are more comfortable than the lecture hall chairs I've sat on in the past.
I feel it's more appropriate to liken online courses to the electric car. They are a more efficient use of resources, and we'll need them if humans are going to overcome the (frighteningly) vast array of current and future problems.
A lot of people don't realize this, but Coursera is a young startup that just had its first birthday. If you have ideas for how we can make things better, I would love to hear them.
And if you are a hacker, come join us and implement your ideas for millions of students!
I doubt my idea is one that has not been discussed in depth, but I am really disappointed that students must use their name or be anonymous, and cannot create a persona.
For instance, I have a unique name, and I'm also generally private enough not to have ever subscribed to Facebook. I don't really care about anything I've have posted being traced back to me, but I do care about the reverse. I don't want some low-level HR person doing due diligence to take a shortcut and make a decision based on a regionally unpopular position on some political issue.
As such, there are real reasons to use personas, and I believe real reasons to generally minimize exposure of one's identity online. If you later have roles as a public figure, it can be a distraction to have uncontrolled material out there signed with your unique name.
When I'm helping another participant in a course struggle through a problem, or asking my own question that to me will later seem dumb, it's easier to use something more unique than 'anonymous' when having a conversation. Otherwise, I could just not ask dumb questions, but if they really aren't dumb at all, then the answer should be easy to find on Google.
I could use a pseudonym, an email address not linked to me in any other way, and if really paranoid, I could use the Tor network—but I'm not concerned about taking classes in secret, I simply want to participate as much as possible and as effectively as possible while opting out from contributing to the 'portfolio' of discourse attributed to my real-world identity. It would be naïve to pretend that the student dialogs are not interesting data for anyone to harvest regardless of user term, and that they will not eventually be as indexed and searchable as Markmail or Google's archive of Usenet.
Perhaps I'll never even refer to a certificate from a Coursera course I enjoyed, much less feel the need to display it, and I could use a handle rather than my name, but I can't help but suspect that most of the people using 'anonymous' in the forums are doing so for the same reason as me, or even just declining to contribute.
I really believe that it would be a great improvement if, like EdX, the name used in forums was different than the name attached to any certificates. And really, being a global program, and considering the attitudes with regard to academic honesty outside of the US, the certificates may not be very meaningful until there are proctored exams anyway. Furthermore I can't imagine how policing abuses by nicknames is any more difficult than people using 'anonymous', they're both linked to an account that is participating (or suspiciously not participating through quizzes and watching videos).
Thanks for the feedback. Naming policies are a very difficult issue that I know have been debated at the company. I'm just an engineer, but I will forward on your comments.