Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#181

Post by Etherea » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

aleksei wrote: post #50

zerkten wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses. It's interesting how much this varies globally. In the UK I had zero hand-holding for my undergraduate degree. In the last two years of high school there would be constant reminders that this would be coming. You'd turn up to lectures, occasionally have coursework that at most counted for 30% of the overa…

Yes, the university life portrayed in American tv shows is also quite unfamiliar to Nordics. Your experience mirrors mine in Finland. You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams. No one cared whether you attended the lectures or the exercise sessions, you were simply expected to be able to apply the material by the end of the course. However it depended heavily on faculty or even field. I think the hu…

There I would factor in the cost of education in Europe and US...

I also did what you did in my years at school and I regret it deeply. Noone would take on welding without being next to an experienced welder, why is this any different with other subjects? I now wish I had been smarter and spent more time with my professors outside of the class to learn by watching them work on problems and work with them.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#182

Post by Etherea » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

j45 wrote: post #24

I've been a technologist in academic and industry online education for almost 20 years. Life is not linear. Why are traditional education and MOOCs linear and monolothic? Career paths are no longer linear, but so much education continues to be linear. The pace of innovation adoption in education is very slow, partially due to the lack of technological abilities of leadership and management in education. There is ofte…

Ditto! To me they pretty much all sound like the patent trolls that do this old business stuff but "on-the-internet" (it's and old meme..., ossuary if it's not funny). Putting a video of yourself talking doesn't make it "online", it makes "on-demand" like Netflix. I want "online" as in: we had an online meeting with the director of the job site because it was unpractical to drive there in time, online!!!

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#183

Post by the_watcher » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

gmiller123456 wrote: post #178

the_watcher wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in this industry a bit, and MOOCs rarely use "course completion" as their primary success metric. One reason is precisely what you mentioned - that many people simply take the course for as long as they need to get their desired value out of it, then leave. Another was that the team I worked with found that, by far, the single biggest factor in terms of course completion was that a third party (usually th…

So what ways do they measure success? I can attest that I have never started a course just for a few lectures, and I've always planned on taking the whole course. I've quit the majority of courses just because they weren't any good (usually poorly designed homework). I have quite some because they moved on to topics that I didn't find interesting, but I never looked at them from the beginning and said "That's where I…

They'll usually _track_ course completion, but it's not necessary for a course to have a high, or even an average completion rate to be a successful course. From what I've seen, they'll track active time spent in course, how much of the course is completed, use quizzes to reinforce learnings while also getting a check in on how actively the student has been taking the course, etc. They also rely on ratings and qualitative feedback. It's not as precise as something like "completions", but from what I've seen it's reasonably effective at assessing course value.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#184

Post by jjeaff » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #124

jjeaff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this the other day. The idea that most people are just watching garbage on YouTube 'might' be true, and that viewing educational or technical content is an outlier, but I'm not so sure. Sure, there are countless massively popular channels with garbage pop content, but that may be due to the "general" nature of the content. The broad audience keeps it at the top of the most watched lists. I think…

> Youtube is an amazing phenomenon that I think doesn't get > enough credit because of all the junk on there, but the > fact that I can search for how to remove the abs module on > a 2007 BMW 750li and get multiple videos showing how to do > it just blows me away and definitely makes it a lot easier > to get things done. One of the garbage things about YT, though, is that the third thing on that video's "watch next"…

It doesn't take long to recognize and avoid that type of video. But man, a single click on one of those videos will take you down a rabbit hole so fast.

Re: Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning

#185

Post by jjeaff » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #149

jjeaff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this the other day. The idea that most people are just watching garbage on YouTube 'might' be true, and that viewing educational or technical content is an outlier, but I'm not so sure. Sure, there are countless massively popular channels with garbage pop content, but that may be due to the "general" nature of the content. The broad audience keeps it at the top of the most watched lists. I think…

Consuming irrelevant information is its own form of procrastination.

How do you define irrelevant? I consume useful information very frequently.