The End of College? Not So Fast 145
An anonymous reader writes: The advent of MOOCs, Khan Academy, and the hundreds of other learning sites that have popped up caused many people to predict the decline of expensive, four-year universities. But Donald Heller writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that most of the people making these claims don't have a good understanding of how actual students are interacting with online classes. He points out that it's a lot easier for a 40-year-old who's in a stable life position, and who has already experienced college-level education to work through an MOOC with ease. But things change when you're asking 18- to 20-year-olds to give up the structure and built-in motivation of a physical university to instead sit at their computer for hours at a time. (The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.) Heller also warns that prematurely hailing MOOCs as a replacement for colleges will only encourage governments and organizations to stop investing in institutions of higher learning, which could have dire consequences for education worldwide.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.
Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.
If you learned that in college you are among an elite few college graduates. Even above average college graduates rarely have these abilities unless they already had them before entering college. You seem to describe someone with ten years of experience working in a challenging environment with quality mentors, not a graduating college senior. That isn't to say it is important for most people to get 16 years of education instead of just 12. But most people I have worked with become useful and resourceful in their early 30's, not at the age of 22.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.
Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.
If you learned that in college you are among an elite few college graduates. Even above average college graduates rarely have these abilities unless they already had them before entering college. You seem to describe someone with ten years of experience working in a challenging environment with quality mentors, not a graduating college senior. That isn't to say it is important for most people to get 16 years of education instead of just 12. But most people I have worked with become useful and resourceful in their early 30's, not at the age of 22.
Let me guess... since he's on /. it could well be that *before* he went to college he had already mostly self-taught himself about computers, possibly programming, etc. Or in other words, he *already* knew how to learn things, research things, organize resources, and test his understanding with the computer. College might have helped *hone* those skills, but I agree, people either want to learn or don't - those who don't think they'll go to college and graduate with a piece of paper that will get them a 'better'/'more cushy' job making more money because of that piece of paper, no understanding that people become "useful and resourceful" by their depth of actual knowledge... and by knowledge I mean not only what you can learn in a book or a class, but what you've learned and *retained* on your own.
I got my Ham radio license in 7th grade, was playing with/learning electronics younger than that (I was drooling over the 1975(?) article in RE(?) on building the Altair 8800 - I was 11), taught myself digital electronics devouring the venerable TI TTL Handbook, building little projects for my TRS-80 (Model-I) in HS, etc. College taught me a lot more math/theory, but it didn't teach me the basics of *how* to learn, or instill the interest in me.
You can learn from anyone... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of my "worst" teachers have taught me valuable lessons outside of the class and subject area. How well you can deal with unreasonable people may help you more than you realize when you are just a young college student.
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But most people I have worked with become useful and resourceful in their early 30's, not at the age of 22.
This isn't about the age of the individual, but the complete failure of the higher education system. Raises the question what the fuck you're actually paying for too. *That's* the real end of college: the value derived isn't worth the pricetag any longer.
Re: Sounds familiar (Score:2)
You're paying so that there's a sunk cost if you quit. That's my take away from the summary (how I read the evidence that most people quit MOOCs that are free).
I'd like to see a quit rate for ones that have a fee (not a huge one, but say a few hundred), and actually count for something concrete.
The upside of a college class in today's society is more than just knowledge, and the downside for quiting is wasted thousands of dollars. With that in mind, college classes (and college in general) have a huge quit
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Re: Sounds familiar (Score:1)
I knew a girl in university who was taking psychology.
Thank you for making something worth reading on Slashdot, even on April first. That SHOULD NOT be an undergrad.
Re: Sounds familiar (Score:1)
Awww shit, quote was supposed to include the and that's not the worst part bit.
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*That's* the real end of college: the value derived isn't worth the pricetag any longer.
That will be the real end of college, or at least college as we know it, but it not likely to be soon. College is simply still too good of an investment for most people. The differences in earnings between college graduates and high school graduates are staggering, and in today's economy the gap is growing. I believe this gap has more to do with HR screening policies than the actual education given, but that is irrelevant when making the decision of whether to go to college.
