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Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

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Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#51

I hope edx does not follow coursera way.

I believe they did in a way, certificates are now available only if you pay, rather than for anyone taking the class. That doesn't bother me but it's the first step coursera took before ending up where it is now.

I guess it makes the certificate itself seem more valuable as a means of expressing that you accomplished something. My view of edX is biased though by how awesome CS50 is, it feels more like a movement than a class.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#52
post #49

I feel Coursera's pricing strategy is located at two opposite extremes and misses out an entire range of options in the middle. They either make an entire course completely free with no option to pay even if the student wants to, or they put it behind a paywall where one can't even start without paying. They along with their institutional partners are missing out revenue from people like me who'd like to pay some amo…

Are there any successful ventures with such "pay-what-you-like" pricing strategy? Having unsuccessfully tried such a pricing model myself, I have serious doubt about it's viability. Majority will not pay anything, very few will pay reasonable amount, and some will pay very little but will be very high maintenance. Payer: God dammit, I paid for your service and I want one hour of your support time. Company: How much d…

Bandcamp?

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#53
A good friend of mine who works at Coursera attributes their descent to the brain drain they've had over the past year.

Apparently, management is sweeping the problem under the rug, and forcing a false rhetoric that the departures were good. Even their Glassdoor page[1] seems doctored now. Sad times.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Coursera-Reviews-E654749.h...

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#55
It is truly sad to see Coursera getting greedier by the day. I can honestly say this website changed my life, I was living in a third world country and still in high school when I enrolled in Andrew Ng's machine learning class and thanks to that MOOC I was able to get a machine learning job building recommender systems for a Canadian company straight out of high school. There are plenty of amazing MOOCs that Coursera has completely removed from the website or are only available for people who want to pay upfront. Please don't be like Udacity Coursera.

BTW you have until June 30 to download your courses.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#56
post #49

I feel Coursera's pricing strategy is located at two opposite extremes and misses out an entire range of options in the middle. They either make an entire course completely free with no option to pay even if the student wants to, or they put it behind a paywall where one can't even start without paying. They along with their institutional partners are missing out revenue from people like me who'd like to pay some amo…

Are there any successful ventures with such "pay-what-you-like" pricing strategy? Having unsuccessfully tried such a pricing model myself, I have serious doubt about it's viability. Majority will not pay anything, very few will pay reasonable amount, and some will pay very little but will be very high maintenance. Payer: God dammit, I paid for your service and I want one hour of your support time. Company: How much d…

It probably depends on what the product or service is, and how it's sold. Coursera already provides some courses for free, and even those attract some high maintenance types from what I've seen in the forums. Does providing a pay-what-you-want option increase the number of nasties or the degree of nastiness, for example, inviting legal risks? I don't really know. But I feel Coursera should atleast experiment and gather the data before deciding, instead of missing out on all that data.

Leanpub and Gumroad are two services that follow this strategy. I don't know if they are successful ventures, but I notice they have maintained this pricing strategy since their inception and never changed or stopped it.

Leanpub says "...the pattern we have seen with multiple books, about a third of people will pay the suggested price, a third will pay the minimum price and a third will pay somewhere in between. Finally, the odd person will pay more than the suggested price" [1]. Some anecdotal experiences of individual authors [2],[3],[4] support it.

[1]: https://leanpub.com/help/author_faq [2]: http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/1626 [3]: http://blog.ppenev.com/2013/07/16/what-i-have-learned-from-l... [4]: http://blog.gumroad.com/post/75707736685/is-pay-what-you-wan...

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#57

I always wanted to work through the algorithms MOOCs from Princeton but I kept putting it off. Profs Sedgewick and Wayne are phenomenal teachers. Anyone know if this course will be available in the future? (probably not, since they had no certificates etc, and I don't see them going along with paid-for-quizzes courses, but it doesn't hurt to ask)

I'm in the same boat. Found https://github.com/coursera-dl/coursera-dl and was able to download part 1 and 2.

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, his comment assumes you can't improve your enjoyment of life just by learning about things you like.

After a while, this never ending river of UTF-8 characters and RGB pixels gets a little old. You realize all the time you've spent whiling away so much time, imagining that it's all building up to something even better than yesterday's tide of serialized data streams, that your youth has faded, and you're still just staring at a lightbulb masked behind a screen of wires, listening to air disturbed by oscillating magn…

[deleted]

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#59
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they did in a way, certificates are now available only if you pay, rather than for anyone taking the class. That doesn't bother me but it's the first step coursera took before ending up where it is now.

I guess it makes the certificate itself seem more valuable as a means of expressing that you accomplished something. My view of edX is biased though by how awesome CS50 is, it feels more like a movement than a class.

indeed, and I am sure there is a percentage of people that will likely pay for a certificate that was not paying before.

It's not a bad move, and it's totally legit, _but_ it hints at a stronger effort to get money.

Regarding the "movement" thing, I had the same feeling with my first 3 large MOOC (AI which begat udacity, ML & DBs which begat coursera). But not anymore :/

Re: Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

#60
post #30
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder of https://www.CourseBuffet.com here. I would say it is a mixed bag. There are without a doubt people getting real value out of MOOCs who otherwise would not be able to take these courses. This being said I talk to a lot of people about MOOCs and I am still surprised how many people don't know about them. Actually one of the first questions I am often asked is why do they offer free courses! Edit: to add to m…

I've googled seemingly tons of different combinations of keywords to find out if a product like yours existed before starting to build it myself. Which search keywords most often lead users to coursebuffet? (and how did I miss them!) I have to say it's super quick and I like the interface (just signed up), what does the stack look like if you don't mind? Edit: Now that I think about it, I have tons of questions, I'll…

1.I will say it for sure isn't MOOCs That being said our SEO leaves a lot to be desired. Something we are still trying to figure out. Not sure why we are not ranked higher.

2. Rails/mysql

3. yes will remain free.

4. Monetization and an other questions just email me bruce@coursebuffet.com

What we do that is different than others is examine each course we list. We then classify it by assigning it a subject and number that roughly reflects what level it would be at a US university . Is it a first year 101 course then say for intro to micro economics it is Econ 101. This is incredibly time consuming but we think it enables us to give users results that are more informative and they can see like choices clustered together.

The other major benefit is we can offer the CourseBuffet Degree Paths (https://www.coursebuffet.com/degree) that replicated a Bachelor's degree using free MOOCs. These paths are platform independent so one is not locked in to Coursera, edX, etc. We also now have Minors that replicate academic minors for Econ and Philosophy.

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