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Surprising Things About School

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Re: Surprising Things About School

#161

Post by red_admiral »

About that 2% completion rate.

Organisation A runs a traditional class that takes in 100 students. 50 complete it.

Organisation B runs a MOOC that, with a bit of advertising, gets 2500 people to sign up for free. 50 complete it.

Maybe my made-up numbers are off by orders of magnitude. But "2% completion rate" on its own doesn't sound so terrible if it reaches a much wider audience to start with - which both "free" and "online" could contribute to.

I have signed up to many MOOCs and completed a couple. I consider that a net benefit. MOOCs are not going to replace university education any time soon in my opinion, but for people who don't have the university option in the first place or want to take a single course every now and then they're a great thing.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#162

Post by georgeecollins »

UncleEntity wrote: post #144
georgeecollins wrote: post #132

> "Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their effectiveness, and most don’t try. If you can’t measure effectiveness you can’t fail." I don't know the facts-- and none are presented in the tweet-- but I do have a friend whose very job is to run studies on the effectiveness of programs at a University. I am sure this person is not alone. Even if "most" (asserted) universities don't have a way to meas…

I see billboards and the busses that shuttle people between the different ASU campuses going on about their effectiveness all the time. #1 school for this metric. In the Top 10 for some other metric. Even the small California state school I went to goes on and on about the things they're good at...Environmental stuff and getting grads into the Peace Corp.

Right, and they know a lot about things they may have reasons not to share. Like, what majors are people likely to drop out of, which groups they accept are least likely to finish.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#163

Post by UncleEntity »

dpark wrote: post #152
lambda_lover wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the same experience here -- my mother got a bachelor's right before my brothers and I went to college, which just ended up penalizing us because it looked like we should have a lot more savings than we really had. I think there's a very very small portion of the population who gets their tuition reduced enough to be comfortable. Loans end up covering the rest, so yeah, your average student really does pay clo…

The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults .

This is a new thing (not the means testing but the idea behind it) AFAICT.

It was just assumed that if your parents were above the "means" they would help out any way they could because that's what was expected of them as parents.

College was also seen as an enabler and not an expectation for my generation.

Or...if your parents spent all the college fund sending your sister to UCLA you could join the army and emerge as an "adult" so your parents' income wasn't taken into account and get grants and loans on top of the G.I. Bill.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#164

Post by kthejoker2 »

austenallred wrote: post #36
kthejoker2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The school should partner with one of those "we invest in you in return for 1% of your life earnings" hedge funds. That way it'd have easy access to short-term capital needs like this.

OP here. We are a school that is completely free and takes a percentage of income (though for two years, not for life). Even still the $400 to make it through the last month was a barrier. We’re working on having a fund available for living expenses, but “I’m going to pay you cash so you can go to school” is a different risk profile than “This School is free until you’re hired.”

That's awesome. The only reason the school should take the burden is to distribute the risk pool and also theyre the most capable of providing some value framework on whether this $400 or that $400 is a better investment.

I personally would loan money for this sort of thing if there was a reasonable ROI and someone vetting the students.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#165

Post by throwawaymsft »

red_admiral wrote: post #161

About that 2% completion rate. Organisation A runs a traditional class that takes in 100 students. 50 complete it. Organisation B runs a MOOC that, with a bit of advertising, gets 2500 people to sign up for free. 50 complete it. Maybe my made-up numbers are off by orders of magnitude. But "2% completion rate" on its own doesn't sound so terrible if it reaches a much wider audience to start with - which both "free" an…

It sounds fine in theory -- people are being helped -- but in practice, I don't think it's so simple.

People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?)

When the vast majority of people fail to complete the goal, you decrease their confidence in the process. Unless someone starts with strong academic confidence, they may be demoralized by giving up/failing a course. We shouldn't be happy that 5% of people enjoy high school math class if 95% of people graduate hating it, and never touch the subject again.

We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned.

"That pill I sold you, turns out it's no better than placebo... but placebos are 30% effective, so it all worked out, right?"

Re: Surprising Things About School

#166

Post by dpark »

UncleEntity wrote: post #163
dpark wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults .

This is a new thing (not the means testing but the idea behind it) AFAICT. It was just assumed that if your parents were above the "means" they would help out any way they could because that's what was expected of them as parents. College was also seen as an enabler and not an expectation for my generation. Or...if your parents spent all the college fund sending your sister to UCLA you could join the army and emerge…

Of course when college was a stretch but not median-income-barely-covers-tuition expensive, the assumption that parents would cover it were more reasonable. And it was less of an issue if they didn’t since the debt load wasn’t insane.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#167

Post by dragonwriter »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #165
red_admiral wrote: post #161

About that 2% completion rate. Organisation A runs a traditional class that takes in 100 students. 50 complete it. Organisation B runs a MOOC that, with a bit of advertising, gets 2500 people to sign up for free. 50 complete it. Maybe my made-up numbers are off by orders of magnitude. But "2% completion rate" on its own doesn't sound so terrible if it reaches a much wider audience to start with - which both "free" an…

It sounds fine in theory -- people are being helped -- but in practice, I don't think it's so simple. People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?) When the vast majority of people fail to complete the goal, you decrease their confidence in the process. Unless someone starts with strong…

> People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it.

Most of the free MOOCs I've registered for I've not really had a particularly strong intent to finish. (Paid MOOCs are a different story.)

> (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?)

Because of a preference for interactive vs. static content, for one thing.

> We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned.

Actually, being low-barrier-to-entry so as to support more experimental, low-commitment exploration—which logically implies a lower completion rate—is a big part of how free MOOCs were positioned.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#168

Post by ThrustVectoring »

austenallred wrote: post #24
VLM wrote: post #16

The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement. In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't kn…

OP here (shocked to see this on HN): The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them. In other words, take a random sample of 100…

How well are you controlling for the sheepskin effect? Students are highly motivated to do what it takes to get a degree from a university, and much less motivated to actually learn the topics nominally offered.

I suspect that a MOOC offered with the same incentives and structure as a live class - ie, as part of a degree-granting program with mandatory tests at set dates - would have significantly higher completion rates.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#169

Post by ThrustVectoring »

brudgers wrote: post #78
randomdata wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Mini code bootcamp' suggests that your target audience is people looking for careers? What are the end employment results like for all the participants? For instance, are MOOC students more likely to not complete the course because they have already found work in the meantime? Perhaps because they have more freedom to look for work during business hours, for example, rather than sitting in on a live class during the…

The student handbook for the author's school suggests a graduate should expect to spend three to six months applying for five jobs a day. That's about 500 to a 1000 applications following six months of 45 hours a week at their online school.

Five per day is a pretty low application rate for what it's worth. You can get through twenty in an hour if you're organized and motivated.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#170

Post by ThrustVectoring »

randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

>If the more and more people attaining a postsecondary education really were adding $10k to their yearly income like the article suggests, incomes would be rising substantially.

Adding $10k to your yearly income does not add $10k to the aggregate yearly income. In large part, educational credentials are a positional good - if we gave out twice as many law degrees, we would not have twice as many practicing lawyers. In other words, completing a degree often helps you get a job at the expense of others who do not hold degrees.

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