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I don't have any experience with MOOCs, but I can tell you that (in general) if I get an older student (30+) in my class, he or she is very likely to be near the top of the class.
The older students generally know why they're there. They have motivation.
I'd imagine the same thing holds true with MOOCs.
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Strange I never went to college and I figured out how to learn things on my own and am in a successful career. College is not needed to learn how to learn things.
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College is not needed to learn how to learn things.
I think it's important to point out that while you may not have needed college to give you a good learning methodology, the parent poster and likely many other people do. And for those who don't need college to do so, they may learn how to learn faster in college than they would have without college.
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So you're saying that these people learned nothing in Grammar School or in High School? If they don't know how to learn how did they even make it to college? Needing college to learn how to learn things is a myth. You've been learning things since you entered this world. Be it on your own or by means of it being passed down by another. College is not needed to learn how to learn That's just stupid talk. Some people may need a formal education to have direction in what to learn, but that is different.
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Now, that doesn't mean that I couldn't have done so on my own. However, in certai
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You missed the point. You do not need college to "learn how to learn". You may need college to give direction to what you should learn. I find it ironic that "Freshman him" would not have known how to do any of the things listed there which are needed in order to get through Highschool. How'd he even make it to be a Freshman?
The earlier the better (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things.
I was lucky; I was homeschooled before college, and as a result learned how to learn things with directed self study instead of just doing what teachers said.
It made college way more valuable to me as a result, but it also made life after college better because there was never a point where I thought "Yep, done learning now, time to work for a few decades".
The sooner we can get people into a state where they enjoy and can learn on their own, the better everyone will be.
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Agreed.
I taught at a community college for a while and if there's one thing that's self-evident, it's that a lot of students see classes as another "chore" on the way to a career, and haven't seemed to consider the reason why they're in that class in the first place: that it's supposed to make you think, and be enriching to you.
Instead, students just wanted to formula and didn't want to process how it worked or why. Just as long as it cranked out the right answer on the test, that was good enough. Those s
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
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The teachers that will teach students that are hard to find nowadays.
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Irrespective of how many times the video is played, it would sto
College is way over priced (at least in the us) (Score:1)
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
Re:College is way over priced (at least in the us) (Score:5, Interesting)
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
Most "free courses" are basically the introductory units from a university 101 class or a master's programme, and designed to advertise the school to you. Berkeley have some fantastic courses on Coursera -- they clearly put a lot of time and money into them -- but once you've signed up, you're a marketing asset for their (very) expensive accredited distance programme.
Besides, free courses tend only to be capable of teaching "basic skills" which can objectively be marked right or wrong, so "coding" but not "systems design". This means that the future for them is to remove some of the grunt-work from teaching staff, and allow them to focus on the higher-level abstractions. If there's any justice in the world, it will lead to a higher quality of education. Sadly, it is more likely to be looked at as a cost-cutting measure, and higher-level learning will be left by the wayside....
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I work for a major online school that happens to offer some free courses in a secondary product. You are exactly correct. We only give them away for free in order to drive traffic to our paid offerings. They are seen as just a new type of marketing site.
Re:College is way over priced (at least in the us) (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
What are you yammering about? A college is a brand; the rules about competing products don't apply the same way. A degree from a well respected school isn't even in the same market as a degree from I_Sat_On_My_Ass_At_Home_And_Learned_Stuff. MOOC's are perfect for what they are meant for, people like me who don't like the idea of certain knowledge going to rust.
If you don't believe me then pull up the course material for your local community college and compare it to something like MIT, then compare the pric
Education is only part of the real point (Score:5, Interesting)
For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.
College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.
It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.
I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.
There are people who want to learn and not go to a (Score:5, Informative)
There are people who want to learn and not go to a 50K-100K party to get a piece of paper.
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Everyone I've ever known that described a college degree as 'a piece of paper' was bitter about it it some way - either their family or personal situation had not allowed them to go, maybe they'd been denied a job opportunity without it, maybe they'd flunked out.
