edX has been my go-to recommendation for people in my side of the world (I live in Sri Lanka) to get quality education at no cost. This is the end of that - they might have some protections but its no longer going to be focused on quality content delivered in a highly learnable manner.
MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
61–70 of 202 posts
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture when I'm going for a run. Sometimes I like to listen while I'm doing chores. Seems presumptuous to say I'm "not taking the course" when we know that learning styles vary so much between individuals.
> Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. YouTube has a ton of lectures, for free, that you can view and/or listen to in this manner. But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
The notion that there's a single concept of the purpose of remote learning and a single concept of how students learn is exactly the problem.
It baffles me that people expect to take a process optimized for a neurotypical 20-year-old subsidized enough to devote 100% time to study and apply it to everybody else on the planet. I get how physical universities ended up the way they did. But software is infinitely soft and the internet is basically everywhere. Insisting that everybody must learn the same way a bunch of well-off youth did in 1950 is grossly exclusionary and wasteful.
In short, I don't care what the universities are trying to achieve with remote learning. I care what the students succeed in achieving. Let's focus on that.
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#63Good. Less cognitive dissonance for me. I can now more confidently and accurately say that the higher ed in US is dead and produces little more than fake credentials and political propaganda.
"I am glad that something I perceive as negative occurred, so that I don't have to be wrong about my assumptions".
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#64Hypothesis: MIT and Harvard had enough experience in distance learning by now to realize that it is NOT going to be the wave of the future in education. They don't want to exactly say this out loud and take flak for it, so they're just unloading this (for significant $$) primarily in order to refocus on in-person education, since they've realized that distance learning has been around for decades and nothing about th…
To paraphrase Tom Lehrer [1]: education is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. This is true regardless of the medium. Some people will get value out of distance learning, others won't, just as some people will get value out of in-person learning and others won't. The only difference is the cost. Distance learning can be provided for a lot less money, so you can afford to be less sele…
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Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#65This seems like terrible news :( After the focus on monetization of platforms such as udemy and coursera, edx seemed to give me a sliver of hope that education will be open. Given the immense trust funds held by Harvard and MIT, I had hoped money would not be a factor and these institutions would be able to develop their platform in the open. I'd like to add .. non-profit does not mean free to end users. There are ma…
Having a highly paid executive (even multiple) doesn't make a non-profit "terrible." People deserve to be compensated for their work and you'll have a hard time arguing that running a large non-profit successfully isn't challenging, demanding, and deserving of good compensation.
It isn't necessarily so, but there's a correlation. A lot of terrible nonprofits are excellent at funneling money to execs.
A lot of the work at nonprofits is challenging and demanding. Everybody deserves good compensation. But as with large for-profit companies, it's often only executives who get that. Take a look at CEO compensation over the decades. It has risen massively compared with worker pay: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
Maybe CEOs have gotten 940% better at CEOing in the last 40 years. But I think the more likely answer is executives have gotten much better at skimming a larger slice of pie.
One could argue that if investors want to grossly overpay for-profit execs, that's between the investors and the execs. But that's definitely not true in not for profits, which get all sorts of legal and social leeway because they're in theory doing good for society.
So yes, it's fair to argue that having very highly paid executives in a non-profit is terrible. Does that mean execs who are in it for the money will stick with fleecing investors? Probably. But I'd say that's better for the nonprofits, as then they're likely to end up with people who are there for the mission.
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#66MIT and Harvard did this for 800million? Don't these two universities have multi hundred billion dollar endowments ? Squeezing every single drop of money from every single brick of the university : great work, MBAs . Slow clap
It's a shame how academy ends up being unaccessible for many people, even though they receive a lot of endowments... while there are a lot of ways to make them more accessible! Like: online courses... or... What about the white elephant in the room? The cost of social events and Ivy League athletes/sports. I don't have anything against those, but if I were in a position of power in one academic entity, I'd definitely…
You don't need to do anything regarding Ivy League sports to be involved with the academy, how is this relevant?
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#67The key to online learning's sucess is counter to the current system's goals. What these big-name universities could do to make online learning go mainstream is lower the barrier to entry by: i) lowering tuition fees in accordance with mass production practices and ii) provide real credits and degrees without the pomp. But both these actions would water down the "good" name of these legendary institutions (a legend built on exclusion and cronyism). In other words, they themselves are the ones holding on-site education as superior, lest the system collapses. No matter, it's just delaying the inevitable.
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#68This seems like terrible news :( After the focus on monetization of platforms such as udemy and coursera, edx seemed to give me a sliver of hope that education will be open. Given the immense trust funds held by Harvard and MIT, I had hoped money would not be a factor and these institutions would be able to develop their platform in the open. I'd like to add .. non-profit does not mean free to end users. There are ma…
Having a highly paid executive (even multiple) doesn't make a non-profit "terrible." People deserve to be compensated for their work and you'll have a hard time arguing that running a large non-profit successfully isn't challenging, demanding, and deserving of good compensation.
This needs to be said more often! Having worked at & with many non-profits, if you don't have competitive wages your top talent keeps leaving. That crushes small non-profits because top talent wear multiple hats & are very difficult to replace. Anyone who has had to replace talent knows the pain of having to hire & then get a new person up to speed.
As for marketing, spending lots of money on marketing isn't bad as long as it's working.
People need to quit judging non-profits just by looking at 2 numbers without understanding the entire scope. This is a huge issue for non-profits.
I know of non-profits that have been forced to setup multiple entities. One for "public" where they can say 100% of donations go to the cause & one for people who understand running a business where they can get private donations that help pay people salaries, building expenses & everything else.
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#69So the universities have decided to monetise their own great reputations by simply selling it to a bidder?
This happened a long time ago with Harvard Extension School.
Re: MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture when I'm going for a run. Sometimes I like to listen while I'm doing chores. Seems presumptuous to say I'm "not taking the course" when we know that learning styles vary so much between individuals.
> Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. YouTube has a ton of lectures, for free, that you can view and/or listen to in this manner. But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
In undergrad I'd listen to lectures while doing chores all the time, especially when the concepts are theoretical and it's more about just listening to the information.
It won't work for a calculus lecture, but for a lot of topics it works just fine.