EdX Drops Plans To Connect MOOC Students With Employers 59
First time accepted submitter cranky_chemist writes "MOOC provider edX plans to abandon a program that allowed companies to mine their massive open online courses for talent after a pilot program in which none of 868 students were hired failed. edX cited HR departments for the program's demise, stating 'Existing HR departments want to go for traditional degree programs and filter out nontraditional candidates.'"
Not Surprising (Score:1)
This is not surprising at all. Online access to education is mostly good as a supplement to skills, not as a means to get a qualification or a job.
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This is not surprising at all. Online access to education is mostly good as a supplement to skills, not as a means to get a qualification or a job.
I have a similar attitude towards traditional education as well.
Don't get me wrong, learning theory in a classroom is important. But it's not a substitute for good ol' fashioned practical experience.
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Classroom learning == "sage on the stage".
It's nothing more than the path of least resistance and highest convenience for researchers who are forced to show up at least a few times a year but whose interests are just elsewhere. That's why it is the way it is.
Trying going to university and changing the way they do things, putting courses online or REALLY being innovative about how people learn and interact.
I did in 1999. They took me apart- kicked me out of labs, literally hounded me out of school. My sin? I
They're called "flipped classrooms" (Score:3)
Trying going to university and changing the way they do things, putting courses online or REALLY being innovative about how people learn and interact. I did in 1999. They took me apart- kicked me out of labs, literally hounded me out of school. My sin? I wanted to pout all my major's courses online so that profs wouldn't have to teach them over and over again and people could spend classrom time asking custom questions, which themselves would be recorded for posterity.
If it makes you feel better, in the years since you left the process you're describing has become a major educational trend [wikipedia.org]. And I agree it's an interesting model.
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It does make me feel better, but- and here I am being extremely personal and not at all objective- those are MY ideas MY insight . When I saw Khan academy I just thought *what took you so long* but also *is that it? *
There's so so so much more that could be done. I am doing it. Maybe someone will get there before me but given that I've left school, had a full career, and finally turned back on what is STILL a blank space for whatever reason I think I just have to do this because surprisingly things obvi
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TL:DR I got kicked out of college for videotaping the lectures without permission.
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Jesus. Sorry for you. I actually had not just permission but a contract that this would be my independent senior project. Then, one day, out of the blue for no reason given they kicked me out of the only lab capable (in those days) of processing video. The lab was "private" (they said) and if one of the PIs didn't want you there, they agreed the person was out. I never met or interacted with the PI who I was told didn't want me there. No reason was given. Nice huh? "Private" entities (a couple guys) using p
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The problem is that involves all that messy, yucky face-to-face human contact. Why can't you join some open source project via the internet to get experience, or start your own?
The real problem is the assumption that employment is the goal. The goal should be the advance of knowledge and technology. Individuals can advance knowledge and technology without being employed; MOOCs should focus on that.
First, get rid of the honor code, which is designed with employers and credentials in mind. Forget the employer
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You're not really telling the whole story; you're painting an attractive picture which is not, let it be said, completely false either.
First not everyone , by def. can "participate" in research. PIs basically think of undergrads as a waste of their time and an impediment to their career. That's not a moral judgment (although maybe it's that also) it's a fact relayed to me numerous times by the PIs themselves. A few are tolerated but everyone doing it? Never going to happen. Are the ones who can't "join" les
Talky Tina (Score:2)
...who are like the scary talking doll in some nameless horror flick I once saw whose line was:
"Hi. My name's Tiny Tina, and you better be nice to me".
It was "Talky Tina", and it was an episode of Twilight Zone [wikipedia.org].
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It sounds like you've had a particularly horrendous experience with a particularly terrible administrative culture/hierarchy at one university. I can't argue that your experience didn't happen, or that other students won't face the same. Nonetheless, please be aware that not every university (or even departments within a university, and research groups within a department) is identical to yours --- some places are quite a bit more pleasant, with ample opportunities for interested students (including strong
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I just don't buy this. Medical field? Maybe. Programming? Not a chance. The law distinguishes this only where the law creates an accreditation . Hair stylist spring to mind. If an employee dumps toxic waste in the river, the employer is held accountable irrespective of the qualifications or non qualifications of the employee. So also the other way.