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit. My degrees are pieces of paper, although they are pieces of paper which for some reason hold clout with VP and C-level executives. That is why I got them after all. And while it is impossible to know whic
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And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
I hold my degree in high regard, but not all degrees. I was fortunate enough to be able to study CS at a truly world-class institution, where practically every other week the teaching staff were complaining about how the industry kept trying to tell them to stop teaching CS and just churn out bog-standard "coders". As a result, even after almost a decade without coding, I'm now writing software again using all sorts of computational abstractions from custom datastructures and tree-traversal to propositional
Re:There are people who want to learn and not go t (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit.
No, that's exactly the point. Vast numbers of kids spend their first couple of years "growing up." Some of them fail miserably, most of them muddle through fairly well, and some of them excel. What company can afford to take the risk hiring an untrained person, without even a 'track record' of trainability, when that kid may decide he'd rather spend lunch drinking beers?
College isn't supposed to be job training - you may get some skills that are useful in a job, but the point is not to teach you how to be a junior programmer at Microsoft. College, especially residential college, is life-training: how do you balance your freedom to do bong hits all day with your responsibility to pay rent? How do you balance your desire to post /. with your employer's desire that you accomplish tasks? How do you get stuff done when your teacher/manager is a clueless moron? What kinds of tasks/problems do you enjoy?
If you've figure that out by the time you're 18, you're truly exceptional. Not special-snowflake exceptional, but Bill Gates exceptional. College, and even a job, are likely to hold you back. Unfortunately, many people think they are Bill Gates, when they are only a special snowflake.
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Everyone I've ever known that described a college degree as 'a piece of paper' was bitter about it it some way - either their family or personal situation had not allowed them to go, maybe they'd been denied a job opportunity without it, maybe they'd flunked out.
Or invested vast amounts of time, energy, and money, and all they got out of it was a piece of paper.
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No, it really is a piece of paper.
What matter is that it's a piece of paper that other people think means something. The same way a twenty dollar bill is just a piece of paper. Hey it could be counterfeit even. And that's where the analogy ends.
At the end of the day it's just something that gets you past the screening process of interviews. Speaking about software developers specifically, there's little chance you'd even make it to an interview without a CS degree or previous experience working as one. Even
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, instead of wasting time doing a bunch of busy work for material I already understand, and not being free to go slower on material I find harder to understand.
Funny, that sounds like how I would describe high school, but the opposite of how I would describe coworker's and my university experiences. Professors were quite excited about going into more detail about topics. If there were interest, and if enough people in the course were interested, they would spend a day teaching something else, and if not, most were happy to spend quite a lot of time after class discussing it with a student or two. Often they were also happy to allow a project of some sort in pla
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The purpose of a university degree is to learn to learn
This statement gets thrown around a lot when discussing college, but I just don't see how it holds up. It is very rare for an undergraduate to do any significant research, so most of the learning comes from assignments and probably a little group work. Assignments usually just teach that all the answers you need to solve any problem can be found in the 1-3 books provided by the school. Usually you are even told which chapter has the answers, since that is the chapter you are currently studying. Group work t
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... Group work teaches that the few talented kids should be careful not to delegate important work to their teammates, and most kids learn they can lean on the talented kids to do most of the work. One could say this helps teach delegation, but I have delegated in college and in the workplace and they are not comparable experiences.
I'm envious of your work experience. In mine, college group work as you describe it is the perfect preparation for employment. Perhaps it's different in other fields, but it's most certainly the case in IT. Easily 80% of the IT workforce can't program, engineer, architect or admin their way out of a wet paper bag. They turn to the other 20% who struggle to strike some balance between doing great work themselves and spoon-feeding snippets of reasoning and problem solving technique back to the first group.
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I'd argue that a big part of it is being given assignments that stretch you more than you've been stretched. You don't have to do original research to be geniuinely challenged and grow from the experience. You just have to be given an assignment that requ
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Actually, one thing it taught me was that I had to work sometimes in order to learn. High school was not a challenge.
