Coursera To Offer K-12 Teacher Development Courses 42
An anonymous reader writes "Coursera on Wednesday announced it has partnered with 12 top professional development programs and schools of education to open up training and development courses to teachers worldwide. The massive open online course (MOOC) provider is expanding beyond university courses by offering 28 teaching courses for free, with more to come. It’s worth noting that this is the first time Coursera is partnering with non-degree-bearing institutions. It’s also Coursera’s first foray into early childhood and K-12-level education. The company clearly sees this as a necessary step if it wants to go beyond just students and address the other side of the expensive education equation."
Amazing times (Score:5, Insightful)
We're really living in amazing times.
Most online courses to date have been lacking in one aspect or another, most notably student interest - drop rates of over 95% are common. Teething pains probably, as teachers begin to recognize that a) courses online must be presented in a different way, and b) teaching techniques must be effective (in terms of keeping student interest) when the audience is not captive.
Recently I saw this gem [edx.org], which is extremely good. Good presentation, good technical quality (web form scoring &c), good content, and some experimental techniques in keeping student interest.
While I don't like the techniques used for keeping student interest in this course, they are at least experimenting with new techniques and learning from past mistakes. The quality keeps getting better.
Their business model varies, but one site hopes to provide an MBA ensemble for $50 (Udacity [udacity.com]) and another gets finders fees from companies that hire the top scorers (edX [edx.org]). And of course there's Kahn academy [khanacademy.org], which is turning high-school education upside down.
In a couple of years, you will probably be able to get a complete high-quality education by self-study over the internet for thin money. You'll be able to study as much as you want for whatever topic you want and for as long as you want.
No more massive student loans [google.com] just to get a decent education.
Another example of a moribund business model being overtaken by new technology.
Amazing times indeed.
Re:Not about knowledge... (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're paying for when you take a paid course is individual attention and verification that you passed the exams that the instructor gave you. Coursera is great if you're personally motivated to learn the material, but it's shit if you want any guarantee that the person did the work themselves or took the tests. Yes, it's possible to cheat in regular classes, but it's harder to do so when there's at most a few hundred people in the class rather than the tens of thousands in a free course.
In this case, the correct answer is for the school to just pay the fees associated with teacher training. And leave free alternatives like this to the 2nd and 3rd world where they might not have funding to provide it at all.
Re:Not about knowledge... (Score:2, Insightful)
You do get what you pay for, even if it is simply not having to look harder for the cheaper alternative. Money provides incentive. Someone given little or no incentive will expend little or no effort. Cheaper inputs usually result in an inferior output, otherwise people would quickly stop doing it the inefficient way. Not having perfect information, price is often the best way to evaluate value.
You are also wrong about the answer being a Google away. Without contextual knowledge the person doesn't even know what question needs to be answered or have the ability to understand the answer even if they found it with Google or to be able to evaluate whether the answer they found is actually correct/complete.
Programming ability is worth less on the job market than programming ability and application domain knowledge. Application domain knowledge and programming knowledge are both "simply a Google away" yet are worth 40K per year *each*. We don't care what degree an applicant has, we care how productive they will be. When it comes to hiring people you do get what you pay for. If you pay 40K per year expect to get someone with no domain knowledge and no programming ability. If you pay 80K expect one or the other. If you pay 120K a year, expect both. When your employee gains experience expect them to leave unless you pay them what they could get with that experience elsewhere. It turns out the market does work to set price value of labor. Nobody hires a candidate because they put high salary expectations in their resume. (you should never put salary expecations in your resume) We interview them and evaluate whether the qualifications they listed on their resume are "empty" or backed up with actual knowledge and ability. Usually the advance degree qualification is viewed as equivalent to the same number of years of industry experience in the domain they got the advanced degree in.
Price is market signals giving you information, if you don't understand that you are at a serious disadvantage in the world.