

The School-Less Revolution - tomse
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/14/the-school-less-revolution-free-online-courses-being-considered-for-college-credit/

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jonbischke
The major thing holding back higher education from massive disruption is the
monopoly on credentialing due to the accreditation process. When students can
sit in their living rooms and learn from the best professors in the world and
receive college credit for a fraction of the cost, that changes everything.

Brick-and-mortar institutions will likely fight this and fight it hard because
it threatens their existing models. After all, the most "profitable" classes
at universities are general ed courses where hundreds of students are jammed
into lecture halls. They're also the classes most ripe for disruption because
the user experience is often poor (as Clayton Christensen once said about
large lecture classes "Anything past the fifth row is already 'distance
education'.").

~~~
meritt
When degree mills like University of Phoenix have been granted accreditation,
who actually still cares about accreditation? It's utterly meaningless.

~~~
xiaoma
Immigration officials in China "really cared" about me presenting a degree
from an accredited school when processing my work visa. Despite the fact that
I was at a tech start-up (SmarTots) doing work completely unrelated B.A., the
degree and school were important to them.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
For me, they didn't even want the legal certified transcripts, just a copy of
my actual ceremonial PhD paper that you post in your office! Quite crazy, I
could have bought something to pass in for a 100 kuai if I didn't happen to
have it with me.

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zxcdw
The biggest problem with MOOCs I find is the lack of real engagement with
other students. Yes, students are encouraged to socialize together, work
together and make it a social effort to complete the course - together with
the study group etc. However, one of the big things I have with university
education is that people make contacts and connections with people - when you
attend a highly graded university you can be fairly certain that the people
around you are very motivated and ambitious. They are people who want and will
get things done. They aren't just some fat strangers sitting in their basement
and trolling on the forums such as in MOOCs.

If only it was the skills you have that matters. It's not, it really is not.
It's the fact that you're somebody who attended a highly graded University and
actually got out with a degree. That's something! Not what skills you learned.

~~~
troymc
Many free online courses have associated real-world study groups that form,
especially in the larger cities. In fact, "meeting people / networking" is one
of the reasons people _take_ free online courses.

Then there are ideas like The Minerva Project, where the students all live
together, but the courses are online.

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prezjordan
As someone (college student!) who's been skeptical about free online courses
for quite sometime - I'm finding that as I finish up Martin Odersky's
"Functional Programming Principles in Scala" course [0] on coursera, I've
learned more in the span of 2 months than I have in 90% of my college classes
thus far. One could argue 100%.

I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

[0]: <https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun>

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ludicast
The ability to double-speed videos makes MOOCs make sense immediately. I would
love to see a "MOOClab" come to place that run, well, the lab components of
classes. Dissections, Chemistry experiments, Foreign Language Conversations,
and the other things that are stumbling grounds for MOOCs working in
unsupervised mode.

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jfarmer
Open and free access to high-quality curriculum is amazing, but I don't think
it's a foregone conclusion that "in the future" education will be online-only,
and certainly not in the short-to-medium term.

There are so many things that go into creating an amazing learning environment
beyond curriculum. What are some reasons people go to college?

* To be surrounded by similarly motivated people

* The promise of a transformative experience

* A certificate that is valued by the marketplace

* Employability, job skills, etc.

That's not a complete list, but are some dimensions that an online-only
education is ill-suited to address.

Even the best online, gamified, social learning experience won't hold a candle
to just sitting next to another person who is equally motivated to learn the
same thing you are.

Disclaimer: I'm about to pitch the startup I work for. :)

These are some of the core ideas behind Dev Bootcamp
(<http://devbootcamp.com>). Most of our incoming students have gone through
all of this online-only curriculum and they want more. Employers demand more,
too, because a lot of what goes into making an awesome employee is about the
ability to learn quickly, work on a team, communicate effectively and non-
politically, etc.

We're in the middle of our third class of students. In our last class, 95% of
those looking for a job received an offer, including internships at Twitter
and ThoughtBot, and jobs as a software engineer at places like Hipmunk and
Pivotal Labs.

Here's Justin Kan on Dev Bootcamp:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4725790>

His youngest brother went through our program in the summer.

Coursera is amazing. We're living in a world where everyone can visit the
Library of Alexandria, which is itself mind-blowing.

But I don't think Coursera or other online-only educational experiences can
have the kind of transformative power that an in-person education provides.

