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2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

openculture.com

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Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#11

Post by anbop »

spectramax wrote: post #2

I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives for colleges to do this?

It’s usually more fruitful to look for individual incentives rather than organizational motives. The individual incentives are clear — the professor gets publicity and name recognition, the administrator gets to inflate their staff and budget, and the trustees who approve the (small) budget get to brand themselves as generous and community-minded.

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#12

Post by jarofgreen »

It pains me to see pages like this. Someone has spent ages making this long list by hand, then it's put up as a long blog post. No way to filter by anything .... can we have it as machine workable Open Data please!

Also, think about ways to allow other people to contribute to the list so that the work of keeping it up to date is shared out and not on just a few people.

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#13

Post by mathnmusic »

jarofgreen wrote: post #12

It pains me to see pages like this. Someone has spent ages making this long list by hand, then it's put up as a long blog post. No way to filter by anything .... can we have it as machine workable Open Data please! Also, think about ways to allow other people to contribute to the list so that the work of keeping it up to date is shared out and not on just a few people.

You might like this project of mine where we are collecting awesome learning resources from the Web organized by topics, formats and difficulty: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome#readme

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#14

Post by jaabe »

spectramax wrote: post #2

I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives for colleges to do this?

Are they doing it for free though? To me it seem like they may be building for the future of learning, and getting paid at least something (certificates) to do it.

I work as an external examiner for CS students in Denmark, and I’ve seen nothing here that rivals the automated grading systems applied by Harvard and MIT on places like EDX. Harvard even build an entirely cloud based IDE to get students easy access to development environment from a browser during introduction courses.

I took a few of those courses to see what they are like, and the truth is, the MIT intro courses to computation are actually a lot better than the CS intro courses I took at Aalborg University two decades ago. Sure it’s been two decades, and I didn’t need to learn anything for the first time. The course content was roughly the same as it was back then though, it’s just explained so much better by the MIT lecturers and their automattic finger exercises.

Right now that’s not a threat to universities who aren’t doing this, because a degree is worth something and a few certificates are worth very little. But if that changes, then I see trouble on the horizon for universities that didn’t prepare for a world where they might have to compete online. On top of that, there is incentive for the individual professors, in at least one of the courses I went through, the accompanying book was authored by the professor who taught the course.

I guess there is a high probability that things won’t change of course. Too many MOOC are extremely poor quality, some sites like Udemy even consists entirely of amateurs, and it’s too easy to cheat. But if things do move toward universities teaching online, then we wouldn’t really need thousands of places to teach introduction to CS, would we?

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#15

Post by anonymous5133 »

spectramax wrote: post #2

I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives for colleges to do this?

I'm assuming you've never taken a MOOC before? Most of them are no way even close to equivalent to the real class. Most of these universities basically use these as marketing. They'll teach you the first 4 weeks of material from a 16 week course. Most of them completely lack any form of assessment tools so students can't even practice.

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#16

Post by stewbrew »

Such a list is almost worthless without some kind of quality assessment. I skimmed through a few courses and they vary extremely in quality. Some are made by often rather young lecturers who could have prepared better so that they don't have to read their own name from a card. Others are presented by well established researchers who also are excellent teachers. Some courses cover only the basics with the result that in some fields there are a lot courses with about the same content. Other courses go surprisingly deep. A simple list doesn't help you to distinguish between good and bad courses.

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#17

Post by dhawalhs »

jarofgreen wrote: post #12

It pains me to see pages like this. Someone has spent ages making this long list by hand, then it's put up as a long blog post. No way to filter by anything .... can we have it as machine workable Open Data please! Also, think about ways to allow other people to contribute to the list so that the work of keeping it up to date is shared out and not on just a few people.

Actually, it wasn't generated by hand. I/Class Central generated it for OpenCulture. Here is a more comprehensive list, with filtering: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#18

Post by dhawalhs »

stewbrew wrote: post #16

Such a list is almost worthless without some kind of quality assessment. I skimmed through a few courses and they vary extremely in quality. Some are made by often rather young lecturers who could have prepared better so that they don't have to read their own name from a card. Others are presented by well established researchers who also are excellent teachers. Some courses cover only the basics with the result that…

You can find reviews for these courses here: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

It's the same list, but more comprehensive.

Re: 2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

#20

Post by raz32dust »

spectramax wrote: post #2

I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives for colleges to do this?

Well, most of the courses listed are VC$, meaning they are free, but you can pay for certification. I am guessing universities and Coursera are just placing experimental bets on this pay-for-certification model for casual learners, in the hopes that it might eventually make some money (I hope it does!).
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