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

#101

Post by LeanderK » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #92

LeanderK wrote: post #89

I never understood online-learning ([1]) for non-trivial topics. I need to discuss stuff to really understand it and to also have fun with it! I don't know how somebody could do a complete degree or even some harder lectures purely by watching some videos on your computer. Having access to some smart phd-students, talking with peers and solving hard problem-sets together is part of the fun. I can only imagine doing t…

The issue is - online learning isn't just watching videos. In the case of software related tasks, it's learning skills, competencies, and building software, which is on the computer. Digital learning is not happening, because current implementations have been anchored in the past (recording lectures) instead of creating meaningful digital experiences. Educators generally don't have the technology skills to create mea…

Hmm, maybe i didn't clearly communicate my opinion.

What I wanted to say is that I can't see how you could learn (without being exceptionally dedicated) challenging topics. Things you normally go to university for. Things where you constantly have to do difficult exercises, where you find yourself wanting to quit, but you have to keep pushing yourself through it. In the end, it's fun. But the path you have to travel to get there is not (always).

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

#102

Post by bcheung » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #84

bcheung wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I notice that many MOOCs have this academic mentality that something must be complete and a certificate earned. I could really give a damn about a certificate. Gaining the knowledge I need is all I care about. Udacity really makes me mad when they remove courses that I paid for if I don't do every little exercise (even the ones that are so horribly designed and have little learning value in them).

Gaining the knowledge may be all you care about, so long as you never have to demonstrate that gain. Certificates/exams/etc. are all used as proxies for demonstrating that in a complex and expensive way. Perhaps Udacity et. al. need an equivalent to "audit" - sounds like that would work for you.

It was more the removing access to a course that I paid for if I didn't follow their schedule that really upset me.

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

#103

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #2

I've learned everything I know for the last 20+ years after graduating from college at my own pace. I'm sure that's true for most developers.

Self-directed learning is a mainstay of developers. With every job being affected by digital change, this behavior is having to spread.

It's not uncommon for curriculum to be out of touch with what has

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

#104

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

LeanderK wrote: post #101

j45 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is - online learning isn't just watching videos. In the case of software related tasks, it's learning skills, competencies, and building software, which is on the computer. Digital learning is not happening, because current implementations have been anchored in the past (recording lectures) instead of creating meaningful digital experiences. Educators generally don't have the technology skills to create mea…

Hmm, maybe i didn't clearly communicate my opinion. What I wanted to say is that I can't see how you could learn (without being exceptionally dedicated) challenging topics. Things you normally go to university for. Things where you constantly have to do difficult exercises, where you find yourself wanting to quit, but you have to keep pushing yourself through it. In the end, it's fun. But the path you have to travel…

Maybe both experiences are valid.

Maybe it's not what our degree makes of us, but what we make of our degree/education.

University is where I learned to teach myself bececause my brilliant highly rated Comp Sci profs and program couldn't teach or communicate the best.

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

#105

Post by ska » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

bcheung wrote: post #102

ska wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaining the knowledge may be all you care about, so long as you never have to demonstrate that gain. Certificates/exams/etc. are all used as proxies for demonstrating that in a complex and expensive way. Perhaps Udacity et. al. need an equivalent to "audit" - sounds like that would work for you.

It was more the removing access to a course that I paid for if I didn't follow their schedule that really upset me.

ah, that's fair enough. annoying.

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

#106

Post by qwerty456127 » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:38 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #71

hackermailman wrote: post #36

The most interesting self-learning platform I've found is expii.com created by Poh-Shen Lo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po-Shen_Loh It feeds you exercises and judging by your answers determines if you need more practice or not using an Elo rating system https://v1.expii.com/grandmaster though I get the argument of having students pay for certs ergo they actually complete the courses, this other method seems to me to…

Systems that keep track of your learning progress and automatically schedule exercises are probably the future of learning, but I'm not sure whether the approach taking by expii.com is good enough yet. I did a few calculus questions and noticed two aspects which I think could be improved: 1) the multiple-choice question format makes questions easier than they appear. I solved a differential-equation question by diffe…

As for the second problem, it also applies to DuoLingo: at some point I get bored by repetitive easy questions, start clicking too fast, make a mistake (or even a misclick) purely out of insufficient attention (while the correct answer is actually obvious to me) and get more boring questions on the same topic.