~~~
designhawg
I agree with what you are preaching, but I think the difference is all in how
you prep for the time you spend with those similarly motivated people.

I went through something similar to devbootcamp here in Chicago (Code Academy,
which is now Starter League). The problem I ran into was that I didn't know
what I didn't know prior to the program. So rather than spending all my time
asking really interesting questions, I feel like I spent weeks going over
really remedial stuff for most people.

When people ask me if they should go to a Code Academy or devbootcamp, I say
yes — but only after exhausting your other resources (which are always
significantly easier for people access/pay for). If they are willing to put in
the time to learn the basics, these students will reach your program with
their minds loaded with questions rather than simply seeking to be taught how
to get started.

Dave Hoover was kind enough to push me toward 'Deschooling Society' (which is
like MSNBC and Fox News having a fight inside your brain, with both sides
being correct). One of the examples that rings true about the book is talking
about the role of school and environment. Let's focus less on the where and
more on the when. It goes on to talk about pooling those similarly minded
folks together for discussions anywhere people happen to gather, rather than
limiting it to a specific location. But it also pushes the idea of consuming
the knowledge ahead of time as prep for intellectual discussion and growth in
the group setting.

My take is that those who want to learn will put forth the effort to prep
before meeting in a traditional face-to-face forum. We're just lucky enough
that the access to the information is becoming easier.

~~~
jfarmer
I totally agree.

Dev Bootcamp gives out our own custom prep material about a month before a
cohort starts. You're interacting with other students and staff online
starting then. Our prep material covers everything from the basics of
programming up to simple object-oriented programming.

Some students will be farther ahead, but one thing we make clear to students
on day 1 is that they're as responsible for creating the learning environment
as we are. In fact, they outnumber us, so in many ways they're more
responsible. :)

We emphasize patience and empathy, so students who are behind get mentorship
from the students who are ahead. It reinforces the learning for the more
advanced students and shores up the less advanced students.

Starting Jan. 28th, we're moving to rolling cohorts, where ~15 students enter
every 3 weeks for a 9-week program. This way there will be a "senior third"
expected to mentor students in the "freshman third." You'd be able to seek out
that struggling student and give him the help they needed right when they
entered the program.

Also, Dave, who is a badass at every level, joined the DBC team last month. I
love that man and his squirrel-as-a-running-back t-shirt.

Scroll down and check it: <http://devbootcamp.com/learn-more/>

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biscarch
"The school system, as we know it, is on the verge of extinction"

I'm pretty tired of moocs being hailed as the greatest thing ever. Its just
the same old format replicated on the internet.

*don't get me wrong, more education for more people is better, but we can do better than moocs

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dave_sullivan
I really don't get why there are so many people that come out negatively
against MOOCs.

A traditional college education probably is better than MOOCs, but the
economics of MOOCs are so good that it just doesn't matter. It is _literally_
like saying a $50,000+ product with 100% of "maximum benefit" is a worthwhile
deal compared to a product that costs $0 and gets you, say, 70% of the
benefit.

~~~
saraid216
> A traditional college education probably is better than MOOCs, but the
> economics of MOOCs are so good that it just doesn't matter.

How can you say this, and then not understand why so many people come out
negatively? Some people feel that the extra 30% matters. You clearly don't,
but disagreeing is different from not understanding.

~~~
dave_sullivan
The extra 30% matters--that's a fair point.

For instance, if I was getting spinal surgery, I wouldn't want the guy that
only got 70% of the maximum benefit from med school (if you could measure
that). Still, there are lots of professions that do _not_ involve life and
death situations and programming is one where you can _generally_ screw up a
few times when you get started, provided you're not building life support
software. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Re: not understanding--you're right, when I said "I really don't get why", I
didn't mean that I _really_ don't get why, I just meant that it disappoints me
that apparently rational, educated individuals would come out against a
general push towards free, massively delivered education for the world because
it's not a perfect alternative to a massively expensive entrenched
alternative.

