

The Ed-Tech Bubble - lexilewtan
http://lexilewtan.tumblr.com/post/31002491505/the-ed-tech-bubble
There’s an education bubble, and there’s a tech bubble - but the ed-tech bubble isn’t fleshing out either.
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tzs
> But found that I had no reason to stay in it, or to fight for my grade the
> way I did when a set of consequences were on my back.

So? I failed to ascertain from the article why this is supposed to be some
kind of problem.

Also, as far as I can see, quite a few people do find some reason to stay in,
and fight for their grade. I've taken several online courses:

• The Norvig/Thrun AI class at Stanford

• Thrun's robot car class at Udacity

• Evans' applied cryptography class at Udacity

• Jackson and Shoham's game theory class at Coursera

• Ng's machine learning class at Coursera

• Abu-Mostafa's learning from data class at Caltech

At most of these, the forums were full of people who evidently found a reason
to stay in. Whenever there was any ambiguity in a question, there would be
spirited discussion and vigorous arguments from those who thought that the
ambiguity had cost them a point.

There did tend to be more of this on Udacity courses than on Coursera courses.
I think it because the Udacity forums are based on a Stack Exchange clone,
whereas the Coursera forums are more like traditional forums.

On the other hand, the Caltech learning from data course had some good forum
action, and its forums are quite plain and simple, so I don't think forum
software explains the difference between Udacity and Coursera. Part of it
might be that Abu-Mostafa frequently answers questions on the forum, whereas
at Coursera I didn't see the professors on the forums much--only TAs.

If you need some kind of threat looming over you in order to motivate you to
stick with a course and no such threat is available, why take that course? Go
take some course in a subject that actually interests you enough that learning
more about it is sufficient motivation.

~~~
lexilewtan
Those are huge accomplishments - congrats.

My point is that its important to factor motivation into product conception
and design. Sure, we could all read wikipedia and articles all day (i mean, we
do) - but having measurable "buckets" for our choices make them easier to
explain. Hence the entertainment or resume-builder formulas I laid out, which
appear to fit your motivational measurements.

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azylman
It seems like the author is taking a specific subset of ed-tech ("online
learning companies that rely on the student's intrinsic motivation") and
trying to generalize it to all ed-tech.

There are TONS of different companies doing some really interested stuff in
ed-tech. Not only are there lots of ed-tech companies that aren't online
learning companies, there are a lot of online learning companies that DON'T
rely on a student's intrinsic motivation: e.g. anything in the K12 space -
there are a lot of K12 schools that are beginning to incorporate online
learning into their curriculum, and then there's plenty of extrinsic (e.g.
grade-based) motivation to do well and perform.

I think my #1 takeaway from this is that the author isn't the target market
for most of these ed-tech companies. They're not trying to get people to take
these classes for fun, no more than colleges want people to take classes for
fun.

~~~
lexilewtan
I'm definitely aware that there are tons of companies doing amazing things.
But I think that people are confusing tools for communication with tools for
education, and that the distinction is unfortunately larger than the landscape
suggests.

Great point about incorporating behavior though - technology that molds and
aids existent behavior is always needed!

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Turing_Machine
The model used by Coursera, et al is far from the only model for online
education.

Expecting future education to work like a traditional lecture class (just
online) is far too limiting, IMO. To name just one alternative among many,
consider sites like StackOverflow. Educational? Absolutely. Fits the
traditional model where there's a smart guy standing at the front of the room
(real or virtual) and shoveling the same knowledge into every student's brain
at the same time? Not in the slightest.

There's probably going to be a continuing role for courses and course-like
entities, but those shouldn't be the only thing we work on (and I would argue
that they shouldn't even be the primary things we're working on). The lecture
model was developed to deal with a set of constraints that are largely
irrelevant in an online environment.

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zachwill
Speaking from the point-of-view of someone who already has a bachelor's
degree, I have found it hard completing free online classes — the majority of
the time I just scan through the lecture notes and assignments. On the other
hand, my dad (who has two master's) has worked through almost a dozen MIT
courses — and normally reads through the accompanying textbooks.

The one course I found truly useful was Stanford's iOS course (it really is
one of the best iTunes U courses available). Other than that, I'm much more
likely to watch a single lecture (think TED or Stanford's lecture series on
YouTube) than a whole course.

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suneel0101
interesting insights, especially connecting learning with some more immediate
and socially valuable reward like a job or enriched personal life.

