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Coursera’s Preview Mode

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Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#51

Post by t_mann »

vintermann wrote: post #45
t_mann wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen Maybe a bit early to declare that, as the wave of college closures has shown no signs of slowing after the Covid years [0] and is expected to accelerate further [1]? [0] https://www.2adays.com/blog/college-shutdown-surge-update-th... [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91245055/higher-education-crisis...

It isn't MOOCs which is killing them in any case, though. Or do you disagree?

Depends on whether we're talking about MOOCs in a narrow sense or online learning more generally.

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#52

Post by __rito__ »

__rito__ wrote: post #22

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs. A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them. It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialis…

Didn’t notice the double-l in 'untill' till now. ;)

Edit window is gone.

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#53

Post by ozgung »

__rito__ wrote: post #22

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs. A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them. It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialis…

Learning Neural Networks from Hinton was transformative for me. It must be transformative for the industry, they still use Coursera lecture notes for citing RMSprop. I completed the very first MOOC offerings in Fall 2011, Machine Learning by Andrew Ng, and AI by Norvig and Thrun. It’s the first time ML “clicked” for me although I had took ML course in Master’s before. Sadly no one cares about my “Statement of Accomplishment”s when hiring. I carry them with pride, knowing they effectively taught me timely and relevant knowledge from the best experts in the world.

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#54

Post by nileshtrivedi »

MOOCs are still going strong at India's NPTEL , which started distributing university-level video courses for engg in 2008:

- 5m subscribers, almost 2B views on youtube

- 30m enrollments

- 600+ courses every semester in 22 disciplines

Anyone from the world can signup. Proctored exams are optional and cost about $11 per course. Not taking VC funding and setting up local chapters for supporting students seems to have worked out well for them.

Website: https://nptel.ac.in/

ACM report about this from November 2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3550473

Former-director of IIT Madras has talked about how NPTEL came together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoGegFLY

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#55

Post by Aurornis »

rustystump wrote: post #43
RHSeeger wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give. - don't really care about false negative rates That pretty much sums it up right there. And it's not hard at all to see _why_ this is the case.

Is there data that backs this? In my anecdotal experience it is all over the place. Unless i specifically know a given program it is a total crapshoot on if it means anything. I find pedigree to be about predictive of performance as a d20 toss.

I doubt you’ll find any public data on this because internal hiring success data is rarely ever released and MOOCs are already a rare resume item.

In my experience with hiring, though, it tracks. The number of times I’ve seen a MOOC on a resume is already a small number. Of those, it was usually 1-3 courses, not an entire program. Taking a couple courses does not compare to the repetition and layered learning of an entire program.

If someone showed up with an entire MOOC learning program and certificate of completion that I could verify then I would look into it. In my experience you don’t see this. You see people listing a couple MOOC courses right next to their other certifications. When you ask them questions about the topic they usually don’t remember much because it was a one-time course they took.

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#56

Post by vintermann »

t_mann wrote: post #51
vintermann wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't MOOCs which is killing them in any case, though. Or do you disagree?

Depends on whether we're talking about MOOCs in a narrow sense or online learning more generally.

So you think online learning is killing college? That doesn't sound very likely to me. Why do you think it is?

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#57

Post by rgavuliak »

aaron695 wrote: post #24
rgavuliak wrote: post #4

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I would disagree, I saw a lot of people, especially in the Data Science field that got up-skilled by back then free Coursera.

Alternate theory, MOOCs got lectures put onto YouTube. And this is what the early success really was. It'd be interesting to see if what they "up-skilled" on is now common knowledge in Data Science.

I think especially for Data Science, a lot of the curriculum got taken over by universities and new university programmes for Data Science were created since then so in a way it became common knowledge for fresh graduates.

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#58

Post by rgavuliak »

brudgers wrote: post #5
rgavuliak wrote: post #4

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I would disagree, I saw a lot of people, especially in the Data Science field that got up-skilled by back then free Coursera.

I both agree and disagree. In the early days, Coursera was transformative. I took some amazing courses and learned a lot. ...but the vision was always automation and as courses were rerun, the instructors were more likely to be disengaged, and live interaction via the forums fell. Finally when courses went to ongoing enrollment, there were no longer cohorts, and the experience was a correspondence course. So in the e…

Interesting point

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#59

Post by loco5niner »

__rito__ wrote: post #22

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype. I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs. A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them. It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialis…

Same here. Finally got a dev job a few years after graduating with my Computer Science degree when a boss noticed I was taking a MOOC during my slack time. Graduated just after the dot com crash.

Re: Coursera’s Preview Mode

#60

Post by t_mann »

vintermann wrote: post #56
t_mann wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on whether we're talking about MOOCs in a narrow sense or online learning more generally.

So you think online learning is killing college? That doesn't sound very likely to me. Why do you think it is?

It's a factor, together with high tuition fees, demographic changes, changing attitudes about credentialism (the political tide turning against liberal elite institutions), the cheap 24/7 availability of excellent learning materials online might kill "college as we know it" (in the US). US college is much more than education, it's a lifestyle, with lavish amenities, extracurriculars, varsity sports, all sorts of counselling. It's a bit of an anomaly, most universities globally are much more bare-bone. If US students start value shopping, the US college landscape might start to look more like that.
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