~~~
saraid216
For me, what pisses me off most about MOOCs is the rhetoric. They're basically
devaluing future reform by claiming it's here now... but this isn't education
reform, nor is it even _new_. The novelty is in scale.

It doesn't surprise me that most people don't recognize this. Most people
haven't actually thought through the nature of what they seek to replace.
They've grown up on broken education--content delivery--so they think that
broken education's problem is simply one of scaling the delivery system.
They've grown up in a country where education is a minimal priority
financially, so they think that the solution to its problems is economic.

Those of us who have been fighting for education reform since before Salman
Khan are watching this and seeing the opportunities we worked so hard to wedge
open slip away. Instead of breaking the classroom-as-church-sermon paradigm,
MOOCs have enforced it with an iron fist. Instead of creating legitimate ways
of evaluating student progress, MOOCs have doubled down on the worst methods
of doing so. Instead of helping us recognize that education is not just a
funnel for the job market, MOOCs have emphasized it as its only real purpose.
This is anti-reform. It's like saying you're fixing Big Brother by installing
_more_ cameras and wiretaps.

Does it have a benefit? Absolutely. A lot of the technologies and methods
being developed by MOOCs are things we could use if we actually had real
reform. Khan is trying, in his own way, to do that; that's why he's working on
a brick-and-mortar school.

It also has an interesting risk. The liberal arts of universities have been a
refuge for political dissidents in developed, educated countries. They provide
a decent level of security from which loud criticisms can be made. Arguably,
the blogosphere has obsoleted such agitators, but what if it hasn't? How do we
account for this in an age of MOOCs?

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ArbitraryLimits
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I fail to see how online courses are
anything innovative - they seem to me like the logical extension of those 1000
student intro classes from 1000 to 1,000,000. I've done an entire master's
degree program online and I feel like the quality of instruction was pretty
much unchanged.

~~~
prostoalex
It allows quality professors to bubble up to the top and allows the student to
at least explore alternative lecturers.

At regular school you're pretty much stuck with whoever played their cards
right to get the tenure, lecturing skills are hit-and-miss.

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doctorpangloss
_...accredited schools hold a monopoly on the American education system._

Puzzling—is it not _MIT_ OpenCourseWare? Perhaps its success is owed to its
association with the visible, well-known brand.

Coursera on the other hand: Maybe a few adults have heard of it. We should
wish them the best, but much more than accreditation would be needed to
legitimize online education.

~~~
xiaoma
On thing that helps mitigate the problem quite a bit is that courses on
Coursera are usually taught by professors of world famous schools such as
Berkeley or Stanford, and sometimes the teachers themselves are famous. E.g.
their functional programming in Scala course is taught by the _creator of
Scala_.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I realized that the more famous the professor and the more famous the school,
the less effective they were at actually teaching. Now there are definitely
some gems, but in general, teaching ability is highly detached from research
capability.

Now, all of these famous schools have dedicated lecturers that run the high-
volume entry level courses; they are professional teachers and really focus
their efforts on running classes. I can imagine future online courses being
developed in a similar manner.

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shawndrost
"And it’s inevitable that online courses will in one way or another replace
schools."

The thing is that education is mostly about motivation, not curriculum. The
real world is incredibly engaging, and I don't see the web displacing it
anytime soon.

Shameless plug: I believe in this so hard, I started a brick-and-mortar school
for programmers. <http://catalystclass.com>

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saraid216
The article says,

> A review of research by the U.S. Department of Education in 2009 found that
> “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on
> average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face
> instruction.” The research should be taken with a grain of salt, since we
> don’t know how the introduction of world-class teachers, or the effects of
> scale, will change the outcomes.

Does anyone know exactly which study they're referring to? Preferably a link
to the actual paper would be nice; I'd like to see details.

~~~
a_bonobo
Probably this one:

"Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies"

[http://www.geteducated.com/images/pdfs/doe_online_education_...](http://www.geteducated.com/images/pdfs/doe_online_education_finalreport.pdf)

That's a paper from the DOE from 2009 on online learning, probably that one,
as your quote is in there as well - here's the revised edition from 2010 (no
clue about the differences), same title but more trustworthy URL:

[http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-
practic...](http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-
practices/finalreport.pdf)

~~~
saraid216
Thanks.