People form guilds to gate competition. Some of those guilds have morphed into legally sanctioned licenses. Aside from that, very many CEOs were drop outs even i
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Indeed, that is our experience (at a university) as well.
Students taking online courses through the university are expected to be as proficient as the regular students - if they aren't we need to fail them or employers lose faith in our degrees.
If you already have a degree (or most of a degree) and a job then online courses can be a great way to augment your skillset, even if you never do the the homework watching the lectures will tell you a lot of stuff you'll need to look up and learn if a particular ty
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No no no that's the first 12 years of school and everything else in a child's life. By the time they're 18, they're properly broken except for the whole sex-drive thing of course, but that's what employers' 14 hour days are for, which, by the way, is an act of pure unadulterated jealousy and nothing more. Everyone in every industry knows the 8 hours beyond the first 6 only create work that has to be undone the next day.
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Also not surprising since they started with companies like Amazon and Google. I doubt they have any problem finding enough qualified candidates from more traditional routes.
FTFY (Score:2)
'Existing HR departments want to go for proven degree programs and filter out unproven candidates.'"
HR department don't like to be product testers.
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The poor.
News at 11 (Score:1)
Degrees are certifiably worthless now? (Score:2, Informative)
That summary is extremely clumsily written. "...none of them were hired failed"? What kind of gibberish is that?
And whats the big deal about filtering by which method a degree was obtained? Is a degree somehow better if its obtained by physically sitting in a classroom with 30+ other people? The content is the same, the students learn the same material to qualify them in a given field (which is what a degree certifies). Are they admitting that degrees are basically worthless, since something as trivial
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Nonsense. You can interact with others with or without a degree. Degrees are merely pieces of paper, and I've found that hiring self-taught candidates leads to much, much better results than hiring the trash that comes from college (though there are good college-educated students, but that's in spite of college, not because of it).
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Peer interaction wasn't a requirement for my bachelor's degree.
I don't think I saw it in the syllabus for any of the majors.
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It seemed like a perfectly cromulent summary to me.
nose peas for gasping Aspers (Score:2)
"What kind of gibberish is that?" It's unemployable gibberish. To start with:
It still sucks. No amount of rephrasing will fix it. It's trying to create an infantile shock reaction while tiptoeing around the essential factoid:
We don't want to think, we just want
Higher ed- still looking for a business model (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah now that students are wised up to the Bad Deal http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815 [rollingstone.com]
student loans are and are avoid college unless they can pay (which after decades of tuition inflation, they can't) they really have no means to support themselves except through raiding the ol' endowment , which can last at best another 7-10 years even in the case of multi-billion dollar endowments.
They can see online learning is going to rip them a new one, so thy're trying to get out ahead o fit,. now how to make money from it so things can be business as usual (hint: you can't!). Hey, maybe if we cut ourselves a slice of that Monster pie, we can keep this thing going.
Here's a dose of reality. For decades and decades you've ripped people off imposing double and triple inflation rates tuition increases with not a thought to the financial burden you were imposing on "people barely not children" and co-signing grandmas. Then you lobbied congress to make student loans unbankruptable just to keep your gravy train going. You discouraged stymied and thwarted every attempt to put your courses online or bring costs under control right up until Kahn Academy proved it was so simple it could be done by one guy with a magic marker.
Now you're all about it!
But the math still doesn't add up, does it? No , it really doesn't. You're still just fucked.
Sometimes in life, the new things just don't include the old things in any way at all.
And you thought you were bigger than history and changing times.
I just want to make sure that the state doesn't waste our precious taxpayer money making good on pension obligations when you-all go bankrupt, which can't be too soon.
Set a course for mediocrity captain! (Score:3)
Schooling (Score:1)
No clear business plan (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money (such as this one [chronicle.com]). Schools join the consortium by putting up more investment money [bloomberg.com].
They're burning through this money with no clear business plan; specifically, they don't have a product to sell.
