
Why Free Online Classes Are Still the Future of Education - denzil_correa
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/free-online-classes-still-future-education/
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joshontheweb
My big annoyance is with the MOOCs that still try and fit you into a schedule.
Many times I have been in a course where I would have burned through the whole
thing if I was allowed. But instead they feel the need to stagger the
information on a weekly basis and I lose interest. Coursera is the one that
comes to mind. I also don't care about getting a grade or certificate. Just
give me all the lectures at once and some exercises so I can practice if I
want. Gotta let go of the past.

~~~
jrs99
Then your MOOC is the entire internet.

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toomuchtodo
An MOOC for a subject is truly just a big wikipedia article. Text, video,
audio resources curated by someone.

Hopefully MOOCs will eventually be similar to epub books; open format, meta
data, a collection of digital objects.

~~~
odower
We're not focused on curriculum, but rather a collection of content around a
subject at [https://curiosity.com](https://curiosity.com).

Wiki, text, video, audio...people learn different ways in different order
unless they're made to do otherwise. We're focused on the always curious
person. MOOCs serve a different purpose so hard to see them going more
unstructured.

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protonfish
The entire concept of online classes is an anachronism - the way early
automobiles resembled horse carriages. This is just schools' futile attempts
at staying relevant using some token internet and marketing themselves to
people indoctrinated that traditional classes were the only way to learn.
Lecture is the worst way to teach, and yet people gush about putting videos of
lectures online as some sort of innovation. It's sad that we can't think a
little more outside of the box.

An online education service I'd like to see is not teaching but certification.
They could recommend learning resources and offer email and voice
communication with subject matter experts for feedback and questions as
needed, but the main job would be assessing your competence in a specific area
and backing it up with a guarantee. You could get a card showing certification
in Calculus II (expires one year after issuance) or Early American History, or
whatever. But when you pass certification, you actually know the subject - not
just sleepwalked through the course doing the minimal busy work. The student
may use whatever learning methods that work best for themselves to achieve
this and employers looking for specific experts would have confidence in the
possession of that expertise.

~~~
dragonwriter
> An online education service I'd like to see is not teaching but
> certification.

You appear to be describing essentially the model used by Western Governors
University, [http://www.wgu.edu](http://www.wgu.edu) (their "certification" is
traditional degrees, and doesn't have an expiration date, but the educational
model of focusing on demonstrated competence with the institution combining
assessment with assistance in the form of recommended learning resources seems
to be nearly exactly what you are describing.)

~~~
protonfish
Well that's what their marketing says, and if true, then good for them. I
guess I was thinking about something more atomic and a la carte. It'd be cool
to have a card that said "Protonfish - certified expert in Game Theory, H. G.
Wells, Franciso Tarrega, molecular biology and TCP/IP.

(I am not actually an expert in these areas, but I wanna be.)

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falcolas
I spent a few days looking through online courses from a couple of different
vendors, hoping to take course of online class in a new field of study, so I
could round myself out or possibly find a new career field.

I quickly learned that outside of the Software Development discipline, and a
precious few pure science fields, there are virtually no courses available. If
you'd like to look into education or humanities or any of the thousands of
other degrees? All you'll find are 101 level courses, if you find anything at
all.

Hopefully this will improve, but I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
christudor
This is exactly right. That's why I started MASSOLIT (www.massolit.io), which
provides video lectures in the arts and humanities. It normally costs
£5/month, but if you send me an e-mail (chris@massolit.io) I'd be happy to
give you a couple of months for free...

~~~
odower
Very cool. Interested in learning more. Would like to list your courses on our
site ([https://curiosity.com](https://curiosity.com)).

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akbar501
I have mixed feelings about the MOOCs.

On the positive side, the benefits are substantial. 1. Democratized access to
the world's top educators, 2. Low cost distribution of education.

On the negative side, the MOOCs are kind of the large classroom problem taken
to the extreme. It's generally agreed that a classroom with more students per
teacher is not as good as a lower student/teacher ratio.

But to critique my own negativity, the people working on MOOCs are smart and
motivated. It's a bit naive to think that the current MOOC is as good as they
will ever get. Clearly, these are early stage products that have substantial
evolution and improvement in their future.

The one area in open education that needs to improve is around content
licensing. If you look at most open educational content, the licenses are
restricted open source (GPL like) and note unrestricted open source
(MIT/BSD/Apache like). I fail to understand how making the content
unrestricted would not benefit everyone.

