181–190 of 277 posts
Worthwhile to point out that edX is a non-profit [1] unlike Coursera [2] and Udacity [3]. [1] https://www.edx.org/about-us [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursera [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity
Kinda. They act more like a for-profit than like a non-profit.
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So? They have changed their business model. They're entitled to do so. If you care so much about the poor, you might as well subsidize a MOOC for them, instead of demanding Coursera to do so.
And people are "entitled" to criticize them on the Internet. Sheesh, people really over-dramatize Hacker News threads. We aren't a legislative chamber debating a bill. We're an assortment of techno-hipster liberals and wannabe-entrepreneur libertarians, commenting on (often trivial) current events over coffee on a Saturday morning. The moral outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage-over-the-outrage gets comical afte…
How is that for an outrage over an outrage? :)
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You just don't get it. I can afford to pay for a MOOC and I would consider it, but there are millions of people who can't afford it. Coursera's about page used to say this: "committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it". Now they have removed every instance of the word "free" https://www.coursera.org/about/ Nothing wrong with being a for-profit company, but they went…
So? They have changed their business model. They're entitled to do so. If you care so much about the poor, you might as well subsidize a MOOC for them, instead of demanding Coursera to do so.
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So why not share all the downloaded content through a p2p torrent network, rather than to keep them in our own servers to ourselves, so that everyone else benefits?
The Coursera TOS prohibit this. Specificaly, "You may download content from our Services only for your personal, non-commercial use, unless you obtain Coursera's written permission to otherwise use the content."[0] [0] - https://www.coursera.org/about/terms
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Can someone get the archive team on this?
I don't think that would be legal. Coursera ToS definitely prohibits something like this. I can see a case for a torrent with the courses mysteriously appearing on some torrent site and someone linking it here, though. Man, those cheeky pirates! They can't leave anything alone. (I don't personally have bandwidth for something like that, sadly. Of course I'm also not a pirate.)
Have some heart. This is completely Ethical. What about millions of people around the world who does not even have bank account to pay. Remember the authors does not get screwed. Their life will not get modified drastically. Only the undeserved people who are making money out of them.
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If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand, instead of trying to monetize courses and certificates, people could continue to have this content for free. Unfortunately, universities don't exactly exemplify long-term thinking. Most of the content for these MOOCs is created by professors as part of their jobs, so this content is owned by their universities. I bet a vast…
> If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand Top universities already have plenty of brand recognition and get way more applicants than what they can accept. The monetary value of any additional marketing is probably very close to zero for them.
You can apply that reasoning to any large organization: once it's known/famous for its excellence, an overwhelming majority of their marketing investments have small return. Still, they continue to invest in marketing because they know that this excellence has to be maintained. That's exactly what they should use MOOCs for - and they initially did
I'd be happy to pay a bit for it if that's what they want. Or is their view that Geoffrey Hinton teaching neural networks in 2012 is just kind of cruft cluttering up the internet?
In case you want to download as may courses as possible before they fade away, here are some notes. Please forgive me some mistakes, I wrote this a bit in a hurry. =========================== 1) Spawn a virtual server on DigitalOcean. I am using the 40$/month in order to have 40GB of space, but my plan is to shut it down in a day or two. The advantage is to have storage space AND super-fast connection. If you don't w…
Tested and successfully downloaded (about 30GB): - recsys-001 - hwswinterface-002 - eefun-001 - experiments-001 - gametheory-003 - crypto-010 - pgm - cariesmanagement-003 - algo2-003 - analyze-003 - audio-002 - ml-005 - sna-2012-001-staging - spatialcomputing-001 - organalysis-003 - compilers-004 - modelthinking-006 - ggp-003 - algo-009 - intrologic-005 - automata - linearopt-002 - matrix-002 Please add below this co…
I will work on figuring out the slugs next. For you now, you will need to signup for the course and figure it out. You can also find the same the list on Class Central where you can filter by subjects or sort by rating: https://www.class-central.com/collection/coursera-old-stack
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Leanpub co-founder here. We're really happy with our minimum price + suggested price strategy, and have no plans to change it. When coupled with our sliders which clearly show the (very high, 90% minus 50 cents) royalties that are earned by the author(s), and with our free update distribution, we get a lot of benefits for our authors, including: 1. When there is a low or a free minimum price, readers who otherwise co…
Encouraging. Your page for Roger Peng's R Programming book also contains a link to Lulu for those who prefer print. Does following that link bypass your system or are you collecting some kind of fee for that? I'm assuming Dr Peng gets a reasonable chunk of coffee money from Lulu directly as usual. Cheers
That said, having used Lulu myself in the past (back in 2006), Lulu pays good royalty rates on print books and ebooks, and we recommend that all our authors consider using Lulu or Amazon CreateSpace to produce a print book once their book is done. If you search "Leanpub" on Lulu, you'll see a handful of Leanpub books there.
To help our authors produce print books, we have two features:
1. Print-ready PDF export. Click a button, get a PDF with proper page numbering (alternating sides), chapters always starting on the right page, no cover image (since Lulu and CreateSpace have wraparound cover upload features), etc. I think that most of our authors who have print books, including Dr. Peng, went this route since it's a lot easier than the second choice.
2. InDesign export. Click a different button, get InCopy (ICML) files. These can be given to a designer who is good at InDesign, and he or she can make a beautiful custom-designed book. Our InDesign export is pretty basic compared to the print-ready PDF export, but our hope is that it's a better starting point for a designer than a Word document with a bunch of formatting that they need to throw out.
For us, making the print book production process as easy as possible just adds to the value created by using Leanpub. We want to create more value than we capture, and this helps with that...
Cheers