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

#107

Post by LeanderK » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

yuy910616 wrote: post #99

LeanderK wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we have part-time masters here in germany. A friend of mine is doing a part-time bachelor and it works out. But it's usually not as challenging as going to a university for a full-time study.

I think in Europe this might be possible. But in America cost of education is prohibitively expensive.

That's weird. The only serious competition to public higher education-insitutions in germany is in part-time study programmes. One of them, the FOM, is even branding itself as the "higher education institution for working people".

The difference to full-time university degrees is that they are (usually) not research-focused. So you just learn, for example, business management, but they don't try to teach you how to do research, read and understand papers. It's a big difference. You mostly don't need much math if you don't want to do research.

But I've always wondered...is there a differentiation in america between universities and other higher-education institutions?

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

#108

Post by nothis » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #97

I believe education and testing/certification should always be considered 2 perfectly separate things and, ideally, done by different parties. There should be companies that educate people seeking to acquire knowledge and there should be companies that test people seeking a formal confirmation of their knowledge and issue them certificates. No exams should exist in an ideal university, their job is to educate you an…

Something I noticed is that exams are what we're always coming back to in terms of education. Employers want a confirmation that you learned something. That's a university degree. Even with respected websites offering confirmations, how can you trust that and how do you keep track of every website's quality?

I noticed this about all those "machine learning courses" that are getting posted here. Facebook and Google basically hand them out for free, hundreds of hours worth of quality learning material. Top universities let you watch all their lectures online. So what's the catch? Why aren't we all machine learning experts already? Because it's hard to muster the energy unless you commit to earning a degree by, yes, studying for exams. Turns out that's actually thousands of hours of work so the "convenience" part of online courses kinda starts to fade.

I definitely noticed that the quality difference between a good university and a bad one is often about how much they value "education" beyond just being an "exam machine". Presenting facts from the point of view of someone new to them, presenting methods of how to deal with edge cases and traps, taking one-on-one tutoring sessions seriously.

But yea, the end result is getting confirmation for having passed a bunch of exams.

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

#109

Post by blihp » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

frv103 wrote: post #3

I'm not sure that course completion percentage is necessarily the best metric to be drawing conclusions from. I will often sign up for MOOCs and courses for a single talk, chapter, or topic that I'm interested in with no intention of actually completing the course. I wonder I'm an outlier in this regard or if this approach is much more common than the author of this article realizes.

I'm the same way but I think people like us tend to be heavily over-represented on HN and probably represent a small fraction of the total audience. Similarly, I like to watch YouTube videos for specific technical content where the vast majority seems to prefer pop culture and cat videos.

A couple of other personality types / situations to consider:

1) Some people treat learning the way they treat a workout... procrastination is the path of least resistance. So metrics like course completion % 'gamify' it for them to give them the push they need to keep motivated.

2) In the business world, think of the times someone has said 'I'm not trained in that' (or something along those lines, often to try to get out of doing something) and the boss says 'well, go get trained in that.' Course completion is a thing that can be shown to said boss to 'prove' they learned something. While self-learners would tend to keep their mouths shut about not knowing it and say 'sure, no problem' and then go find whatever training materials were needed to learn said thing.

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

#110

Post by thinkmassive » Wed, Oct 03, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #51

thinkmassive wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m taking two courses on Coursera right now but only paid for a certificate in one. I plan to view all content from the other course, however Coursera will not grade the end-of-section quiz for non-paying students. It seems the only way to “complete” a Coursera course is to pay $50 so the assignments will be graded. At least this is the case for: https://www.coursera.org/learn/battery-management-systems

What’s the purpose of the actual certificate? As someone who has done dozens of interviews - I’m not a manager, but for about two years I was responsible for hiring and I’ve sat as part of a panel- most people don’t take most certificates seriously. Some, including myself, take it as a slightly negative signal. I’ve seen too many paper tigers. But then again, except for entry level positions, few hiring managers care…

If someone has completed a certification or course, it becomes a potential topic for discussion. It doesn't matter much to me whether they paid for it, if there's proof it was completed (a code repo or documentation could be an alternative to paying for a certificate).

I have certifications that people well below my skill level were also able to achieve, but I know I can speak to the topics much more authoritatively. It's not a binary signal.

I agree that certain industry certifications are more legitimate than most, although I think continuing education falls in a different but partially overlapping area. Nand2Tetris is the first MOOC I have paid for, because it seemed like a very interesting course that's recognized as legitimate by a substantial portion of people with whom I might enjoy working. Paying is also a good motivator to see it to completion.