~~~
ibebrett
The thing is I'd rather take a course from a top instructor even at a massive
scale, than to take a poor course made by a guy who doesn't have any real
business teaching the class. There is no reason every tiny state school should
be recreating a bad machine learning class (example) when you can take a good
one from a good instructor. If you go to even more basic topics (intro to comp
sci), the quality you will get from having a TA teach a class to a lecture
hall to a top instructor teaching over a MOOC will be like night and day.

~~~
jrs99
are you assuming that a tiny state school will have worse quality teachers
than a top private school? or even that someone who is not a professional
teacher is worse than a teacher at a "top" school?

The tiny state school might have the best machine learning class in the world.

~~~
ibebrett
Yes I am assuming that. As someone who attended a small state school compared
to the level of some of the coworkers taken by classmates at the top schools
it is like night and day. Trust me the machine learning class at stanford is
better than the one at eastern ct state university (for example)

~~~
jrs99
do you mean level of difficulty or mastery attained by the students?

~~~
ibebrett
the quality of the instructional materials, mastery, and level of difficulty
yes.

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HarryHirsch
Are they now? Part of what you do at a university is build your professional
network, both upwards, through your mentors, and sideways, with your peers.
You also get introduced to new developments in your field, through informal,
unscripted interactions, just walk down the hall and talk to the fellow in the
office two doors down. That's a university. You don't get that through online
courses. For a trade school, online courses work just fine. And the ruling
class needs well-trained, obedient drones.

~~~
solarmist
HA! I hear this all the time and it certainly didn't apply to me. This has a
lot of assumptions baked into it.

1) You actually socialize with classmates (I didn't). 2) You either went to a
top ranked school or stayed in the area where those graduates generally
migrate to. (I didn't) 3) You did activities outside of class (I did (mainly
embedded or MS talks), but were outside where I'm actually doing, so I'd call
this a wash too)

Only as a grad student in math (but not computer science) did I feel I got the
kind of interaction that makes in person classes, lectures, interaction more
valuable.

Honestly I don't think I got much out of university that I couldn't have
gotten online.

Where I learned the most was my first three months in the industry. I learned
VCS, scripting, bug tracking, code review, and about meet-ups/user groups.
Basically everything important that wasn't programming.

~~~
mjwhansen
It sounds like you didn't take advantage of all of the resources available
then. Just because you didn't network in college doesn't mean it isn't useful.

~~~
solarmist
Of course, but I think there's a large percentage (minimum double digits, I'd
guess probably at least in the 20's or 30's though) that were just like me and
it wouldn't have made a bit of difference if they did their degree in a box,
on the internet, or on a campus.

At the time I didn't even know that was something your were supposed to do
unless you were in a frat or a business major. To me college was a place to go
and take classes and get your degree and that was pretty much it or at least
that was what I was lead to believe was the only important part.

~~~
HarryHirsch
When I started university, the first thing that they told us, at the beginning
of the first class, was to form groups and try to meet people.

You just made the best argument in favour of the much ridiculed student
success centers, deans of diversity &c. You can put someone from an educated
family into a university and they will do just fine; if they aren't they will
get advice from their parents, and then they will do fine. But access to
university is less exclusive nowadays, and first-generation students will need
some boost or prodding that their upbringing just couldn't provide to take all
possible advantage of their environment (and it isn't their fault).

~~~
solarmist
Yup, exactly, but it was new to me and didn't stick at all. Only now do I know
what I should've done while there.

My dad got his degree; he was first generation and didn't get a lot out of it,
so I'm basically a second first generation college student and have had to
pick up most of this myself. My kids will get a lot more out of their
experiences than I did though.

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mlichtenstern
MOOCs are a great alternative / supplement to the the modern day debt peonage
that often results from standard educational options. One to watch? Minerva
Project, which has Miriam Rivera as COO:
[http://www.minervaproject.com/](http://www.minervaproject.com/)

I found out about it after taking several courses on www.Novoed.com including:
"Technology Entrepreneurship" with Chuck Eesley (free, two-part course offered
by Stanford University), "Startup CEO" with Matt Blumberg, "Venture Deals"
with Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, "The Startup Pitch" with +Chris Lipp, and
"Raising Startup Capital" with Clint Korver. Miriam was previously CEO of
Kauffman Fellows Academy.

I've referenced these courses and the type of opportunity MOOCs present on my
personal blog while addressing the "Pipeline Problem" that has come up in
relation to diversity numbers at major tech cos.

[http://timesnewromanempire.blogspot.com/2014/08/is-
entrepren...](http://timesnewromanempire.blogspot.com/2014/08/is-
entrepreneurship-answer.html#sthash.ZT6BGLvx.dpuf)

