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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

#31

Post by dilap »

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.

I know for me, one of the things I found very helpful about college vs just reading stuff in books, is that the social obligation to learn made it harder to be lazy and keep blowing off a topic. Perhaps Coursera is trying to replicate this w/ its "everyone together, limited availability" model.

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

#32

Post by [deleted] »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #27
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…

But it is educating more people for less money.

[deleted]

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

#33

Post by saraid216 »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #27
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…

But it is educating more people for less money.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

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

#34

Post by waterlesscloud »

mrfusion wrote: post #19
michaelochurch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The part of this discussion that gets swept aside in all the high-minded posturing about education is that most people see coursework as a chore, as something they have to do to get the piece of paper they want.

As such, the unspoken "secret" about college courses is that most people do the least they feel they have to do. The majority of students are simply marking time.

That's deadly in a MOOC because, well, there's no consequence to failing. The least you have to do is... nothing. Combine that with the fact that there's no tangible reward in the way that there is with a degree from a college and you get a lot of people doing nothing.

People, as a group, really aren't interested in learning any more than the bare minimum they need to get what they want. That's what MOOCs are really up against.

As long as there's not honest discussion about that, MOOCs are going to have a hard time of it. High-minded idealistic the-people-want-to-learn approaches ignore reality.

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

#35

Post by psbp »

michaelochurch wrote: post #21
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…

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 bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that th…

It seems like they have a chicken and egg problem. If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), then why bother completing them? Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

They can't expect valid results until the utility of the product is valuable.

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

#36

Post by timr »

randomdata wrote: post #24
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…

> The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be p…

"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.

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

#37

Post by psbp »

saraid216 wrote: post #33
waterlesscloud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is educating more people for less money.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

4 courses at coursera: $0

4 courses at my local state university: $5000

-

Hell lets be a little bit more equitable:

4 courses at coursera with the signature track: $200

4 courses at my local community college: $400

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

#38

Post by waterlesscloud »

saraid216 wrote: post #33
waterlesscloud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is educating more people for less money.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

Call it 7,000 undergrad students at Stanford. 80,000 courses complete at Udacity would be about 11 courses per student, or a very solid academic year of courses.

So we could reasonably say the number of Udacity student-courses complete is similar to a year of Stanford's.

Call it $40,000 for a Stanford undergrad for a year. A total of $280,000,000 for those 7000 undergrads.

Udacity has raised $22 million.

So an entire order of magnitude less than Stanford tuition costs for a similar number of student-courses complete.

Of course Stanford tuition doesn't just go to classroom operations, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?

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

#39

Post by hershel »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #25

I don't see why MOOCs are pitched as revolutionary in teaching. They're still fundamentally lecture-based, and lectures are a terrible way to teach. I'm most familiar with research in physics education, where an average intro physics class fills only 24% of students' gaps in understanding. On the other hand, some professors are experimenting with more interactive methods -- not less interactive MOOCs -- and getting t…

Very interesting link. Thanks.

Based on the conclusion of this link, it would be interesting to combine MOOC courses for the lecture part, with a technology like knewton, which by monitoring exercises you do , learn about what areas you have problems(and perhaps about misconceptions) , and can guide you to relevant content.

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

#40

Post by _delirium »

psbp wrote: post #37
saraid216 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

4 courses at coursera: $0 4 courses at my local state university: $5000 - Hell lets be a little bit more equitable: 4 courses at coursera with the signature track: $200 4 courses at my local community college: $400

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 curriculum-dev and teaching work is done by professors who're drawing a full-time salary from a university (not from Coursera or Udacity). Nonetheless it'd be interesting to see some kind of ballpark estimate of how many total resources it takes to put together and teach a Coursera course, if hypothetically they were actually all billed.
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