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Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

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Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#21

Post by americandesi333 »

nborwankar wrote: post #17

I've been following the MOOC wave since the "early 3" Stanford classes back in Fall 2011. I've continued both on Udacity and Coursera partly auditing and partly participating. The fiasco with the MOOC class, IMHO, was probably avoidable. For one MOOCs of the Coursera/Udacity scale have been around for little over a year and I doubt even Andrew Ng/Daphne Koller or Sebastian Thrun would call themselves experts in what…

I was wondering how 'scaling' Coursera model would affect them. QA becomes very critical once you associate top university brands to the courses that are offered. I hope Coursera will learn from this and really evaluate every course before going online.

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#22

Post by guelo »

nborwankar wrote: post #17

I've been following the MOOC wave since the "early 3" Stanford classes back in Fall 2011. I've continued both on Udacity and Coursera partly auditing and partly participating. The fiasco with the MOOC class, IMHO, was probably avoidable. For one MOOCs of the Coursera/Udacity scale have been around for little over a year and I doubt even Andrew Ng/Daphne Koller or Sebastian Thrun would call themselves experts in what…

MOOC = massive open online course

TIL...

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#23

Post by monkeyfacebag »

It appears the instructor is employed as an "instructional designer" in Georgia Tech's distance learning program. Superficially, traditional distance learning programs have something in common with MOOCs, but there are a number of important differences. An obvious one is scale and it seems like the instructor was legitimately unprepared for the M in MOOC. Unfortunately, (and obviously generalizing here) another one is quality. Distance learning programs have long been second rate and even though the MOOC format isn't perfect, there are some very good professors teaching fields they have made significant contributions to, which is not something I've experienced with distance learning. My take away? You have to vet the instructor.

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#24

Post by revskill »

ekianjo wrote: post #15
uladzislau wrote: post #14

I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core technology right? I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for 1 sec. is considered 'watched', to close the video popup on iPad I need to play 'find a close button' game and overall the user experience of watching videos sucks a big way.

Why don't you download them instead?

Because their hard disk is full ;)

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#25

Post by dizzystar »

nborwankar wrote: post #17

I've been following the MOOC wave since the "early 3" Stanford classes back in Fall 2011. I've continued both on Udacity and Coursera partly auditing and partly participating. The fiasco with the MOOC class, IMHO, was probably avoidable. For one MOOCs of the Coursera/Udacity scale have been around for little over a year and I doubt even Andrew Ng/Daphne Koller or Sebastian Thrun would call themselves experts in what…

I'm currently taking the Single Variable Calculus by Professor Ghrist from uPenn, and I think it hits all the correct notes:

- Prof G and several of his TAs are in the forums. If you post a good or interesting question, they will show up and offer an answer.

- The class is incredibly complete: way more complete and self-contained than any other MOOC that I have tried. Prof B is incredibly knowledgeable and quirky to say the least.

- With the above said, the class demands a ton of self-study, but it is backed up with a lot of homeworks. Each lecture has a hw associated with it. They do have an attitude that you must struggle with the material and keep doing it over and over until you get the questions right and it starts to become second-nature. They pull this off by never giving answers to hw's.

- Despite the attitude with the hw, they have given amazingly complete answers to Exam 1 and Exam 2

- They offered a diagnostic exam before you start. This would let you know right away if this class will beyond your head.

- They really put some time into the class. The entire course is beautifully hand-drawn and I think the professor said that the drawings alone took 1200 hours or so. If you add in the Exams, hw, and the exam answers, there must be something like 1500 hours committed to making this course great.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of the grading:

4 Exams at 5% of the grade each Final = 80% of the grade.

I sort of like it because it gives you a bit of room to screw up and recover, but it is definitely shattering to do bad on an exam and start worrying about how bad the final may turn out. It is an interesting way to encourage you to take the work.

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#26

Post by Smerity »

nborwankar wrote: post #17

I've been following the MOOC wave since the "early 3" Stanford classes back in Fall 2011. I've continued both on Udacity and Coursera partly auditing and partly participating. The fiasco with the MOOC class, IMHO, was probably avoidable. For one MOOCs of the Coursera/Udacity scale have been around for little over a year and I doubt even Andrew Ng/Daphne Koller or Sebastian Thrun would call themselves experts in what…

I think your suggestions are good. I've found that the weakest element of Coursera courses were discussion. Even with heroic efforts of the volunteer tutors, the forums still end up cluttered and confusing.

For this person to come in and try to push everything towards a student centric approach is... scary... Student interaction is what has traditionally had the most trouble scaling. Assigning teams via Google Docs wouldn't have worked for most large sized university classes, let alone a class of thousands.

Coursera now has a major issue: universities now understand that a publicly (spectacularly) failed course can tarnish the university's image.

I know a number of professors in academia and the university bureaucracy is what they're constantly fighting. The bureaucracy kills off innovation and hates taking risks. I fear many professors will not be allowed to teach from Coursera or similar MOOC platforms due to the possibility of damaging the university's public standing. This was already an issue before, considering these MOOCs don't directly benefit the university and could in fact be lowering their revenue (i.e. distance based learning).

The failure of this online course could have a far wider impact than just annoying 40,000 Coursera students.

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#27

Post by Correasa »

ekianjo wrote: post #15
uladzislau wrote: post #14

I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core technology right? I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for 1 sec. is considered 'watched', to close the video popup on iPad I need to play 'find a close button' game and overall the user experience of watching videos sucks a big way.

Why don't you download them instead?

In this particular course, some videos were heavier than 800 Mb.

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#28

Post by PeterisP »

uladzislau wrote: post #14

I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core technology right? I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for 1 sec. is considered 'watched', to close the video popup on iPad I need to play 'find a close button' game and overall the user experience of watching videos sucks a big way.

Yeah, their video player needs improvement.

For me, the pause doesn't work properly if I pause for any significant time. If I pause the video for a minute, then everything is OK, but if I go to brew tea, then when I come back, the video always freezes after unpausing (well, it shows a couple seconds that were buffered) - probably they have some timeout issue there.

Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

#30

Post by bencollier49 »

This will make an interesting case study, in worldwide PR as much as anything. As a Brit, I hadn't heard much about Georgia Tech until now, but I'm pretty certain that if I wanted to take a global MBA, I wouldn't go to the place with the famously incompetent MOOC instructor.
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