As Coursera Evolves, Colleges Stay On and Investors Buy In 46
An anonymous reader writes: The hype over online academics has diminished as it became clear that it wasn't a panacea for cheap, global education. While many organizations are struggling with the realization that online courses don't fit in everywhere, Coursera has found out they definitely fit in somewhere. The colleges partnering with Coursera are sticking around, and the company has drawn fresh investments totaling $60 million from venture capitalists. Rather than shoehorning traditional college courses into an online format, they've begun experimenting with different ways to structure education. "The company has created a series of courses that add up to mini-degrees that students can earn quickly, and pay a small fee to certify that they successfully completed them." Other students are using it as a stepping stone to traditional universities: "Rice University, for instance, reports that it is getting more applicants — and higher-quality applicants — for its computer-science masters' degree after offering a CS course on Coursera."
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"A wild SJW has appeared!"
If you capture one, remember: no meat, no gluten, no GMOs.
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That's bullshit. When you look at an outsourced company in India itself it is not staffed with the best and brightest people, but people from IT specific schools and not computer science or engineering and definitely not a broad based education. That is, you get someone from a school with a highly focused curriculum based upon the job requirements for the next year only. You also don't get the best graduates from those schools. Because the best and brighest Indians are already in America or Europe, ther
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This isn't because of republicans, but corporations. They put intense pressure on universities to stop teaching a broad subject and teach job specific skills, like the big name schools are supposed to be nothing more than mere trade schools. And the universities fall for this, because they hope for some extra funding for a new lab from IBM, or an endowment from Intel, an extra faculty position paid for by SAP. Some day there may be the Taco Bell Chair in Culinary Engineering.
Democrat or Republican politi
Re:MOOCs: my worst education experiences ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a life-long learner. I can't get enough of learning. I have three college degrees...
Yes, I believe you've mentioned that previously. Verbatim, in fact. [slashdot.org]
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The difference may be that while not
Flip the classroom (Score:2)
the model espoused by Kahn academy and others is to flip the classroom. You still go to school. But you watch the lesson at home before class. The teacher summarizes the key points in class then they rest of the time is spent working problems from the lesson .
So it's no a no school mooc but just the opposite. You have to watch the lesson by a deadline then you get intensive application experience to find the bugs in your understanding guided by a teacher in a more one on one way.
These mooc videos will b
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Totally contrary to my experience (but I fall in the qualification of thirld-worder ). I started the course not for the credentials but for the skills to learn. I didn't frequent the forums since I find the social aspect of education way distracting, but the times I entered I found:
- tools to help doing the exercise (without cheating/giving away the answers)
- good explanations for some excercises and the problems arising
- further research of a specific topic
There was also some people asking for certificatio
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Re:MOOCs: my worst education experiences ever. (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be saying that it's not easy to make the time, but what I'm hearing is, "I lack the discipline to schedule and prioritize my time and I need someone to explicitly provide me with that structure."
What's the alternative? Having an in-person class at a set time and location? That seems like it would take more time - and not of your choosing.
Until we get our lessons in pill form, there is no greater convenience to be had. You can learn literally any time you choose to. Get distracted? You can rewind and rewatch. Online quizzes, tests, and assignment submissions usually offer real-time feedback. You can be sitting on the toilet learning nuclear physics if it takes your fancy.
If you haven't got time for this, what are you doing on slashdot at all? You haven't got time for it either!
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I have a university degree completed in person, and I've also completed real complete university courses online. I know exactly how to manage time. I'm saying that a 3-hour lecture the student needs to sit through is an outmoded concept driven by the idea a hall needs to be reserved and students need to travel to it.
Video also forces a particular pacing, why should we still be limited to the (below) average learning speed? Real online courses for credit when I took them (~10-years back, math, science, arts
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Did you lose the stop button?
Use a media player that allows to seek and change playback speed.
I took over 10 courses at coursera. And I'm right now enrolled in one where the "lecture" is just 1 minute video introducing some acronyms and 2-3 links to external
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I was about to make the same arguments to see them already listed in this post.
Every single item that in the grandparent post appears to apply only to live and in person lectures. Long. Boring. Pacing unrelated to my personal comprehension speed - whether that was slow or fast. Unable to pause in the middle for any reason. The only thing I could take away was notes - assuming I could write down what was being shown on the board AND listen to the professor AND try to digest it all at the same time, all b
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Videos are just not always a good stuff to present information. They can be boring and time intensive. But people love to make videos because they pay back a few cents over time, whereas writing a concise description in text that takes ten seconds to read earns you zero cents. A good lecture has questions and answers, a video does not do that. A good lecturer can tell when the audience is getting confused or is nodding off, a video lecturer can not do that. A video lecture is the modern day equivalent
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Both forms require a lecturer who is good in his chosen medium, and more importantly, a student who is attentive and dedicated to learning. If you fail to provide both, you're going to have a bad time.
So I dismiss the idea that video can be 'boring and time intensive' offhandedly. So too may be normal lectures, to the student unprepared to dedicate themselves.
There are many flaws in in-person lecturing that video lecturing solves, the biggest of which is the 'pause', 'rewind', and 'skip ahead' buttons. Wi
Re:MOOCs: my worst education experiences ever. (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a simple solution to this problem:
- Clear, written rules for all, posted at the beginning of the course
- Enforcing those rules on forums too (people will cry, but let 'em)
- Deadlines, that give time to finish the assignments
- Deadlines, that do not move, even if they are bombing your city
I have encountered many of the same problems myself, taking MOOCs. They go away, when the instructors learn from these things and create new rules, and enforce them. This is how Coursera is evolving. The student material is the same, but the instructors learn from their previous problems with the students.
I've also noticed, that the quality of the forums is often based on a few bright inviduals , that really bring insights into conversations (and one of them was from India, and he was a better programmer than me (15 years of experience)). If everybody is a nagging idiot, well the forums are not going to be fun. That is the price we pay for free education without prequisities.
I am actually thrilled, to see Africans and other nationatilities on same courses, and graded the same as you Americans and us Europeans. They come from a totally different background and actually have to do real work, to even get materials for high level education. I wholeheartedly support bringing education to everyone, and have yet to see "free certicate" given to someone on a MOOC.
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I wrote about MOOCs back in 2012 [slashdot.org] when they were first starting to be a thing. I'll save you from reading with the summary: each course is different, your mileage may vary.
Today I find that the only real change is in the number of offerings. There are still experts in their field that are completely incapable of teaching (or at least, teaching using a primarily lecture based system), classes where the TAs appear to be more knowledgeable than the lecturer, and those few where all the stars align. Having an
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Credentials are worthless and have always been worthless, unless you're in a grunt job like an IT helpdesk. I've been a grader and a teaching assistant at a university, and the same attitudes were there as well. Students whose parents paid a lot of money would gripe and moan about the deadlines and asking for extension with flimsy excuses; but it was third world, first world, rich, poor, male, female, etc.
This is why teacher's pets exist. One student who appears to want to actually learn, and learn more
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The use the money.... (Score:2)
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The point of college (Score:2)
Traditional universities should look and learn (Score:1)
Speaking as a "MooCaholic" (I've done dozens, and highly recommend Rice University's Python series), the contrast with a traditional university course was recently brought home to me when I was asked to be an external examiner. The traditional university course had the advantage of paying actual money, but I'm still on the side of MooCs as far as educating students goes.
Between doing my paid for marking, I was doing "free" peer reviewing for Coursera's Data Analysis series which I'm busy on (which I also hi