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

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

#61

Post by agumonkey »

timr wrote: post #13

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 pret…

You're right but I'd like to add that MOOC added a new path to my options into learning, a less atomic one, I can put the effort and complete x% before dropping out of exhaustion, and come back not long after that and gather x% more.

It might better fit adult learning process as, at least I, get distracted more easily (less focus power, more things to handle, different brain). Actually that may be why Thrun is going into corporate education...

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

#62

Post by saraid216 »

psbp wrote: post #41
_delirium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question was about costs of providing the service, not the tuition charged to students. How much does it cost to produce and operate a MOOC, in terms of total resources put into it? It's a bit difficult to account for, because in this early stage there is quite a bit of unaccounted-for labor. For example, there is some cross-subsidy from existing universities, because much of the Coursera/Udacity curricul…

I couldn't imagine the costs of running an online class being more than a brick and mortar.

That's the thing: if we're going to make claims about costs, we need to stop imagining them and actually run numbers. The numbers might be wrong, incomplete, or poorly chosen/framed, but those things can be pointed out and discussed.

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

#63

Post by djs1sjd »

timr wrote: post #13

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 pret…

I spell it out with examples in another comment here, but one shouldn't assume that everyone has equal access to the foundation and motivation needed to put out the "effort" to succeed in MOOCs.

The people who are really educationally disadvantaged are often that way because of some other difficult circumstances in their lives (violence, social breakdown, poor parenting, and the associated effects on motivation).

I'm not referring to (typical) hacker news types here (myself included). You could give us all the extra educational access in the world and you wouldn't make a dent in educational inequalities, whether in the US, or globally.

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

#64

Post by saraid216 »

randomdata wrote: post #42
timr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there." It emphasizes that lots of people on the internet want something for nothing, which has a surprise quotient of exactly zero.

I could see paying for a quality educational service. I already pay for Netflix and only spend a fraction of the time watching it compared to what I spend on watching MOOC-style videos. Udacity isn't really there though. The videos are top notch, but the user experience is not very good.

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for it if you were explicitly subsidizing students who couldn't pay for it?

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

#65

Post by stefap2 »

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…

If I remember correctly we called it "audit a class". Visit lectures without actually taking the course for credit.

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

#66

Post by mcguire »

I think the point here is that if the goal is to provide at least some information (and entertainment, which is not worthless) to at least some of the numbers of students that sign up, then Udacity specifically and MOOCs in general are successful.

On the other hand, if the goal is to provide an education that is as solid and as valued as a university, which Thrun seems to think his goal was, then Udacity and MOOCs are not succeeding.

Further, if Udacity, which is a company that needs to make a profit, is going to succeed then it needs to change its focus.

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

#67

Post by saraid216 »

MoosePlissken wrote: post #44
timr wrote: post #13

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 pret…

How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? If someone finishes the class, aces the exam, and then promptly goes on living their life as an IT professional without any tangible change, was the course anything more than "infotainment"? I'm not sure how you measure "real" learning, but course completion doesn't seem to be a good w…

> How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing?

Here's the thing: you can't tell.

Why is there a final exam? Because otherwise, you can't tell. It's an exit survey.

This is one of the clearest indicators that Udacity and other MOOCs aren't actually "revolutionizing" anything in education; they're just making an economic gamble on an iteration.

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

#68

Post by varelse »

aashaykumar92 wrote: post #9

MOOCs can't expect to replace universities right now, it just won't happen. But if they integrate their platforms in a way to HELP college students and even adults, their popularity will blow up so that in the future, it will be more realistic to think that MOOCs may be THE go-to for a higher level education. Focusing on the college population and growing that is the best way to begin...being ubiquitous from the star…

If I had to pay $150/course, that would end my usage of MOOCs.

In contrast, I'd be happy to pay $5-$10/month for overall access to Coursera or Udacity (probably just Coursera actually given the quality issues I've seen on Udacity). But the minute you try to shoehorn me back into the traditional mode of learning, I'm going back to reading books at my own pace and timing. Can we pretty please finally have the 21st century that should have started sometime during the last decade?

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

#69

Post by saraid216 »

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…

> 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.

You should also be able to invert that, by saying, "I've found all these subjects interesting; what might I be employable as?"

This seems like the kind of thing a recruiting company ought to start working on now. You'd be able to spot likely recruits really early on, brick-and-mortar or MOOC or whatever.

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

#70

Post by aashaykumar92 »

varelse wrote: post #68
aashaykumar92 wrote: post #9

MOOCs can't expect to replace universities right now, it just won't happen. But if they integrate their platforms in a way to HELP college students and even adults, their popularity will blow up so that in the future, it will be more realistic to think that MOOCs may be THE go-to for a higher level education. Focusing on the college population and growing that is the best way to begin...being ubiquitous from the star…

If I had to pay $150/course, that would end my usage of MOOCs. In contrast, I'd be happy to pay $5-$10/month for overall access to Coursera or Udacity (probably just Coursera actually given the quality issues I've seen on Udacity). But the minute you try to shoehorn me back into the traditional mode of learning, I'm going back to reading books at my own pace and timing. Can we pretty please finally have the 21st cent…

That doesn't solve the problem of completing a course, though.
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