Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course • Hacker News Board

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#11

Post by seren » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 3:56 PM UTC

orionsbelt wrote: post #6

sown wrote: post #2

> the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. That's still thousands (tens or hundreds) of students who passed. So perhaps the 'click-through' rate for MOOC is the same as it is for ads? I feel Pro…

Personally, I have signed up for maybe 50 MOOCs, but only completed 2, and really engaged in any level with maybe 3-5. But this was intentional. Signing up lets me: 1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open). 2) Try out different courses / professors 3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all…

I am pretty sure that if most MOOCs would offer a demo of the first few week courses without having to sign "officially", the attrition rate would be much lower.

I see plenty of interesting courses on Coursera, but the one page + one video description is not enough to understand how the course will feel like and if I want to commit few hours of my life to follow it.

I always hesitate to sign because I have the feeling that by signing, I take a solemn oath that I will finish the course... (so at least I am not contributing to the bad metrics, but I feel like the metrics is skewed for wrong reasons anyway)

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#12

Post by fernly » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:05 PM UTC

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores).

The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference.

The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional social component. If they were viewed this way, a different business model might emerge.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#13

Post by timr » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:06 PM UTC

It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven protective bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything.

The self-delusion is so strong that people are denying what Thrun himself said: Udacity was (is?) a lousy product [1]. It doesn't do what it was supposed to do, which is educate more people for less money.

The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds (or at least, maybe the world wants that, but that isn't what Thrun wants, and I admire his integrity -- a lot of folks in his shoes would just be desperately trying to keep the party going, rather than admitting early failure). If MOOCs are nothing more than a place where half-interested techies go to pretend to learn about AI, then they're pretty useless.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#14

Post by mhurron » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:15 PM UTC

fernly wrote: post #12

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional…

> saved for future reference

I wish that was possible with Coursera. I often need way more time then the structured course time. I don't interact with people on the forums so I don't care about that but locking me out of the videos means I don't get to see a lot of things I would like too.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#15

Post by randomdata » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:16 PM UTC

seren wrote: post #11

orionsbelt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I have signed up for maybe 50 MOOCs, but only completed 2, and really engaged in any level with maybe 3-5. But this was intentional. Signing up lets me: 1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open). 2) Try out different courses / professors 3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all…

I am pretty sure that if most MOOCs would offer a demo of the first few week courses without having to sign "officially", the attrition rate would be much lower. I see plenty of interesting courses on Coursera, but the one page + one video description is not enough to understand how the course will feel like and if I want to commit few hours of my life to follow it. I always hesitate to sign because I have the feelin…

I'm not sure I agree. If the course is interesting, I will sign up anyway, while still not completing it. That is, unless I can access the content without signing up, but that does not seem to be common.

I think the real problem is that MOOCs are not brick and mortar schools, and any attempts to mirror a brick and mortar school will only detract value from the offerings. I don't sign up to do homework or take tests, I sign up to learn something. I will then take what I learned and apply it to something practical in my own life. If successful, it proves to me that I understand the content well enough to accomplish what I set out to achieve. I don't feel the need to prove that to anyone else. A certificate of achievement hanging on my wall means nothing.

Of course, the real issue here is that the business model was based on the idea of selling graduates to interested industry partners. If I don't successfully complete the tests, I'm not valuable to them.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#16

Post by michaelochurch » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:16 PM UTC

fernly wrote: post #12

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional…

The old model of education is a cathedral, and DIY is the bazaar, and each approach has its weaknesses.

MOOC is about as silly as "horseless carriage". The old model of education similar to a mathematical proof, with technical lemmas built up progressively until there is a macroscopically interesting result. That has a lot of value. Linear algebra is useful in so many fields, and learning it when you have the time, because you have to, gets it out of the way so you can progress to the fields you actually care about (machine learning, signal processing, physical sciences).

I think the new model will be graph-based and open like Wikipedia, but it will have to be aggressively curated for correctness, quality, and coherence. In 10 years, one should be able to take a query like "I want to be employable as a data scientist in 3 years" and turn that into a spanning tree of the relevant subgraph.

There'll also be a need for an offline/online hybrid approach like Meetup.com and dating sites-- some interaction offline, some in person-- and that part of it won't fulfill the dream of squashing geographic inequality. Perhaps education will be the first killer app for true "Metaverse" technology (but it won't be the last or biggest).

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#17

Post by mhurron » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

sown wrote: post #5

mlyang wrote: post #3

The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to…

I think what changed Thrun's mind was the less than successful SJSU experiment: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...

I'd love to finish that math course if I could log back in.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#18

Post by michaelochurch » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

mhurron wrote: post #14

fernly wrote: post #12

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional…

> saved for future reference I wish that was possible with Coursera. I often need way more time then the structured course time. I don't interact with people on the forums so I don't care about that but locking me out of the videos means I don't get to see a lot of things I would like too.

If you start a Coursera course and don't finish it, you usually have persistent access to the course videos.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#19

Post by mrfusion » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:29 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #16

fernly wrote: post #12

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional…

The old model of education is a cathedral, and DIY is the bazaar, and each approach has its weaknesses. MOOC is about as silly as "horseless carriage". The old model of education similar to a mathematical proof, with technical lemmas built up progressively until there is a macroscopically interesting result. That has a lot of value. Linear algebra is useful in so many fields, and learning it when you have the time, b…

I think the motivation component also needs to be figured out. There's a huge amount of motivation in keeping up with a real world course, not falling behind your peers, and getting your money's worth.

MOOC's can't really provide that. I've toyed with doing a startup in this regard. Perhaps something like gympact but targetted at MOOC's. I.e., you pledge a certain amount of money that you'll finish a course and lose it if you don't.

Even better if you pledge with a group of people and the whole group loses their money unless the whole group finishes. That way you could harness some major peer pressure.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#20

Post by chilldream » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 4:31 PM UTC

orionsbelt wrote: post #6

sown wrote: post #2

> the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. That's still thousands (tens or hundreds) of students who passed. So perhaps the 'click-through' rate for MOOC is the same as it is for ads? I feel Pro…

Personally, I have signed up for maybe 50 MOOCs, but only completed 2, and really engaged in any level with maybe 3-5. But this was intentional. Signing up lets me: 1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open). 2) Try out different courses / professors 3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all…

I've finished about a dozen MOOCs, even TA'ed a couple and my story is similar. I'm usually enrolled in at least three courses with no intention of finishing all of them.