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For people that have a good experience in college, the piece of paper means very little.
I didn't take college that seriously at first, and I almost flunked out, (but I did barely squeak by after I started doing better my later years).
But like the OP said, college is just as much (if not more) about what you learn outside the classroom. It's about shaping your mind to critically evaluate things, learning social skills, learning teamwork, teaching yourself how to function independently, etc.
I have no doubt of
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Most of what I learned in college was how to jump through hoops. Jump through all the hoops in the right order, and you get your piece of paper.
Or you could use the time you're not in class to explore the other opportunities the environment offers. Go to work in one of the labs on real problems. Build something kooky, just because you can. Join the flying club [yjfc.org].
The piece of paper indicates that you can meet minimum criteria. The education shows up on your resume. The piece of paper shows you're allowed to drive a car; the trophies show you're actually good at it.
Re: There are people who want to learn and not go (Score:1)
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Regrettably, my school didn't offer courses in getting laid. I would have signed up so fast....
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College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day.
Oh, right, because nobody in high-pressure professions would ever, ever get shitfaced drunk all the time!
The only difference between my drinking during college and my drinking after college was that after college, I got fucked up on good alcohol because I could afford to no longer drink swill!
The cost of college in the usa is to high and trad (Score:3)
The cost of college in the usa is to high and trades are being pushed down way to much as well.
Just letting student loans be discharged in bankruptcy can lead to a lot of stuff being fixed. It may force schools to cut costs and maybe even cut the fluff and filler replacing it with classes that cover skill gaps. Also can force trade schools to maybe cost less not be part of the 4 year system.
Re:The cost of college in the usa is to high and t (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it will do quite the opposite. Colleges do not bear the risk of loans not being repaid, the taxpayers do. Making loans discharged would significantly increase the amount of debt students are willing to take on, because if they fail in their chosen career they can just start over fresh. The government will happily just eat the losses because it is a drop in the bucket to the federal budget. This will lead to higher tuition rates, more students taking on less socially useful degrees, and a further lower of higher education quality.
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to
too
Not being a Grammar Nazi, just pointing out how such an error can completely null the point you're trying to make (and null that to any others listening). Some others:
Effect and affect
It's and its
Where and were (this mind boggles me, I suppose it is a West Coast accent thing, I have no idea)
Don't let your argument be straw-manned for the sake of a few basic errors; it happens again and again.
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but if some one is 50-100K in the hole and working at mc'ds then bankruptcy will wipe out that balance.
Printing press (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Printing press (Score:1)
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In my experience, the classes that could be MOOCs are mostly introductory classes. There is a qualitative difference between a lecture with two hundred people and two dozen people: in the latter case, if something isn't clear, you can ask and get an immediate response. That can make a big difference.
Re: Printing press (Score:1)
What What What? (Score:4, Funny)
Either way, something has to be done! (Score:2)
Saddleing people with a lifetime of debt is not the answer. A governments duty to its constituents is to provide them with the tools to thrive in the environments that they find themsleves. This is why primary and eventually high school educations became eventually mandated as free and eventually required of all citizens under their jurisdiction. There is no way that something that can only be obtained by money can be considered equalizing in any democracy.
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[Saddling] people with a lifetime of debt is not the answer.
It is if the question is "how to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and have it technically not be illegal".
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There are plenty of community/city/state schools that are dirt cheap (e.g. 2-3k per semester, 4-6k a year). Also, average student debt in the country is ~$25k or so, I'd hardly call that a 'lifetime of debt'... (yes, fresh graduates can't pay it off in a year, but that's why they're not all due in a year). And if you work on the side (yes, tough, many folks had to do this) you can graduate with no debt at all. And then there's financial aid (if you *really* cannot afford it).
Now, if you're getting an acting
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When I looked at tuition at the U of Minnesota, it appears to have quadrupled in real dollars over about forty years. Minimum wage didn't. It's objectively harder to work one's way through school than it used to be.