On top of this, edX at least seems unconcerned with the quality of their offerings. For example, their course offerings aren't searchable by keyword (that I can determine [edx.org]), you have to slog through the entire catalog to see if they have something with, for example, "neuroscience" in the title. Having found a neuroscience course [edx.org], the introductory video [youtube.com] tells the prospective student nothing about the course - it's completely useless.
Pointing this out to them, they said that there's nothing edX can do - Harvard is responsible for that course, and edX is only being used as a marketing vehicle.
Other players are making innovative changes in infrastructure [hackaday.com] and technique [huffingtonpost.com]. None of this is happening at edX or Coursera - it's all videotaped traditional lectures. There's nothing that distinguishes the big MOOC product in a business sense; ie, nothing that says "our product is better for *this* reason".
As an outside observer, the big MOOC players appear to be living a bubble similar to the 2001 tech bubble: lots of hype with no clear business plan.
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As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money
It's called "VC fumes".
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Investors demand that edX vacate the higher educational "market" and focus exclusively on corporate training in five... four... three... two....
US employers can't use skills testing anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
The court case is "Griggs vs. Duke Power"
For an explanation, see-
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=1749 [popecenter.org]
The only kind of testing that US companies can use now without fear of discrimination lawsuits, is educational requirements. Ridiculous but true.
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This seems to me to be a case of Duke power getting unlucky. There's probably a larger list of companies that got away with it. Every business screens its applicants. A high school degree isn't really necessary for most jobs out there, but it is a pretty good filter for fuckups.
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Meanwhile all these filtered "fuckups" go on to become a growing and ever more insidious underclass of poverty and crime.
Great system you've got going there, can't see it working out for you.
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What? I got to learn neural networks from Greg Hinton, and Quantum Computation from Umesh Vazirani, and got to interact with TAs and other students much more than I did in any traditional classroom.
Gary Burton in the Jazz Improvisation MOOC noted that in classes he teaches in physical classrooms, the students rarely talk to each other outside of class. But in MOOCs there is a lot of peer interaction on the forums.
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Re:We already have "democratised education" (Score:4, Insightful)
The article makes a lot of incorrect assumptions. For example: "I’ve noticed that proponents of MOOCs tend to not be in higher education." And yet the founders of MOOCs are in higher education: Andrew Ng, Sebastian Thrun, Anant Agarwal.
Another assumption: "MOOCs rely on automated grading to evaluate student progress." There are other methods, i.e. peer review. I find reviewing others' assignments, on which I've worked myself, very educational.
The comparison to correspondence courses is misguided, since MOOCs allow for real-time interaction with other students via the forums, and immediate feedback on assignments. So while I'm interested in a question, while it's fresh in my mind and perhaps I was debating which of two answers to choose, I can get the instructor's idea of what the answer should be right away. Then if they aren't too strict about enforcing the ridiculous honor code I can challenge the instructor's idea, if I want, on the forums.
The author assumes that MOOCs can't provide "the skills that we actually want students to gain in a liberal arts environment: creativity, problem solving, and critical thinking." But I've found a lot of all three in the forums. In physical classrooms, I didn't find very much, because there were too many distractions involved with what clothes I was wearing, who was sitting next to me, not being able to see the blackboard, missing something the instructor said, waiting while the instructor erased the board, etc.
Point 3 about credentialing reinforces the idea that what universities are really selling with their degrees is the assurance that the graduated student is properly submissive to authority and will conform to whatever arbitrary, ethically-challenged commands a greedy, selfish, control-freak boss throws his way.
The article's discussion of MOOC forums is contrary to my experience. I have found very good and creative discussions in the forums, and participation by the instructors (not in all classes, but in quite a few). Some TAs are also very active and helpful and can clear up mistakes made in the videos, for example. The author's point about there not being enough qualified people in advanced topics, again, does not agree with my experience. I find that there are a lot of very advanced students taking these classes, with advanced degrees in the subject, and very willing to help others.
As for point 5, I rarely felt I got individual attention from any physical class I took. I feel much less constrained to ask questions on a discussion forum than I ever felt in a classroom or instructor's office.
In conclusion, I think you discount unfairly a lot of learners.
So they like discrimination some should sue (Score:2)
as there are nontraditional candidates who have disability who do better in more hands on learning.