Coursera To Offer K-12 Teacher Development Courses

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."

Not about knowledge...

[Darkness404]

The problem with modern education is its not about knowledge, the answer to virtually any question is simply a Google away, instead its about qualification. Part of qualification is this idea that is still stuck in most of the older generation's mind that you "get what you pay for" and so even though something free might be really good, they believe that it is, by definition, inferior to a paid product. You see this all the time with antivirus software, someone buying a $20 product that is inferior to free stuff like AVG but insisting that their computer is better protected just because they "paid for it".

While its always nice to see information becoming more free, I doubt that it will really revolutionize anything until we have a shift in perspective and those in charge realize that free can often be better than paid.

Re:Amazing times

[Russ1642]

Could do that years ago. There's a whole scene in Good Will Hunting about how he got his advanced education for 45 cents in late charges at the library.

Re:Not about knowledge...

[Em Adespoton]

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.

Actually, the correct answer is to use courseware like this as the core *teaching* component, freeing up resources to manage testing and application training.

Teaching materials should be as low-cost as they can be; it's the training and testing of learned skills that needs some sort of paid adjudicator.

This is something I never understood; when I was in school, there were some teachers who felt like it was their duty to shove the training material down students' throats, and then they turned around and tested the training material instead of the students. Other teachers provided the material, taught the students how to learn from it, and then administered tests that measured the students' ability to handle the knowledge they were supposed to have learned from the teaching material.

In my opinion, the first group wasn't really teaching anything in the first place, and passing tests was as easy (or difficult) as memorizing (not learning) the source material. Cheating in these "courses" was rampant. The paywall did nothing to stop it.

The second group could just as easily have used coursera for the teaching, freeing the teacher up to *teach* students the bits that they were having difficulty grasping. Then, come testing time, the teacher has time to create and administer a test focused on what they expected the students to know -- the coursera tests being a method for the *students* to gauge how likely they were to pass the graded test and figure out where to get help from the teacher, nothing more.

Re: Free Education

[Russ1642]

I think the key to getting accreditation for education is the separation of teaching from testing. They should be completely independent. Many higher level programs operate this way. You can learn in any way you want from private tutors to full university classes, but everyone takes the same tests and is held to the same high standard. I could go on and on about this but I'm sure many out there who have learned under this kind of system will agree that it's superior to the high school/university style of teaching, where teacher's are far more interested in testing students than actually teaching them anything.

Re:could be a great improvement, especially in mat

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if it is the right tool for your kids, but take a look at artofproblemsolving.com - I was lucky enough to benefit from some amazing teachers early on and throughout school, but when I came across them while running a math contest, I came to the conclusion that I really wish they had existed when I was younger. Khan is great for remediation, but AoPS is designed to push the advanced kids to strengthen their foundations and explore all the things left out of the normal K-12 curriculum.