My personal experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My personal experience (Score:4, Insightful)
I've given them an honest shot, but like many I could not finish a course. I found that the lack of a face to face human communication was a huge stumbling block to success. Especially thring to learn python, math subjects, etc. It is far easier to be spoon fed knowledge and walked around complex subjects with your hand held. The main weakness in MOOCs is the lack of human interaction and instruction when you are not able to figure it out on your own.
The problem with MOOCs for programming, maths etc is that they were outdated before they began. Sitting watching a video, then doing an offline task, then submitting the task online is just not good enough. You want a tight cycle of: present new information -> demonstrate -> test -> integrate with existing knowledge -> test -> present new information....
The likes of w3schools offered this sort of environment long before the screencasters came in. Khan Academy has integrated coding environments into their programming courses, but the video is still a time sink and typically holds the student away from the code window for far too long.
High School first then collage (Score:2, Insightful)
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If I were a kid in around grade 9 I would presently be MOOCing until I turned blue. My goal would be to basically bypass High School. At this point what are the various certificates good for? I don't think that anyone yet really knows. But I suspect that they will be worth more and more and definitely will be worth more than most half assed high schools. I can certainly say without hesitation that I have seen some online courses MOOC, the great courses, plus others that blow my old HS teachers clean out of the water and certainly blow most of my daughters' teachers clean out of the water. (and yes many online things suck too)
That is correct, but You can only state this thanks to the fact that You have already experienced the fuckup that is the education system. I dare say, almost no grade 9 people think so far away.
But if a grade 9 student has 10 or 20 MIT / Stanford courses under their belt and does well on the SATs then what university can honestly reject that student?
Any that does not believe in online courses. And anybody that does not believe in self-certification, and lack of supervised testing about the course material. Which is basically any HR department.
Right now it is all a little hazy but I suspect that a point will be crossed where quite simply the high schools will begin to lose the best and the brightest. Not the majority just the cream. This will leave the high schools with the mediocre and the crap students. Then the pressure will be on the better of the mediocre students to follow online as well leaving a pretty poor lineup of students. This will then start to whittle away at the better teachers who just can't keep going without at least the occasional success in their class.
To be truly frank, I have never entertained the thought that education up to college had the best and brightest in min
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I think that where it will be most interesting is that right now it is very very very hard to get into a top tier school.
I suppose this depends on your perspective. Admission rates at Harvard/Stanford/MIT are around 6%; Cornell, Duke and the like 15%; Baylor, Georgia Tech, U Mich around 40%. Those are all great schools and offer great educations. The marginal benefit from attending Stanford (#4) over Cornell (#15) or Baylor (#70) is pretty negligible, and I would put all those schools in the "top tier," and 40% admission rate is not even one-very selective.
Most of those schools don't treat their own MOOCs the same way they
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The marginal benefit from attending Stanford (#4) over Cornell (#15) or Baylor (#70) is pretty negligible
From a knowledge learned perspective you're likely correct, from a branding perspective you couldn't be more wrong.
The real problem with University (Score:2, Insightful)
..is that people (employers, students, everyone) are starting to treat universities as trade schools -- job training factories.
That's not the purpose of university. Never has been, never will be (hopefully).
What we need is a better system of trade schools (ala med school, law school, but to expand that to more trades), to revive the concept of apprenticeships, etc.
MOOCs aren't the answer. Like other forms of non-traditional schooling, they are a nice way for adults and others to supplement existing base kno
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That depends on the degree.
For engineers it really is essentially training you for a job. An engineer that can't solve actual real world problems is not worth much. I am referring to chemical, mechanical, electrical etc type engineers not comp sci. Lives depend on your getting the solutions to real problems correct. Most of engineering is also based on statistical and empirical models not first principles models. This is mostly because first principles models don't work very well yet. We can put in everythi
If MOOCs aren't the end of college, automation is (Score:2)
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What would you study ?
How to build automation to replace the other 50%?
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Because the remaining 50% of the jobs are the skilled ones that demand a good education
...to get the interview because the competition is so fierce. Only rarely will the job itself require advanced education.
Re: If MOOCs aren't the end of college, automation (Score:1)
Poor quality of courses (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what's known as a "rationalization". Pick the one explanation you like, and then find some evidence to support it.
To really choose the best answer without experimentation, you write down *all* the possible explanations, and then pick the one that seems most likely.
(If you can do experiments you can eliminate explanations directly - but when you can't do this, the best course is to list all explanations and pick the simplest one.)
A simpler explanation of the low pass rate is that the online courses are of poor quality.
And indeed, many of the online courses are very low quality - especially the ones from high-end players.
The "Probabalistic Graphical Models" [coursera.org] course by Stanford is known as a weeder (students get caught off guard with the difficulty), and the online version demonstrates this: the video shows Daphne Koller standing at a lectern droning on and on(*) with no vocal variety, reading the text of the online slides to the viewer... completely uninteresting and making a simple course boring as hell. (sample video [coursera.org].)
I thumbed through the edX course listing and hit on a course I liked - and the introductory video contained absolutely *no* information about the course! The full text of the course description read something like: "Join me as we explore the boundaries of $subject". (Is it a difficult course? Is it introductory or advanced? What level of math is required? What's the syllabus?)
I mentioned it to the head of edX in a private E-mail, and he responded by saying "that's an affiliate course [ie - from an affiliate institution] and we don't have control of the quality or content".
(WTF? You're running a startup and you don't have control over the quality? And he seemed to intimate that he was more interested in building the scope of their selection than the quality.)
Kahn academy is trying to get feedback from students to improve their presentation and make their lectures more effective, but I don't see any other players doing this.
Everyone's just taping their lectures and putting them online(**). The situation won't change until everyone burns through all the seed money and has to start making a profit based on results. For example, edX got $60 million in seed money, and they're burning through it with no viable business plan.
(*) Keep in mind that I'm critiquing the course, and not Professor Koller.
(**) For a counterpoint example, consider Donald Sadoway's Introduction to Solid State Chemistry [mit.edu], which is *not* a MOOC lecture series but is free for online viewing. Light years ahead of any MOOC course and well worth viewing.
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I did the PGM course (succes
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Are you sure? Why not? Presenting anything by reading the slides is terrible. People read faster than they speak, so while the presenter drones on, the audience has already read the slide and is just awkwardly sitting there waiting for the presenter to shut up and get on with it.
He's right, but the conclusion may require nuance. (Score:3)
Here's the thing—we may not actually want every otherwise unmotivated late teen to be sitting dubiously through college courses just because it's either that or go back to their dorm and twiddle their thumbs. Some things:
- There is an oversupply of graduates these days in most fields and at most levels
- A dawdle-dawdle unmotivated student is not doing their highest quality learning
- Even students that will eventually use what they learn may not do so for years
- In the meantime, what they learned is getting very rusty between learning and use
So with these things said, *how about* a model in which:
- People are not motivated to learn something until they need to
- Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely
- And they will put it to use right away
- And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
I would think this would help to mitigate some of the particular supply/demand problems on all sides (for an education/for students/for graduates as employees).
The one caveat, and it's an important one, is that we do of course want people to be generally mature, thoughtful, capable, and culturally literate if they are goint to be participating in society, and right now high schools are failing utterly at even touching these points.
So to address that need, let's just require a minimal level of "general" college-level education, say a one-year or two-year degree that as no "major" or "minor" selections and issues no grades, but certifies literacy about politics/citizenship, social science (particularly social problems), national culture, basic quantitative reasoning, and so on—enough to become a careful thinker and to better understand "how to learn stuff."
This general education certification would be required in order to:
- Vote
- Get a business license
- Sit on a corporate board
But would be disconnected from particular vocational or other subject-oriented learning issued via, say, MOOCS as well as face-to-face alternatives. And instead of a major in a single discpline, outcomes from MOOC courses could be used to calculate a nationally databased and relatively involved (many measures) "bar chart" for each student, that tallied their experience and competence with particular subject areas, expressed quantitatively as a figure without an upper bound, that is added to with each additional course, and perhaps incorporating quantitative feedback about their performance from employers as well:
So instead of wanting someone with 4-year degree and a "major" in computer science, employers could seek someone with their general education certification along with "at least a 1400 in OS design, a 650 in Java, and a 950 in medical organizations and systems" and so on.
Over the course of a lifetime, scores in any particular area could continue to increase, either by taking additional MOOCs to get more exposure, or by having employers report on accumulated skills and experience to the system.
So that someone that took only a few courses in X in school, but in the real world and on the job, became—over 20 years—the best X in the country, would have this gradually reflected in their national education/experience scores as the years of experience and successes mounted.
Meanwhile, we'd also no longer have the weird mismatches that come when an employee has a degree in Y but actually works in Z, and then has to explain this in various ways to various parties. First of all, at the level of the 1-or-2-year general education, they would no longer gret a "degree in" Y. That would be handed by MOOCs and represented in varous numbers that increased as the result of completing them.
But if someone did do an about-face and choose an entirely different subject or work area in life, this would also gradually be reflected in their education/experience scores. We'd know when someone who'd studied chemistry in their '20s finally became a "real biologist" because their scores
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People are not motivated to learn something until they need to - Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely - And they will put it to use right away - And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
All too often, that means "too late". My first job out of uni refused to train staff with out a "confirmed need" for a particular training course, but typically (particularly at the junior levels) you were given a new assignment at short notice, and even if you theoretically had time for the training course, they were either all booked up, or weren't running that month. This left you blasting through it unhappily as you were indeed putting it to use right away, before you were really ready to. This is how h
Khan? (Score:2)
Did these "many people" ever look at the offerings of Khan academy? That's not academic stuff. And Coursera lacks serious cohesion and supervision. Those are two necessary (but not sufficient) conditions.
But university is about more than learning some formula by heart or reading a book. You need to get an understanding of the context of the theories, the process of discovery, and be guided through the history and current practices. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly not something an online course can
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Did these "many people" ever look at the offerings of Khan academy? That's not academic stuff.
Kahn academy is early academic level at most, it is true. But it is good at what it does.
And Coursera lacks serious cohesion and supervision.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Both Coursera and edX offer courses of a wide range of qualities. There are good to very good courses on both of them, there are very bland ones on both of them. Some of them even leave out the l and the n.
But university is about more than learning some formula by heart or reading a book. You need to get an understanding of the context of the theories, the process of discovery, and be guided through the history and current practices. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly not something an online course can provide.
Why not? Plenty of courses are close to identical to traditional courses taught at the university, going as far as using footage from those courses or even student discussions and e
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And Coursera lacks serious cohesion and supervision.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Both Coursera and edX offer courses of a wide range of qualities. There are good to very good courses on both of them, there are very bland ones on both of them. Some of them even leave out the l and the n.
By cohesion, I assume he means the lack of programmed progression. So that (for example) any time you want to learn a new programming language, they start from zero explaining loops and conditionals etc, yadda yadda yadda.
Online learning, not necessarily online college (Score:1)
April fools already? (Score:2)
Things I learned in university (Score:4, Interesting)
- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.
I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.
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I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.
All true. A few more:
- Getting good grades is EVERYTHING. Learning and enjoyment of the subject are not always concomitant to getting good grades.
- If the lecturer sucks, get the class notes from the guy who taught it last year if he's a different lecturer and study those. God I wish I'd done that on several courses.
- Find out which lecturers are going to suck from students in the previous year. Avoid those courses if you have a choice.
- Access is everything: if the reference books are essential for some
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What utter bullshit. Who cares about grades that much if someone is a very good fit for a position because he has the right kind of knowledge, experience, and attitude? Even for PhD programs the grades in most courses are not everything. Try to learn the things you are interested in and write a thesis about something you care about. Publish something, be it software, blog posts, papers in workshops or (trade) journals.
Don't put absolute trust in what other people tell you about a particular subject, course,
All about protecting college business models (Score:1)
That's what this reaction against MOOCs is all about. Colleges have decided they don't want MOOCs after it being all the rage for 5 minutes, and they want their old conservative business model back thank you. Too late. So now people are trashing online education as "inferior" even if it isn't. There are many excellent courses online, free ones on youtube. You have to teach yourself, it's not about falling asleep in a lecture hall.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what this reaction against MOOCs is all about. Colleges have decided they don't want MOOCs after it being all the rage for 5 minutes, and they want their old conservative business model back thank you. Too late. So now people are trashing online education as "inferior" even if it isn't.
Except it is.
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The extrenely low pass rate... (Score:2, Informative)
(The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.)
The extremely low pass rate doesn't mean a shit. This guy is an idiot. The motivation to pass a course that doesn't cost you anything and is most of the time not required and even recognized is not the same as passing a grade. Many people are just sneaking around at MOOC, and it is perfectly acceptable. They start some course just to see. There is not requirements, verification you are having the prerequisite before enrolling into a course. You just cannot compare MOOC and traditional education on this bas
Re: (Score:2)
I took a course when I worked for the university. The professor wanted me to do a more complicated final project, but I didn't have time with a full time job and family, so I just skipped it and took a C. Doesn't mean I didn't learn everything I needed to, as evidenced by the fact that I'd aced all the other classwork (which is why I ended up with a C even though the final project was 25% of the grade).
And since when is a low pass rate necessarily a bad thing? Is it possible only the people who learn the ma
accreditation needs to change (Score:1)
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Based on life, not on College (Score:2)
Predicting the end of College isn't based on the high value of MOOCs so much as the low value of college. You can take your degree straight to McDonalds because there aren't jobs and/or they aren't hiring Americans.
No other reason (Score:2)
There's a simple reason for the low pass rate in online courses: they're pathetic. They're all canned courses you can find the answer sheets to online in a single Google search. They have the intelligence of a 6th grade class and it's seriously insulting that they're asking you to do this stuff at a college level. They also took away one of their best features which was the ability to work at your own pace - now they drag them out over months restricting your access to assignments and encouraging loss o
Don't get the Hype over MOOCs (Score:2)
What I learned after attending one semester (Score:3)
I learned that I can learn a lot faster on my own. Maybe not everyone can, but after suffering through classes with people that seemed to not be able to get basic concepts in physics and calculus, I realized that I could buy the text books and teach myself at a much faster rate. And since the computer lab was open to the public, I had full use of the facilities to do the homework assignments.
What I hope happens is that those that need college to learn continue to have the opportunity to go. And the smart people that don't need it will stop having to justify themselves simply because they don't have a piece of paper that says they had to spend a lot of money to learn something because they weren't able to do it themselves.
I'd much rather hire self-motivated people who can learn new things by themselves. They are much quicker to adapt to changing technology than someone that had to go to school to learn.
Re: (Score:2)
Students don't necessarily know what they should learn. An unguided course of self-study is almost certainly going to miss important things.
Elite Colleges (Score:1)
Elite colleges buy SAT scores from the scoring company, which I believe is College Board. They market their institutions to candiditates with lower SAT scores in order to get them to apply, all-the-while knowing those candidates will be rejected. This increases the rejection rates and decreases their acceptance rate. A low acceptance rate is a bragging right. This braging right is of course used in marketing and also i
Udacity's failure at San Jose State (Score:2)
False dichotomy (Score:2)
Just because Khan academy is not the answer, does not mean that status quo of college education is the answer going forward. The rest of economy has become dramatically more efficient in the last 20 years. If colleges make no effort to embrace globalization and modern IT, there is no hope for them to be affordable to someone who works in a regular job.
It's ridiculous to pay for a sprawling campus, football team and full room and board just to be one of 40 students to hear a lecture from a second grade local
Reversing A Decline (Score:2)