
Coursera raises Series D - rsumbaly
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/online-learning-startup-coursera-raises-64m-at-an-800m-valuation/
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_coveredInBees
Coursera has been sliding steadily into irrelevance over the past couple of
years. It started with lofty goals, and then at some point it just became a
money grab when they refused to let you take quizzes and assessments without
paying. That would still be fine if paying them gave you any semblance of
help/support/mentorship.

My wife started the bioinformatics track and was deeply disappointed by the
complete lack of any support on the forums. There isn't even a nominal course
TA who helps answer questions posted by paying students. For several hundred
dollars, you get the privilege of viewing a sequence of videos and going
through assessments that can vary substantially in quality, without any
prospect of getting any help from a community.

I've taken my share of Coursera courses in the past, but I didn't even bother
with the Hinton's Neural Network class after my wife's experience and after
checking it out and realizing that all the courses are pretty much zombie
courses with no instructor or TA participation.

If you want quality online education, look no further than edX. There are some
amazing courses on there (especially a bunch of MIT, Harvard and Caltech
courses) and all of them have a pretty good amount of instructor, student and
TA participation. It's so good that I've almost always paid for the
certification simply to show my support to the universities in the hopes that
they continue providing these classes freely to anyone with the interest and
determination to learn something new.

Udacity is okay... it started with similar lofty goals and then pivoted hard
to being a very for-profit organization. Nothing inherently bad about it, but
I look at most of their newer content as going to a trade school where you
just learn the essentials to cobble some things together without a deeper
understanding of things. Udacity courses will rarely satisfy a deeper
intellectual curiosity, though they will likely help you get started with
coding. That being said, they do have some great content from when they first
started out, including Peter Norvig's outstanding course on Design of Computer
Programs.

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JPLeRouzic
I took the specialization in Systems Biology. At that time I got very
frustated but afterward I went to my local university for 4 months on a
related topic, and assure you that I prefer the Coursera experience, even with
the lack of support. At least what I learned at Coursera was at the state of
art, and all that was taught was useful.

~~~
blub
A relative of mine has taken a multi-part course + capstone on Coursera. They
have zero teaching support besides the videos and reading material for paying
customers, it's shocking.

The only difference between them and watching some free videos on e.g. iTunes
U is that Coursera requires homework, has the nearly useless peer-review and
one has to pay for watching.

~~~
JPLeRouzic
That was also what I experienced on Coursera, but that does not describe
everything about the Coursera specialization I took.

I also took on eDx "Welcome to MITx's 7.00x! Introduction to Biology - The
Secret of Life". This is a great course, I liked the videos with E. Lander.
But there was little difference in support with the "System Biology"
specialization on Coursera. Getting quickly an obvious answer, does not help
more than getting no answer at all.

The big difference for me, and in favor to MITx's 7.00x, is that the design of
the exam was much more sophisticated than in "System Biology".

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keeptrying
Udacity's courses are the only online courses I finish.

The quality of their courses and their offerings is great. Also the very real
mentoring is awesome.

I think online education companies are starting to figure out that

Online education != pure self study

I think more and more human support will be injected back into online courses.

~~~
dataminded
When Coursera took away the ability to take quizzes and assessments without
paying, I stopped using it. I think the price point is too high and timeline
too rushed for a casual investment. I usually don't need/want mentoring or
people just an online course.

~~~
rcheu
I finished their ML course pretty recently, and was able to take the quizzes
and assessments without paying.

~~~
_coveredInBees
I believe that only a small subset of courses on Coursera can be taken for
free while being able to do the quizzes and assignments. A lot of them are
restricted though.

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snomad
I had real hope that Coursera / MOOCs would help the universities with
overcrowded and impacted lower division courses, and thus help improve the
time to graduate for most students. I found this article from the "failed" San
Jose experiment ([http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/us/after-setbacks-
online-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/us/after-setbacks-online-
courses-are-rethought.html)).

In contrast, Georgia Tech has the seemingly successful comp sci program and
the number of K-12 students earning some credits in online courses continues
to grow ( [http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/virtual-
schools...](http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/virtual-schools-
education-000227)).

Hopefully the universities give it another shot with the impacted courses.
Perhaps they just need to qualify students for the online experience, it does
take a certain discipline.

~~~
vikascoder
Current Gatech online student here. This is a very very successful course not
because of Udacity, but because of the army of TAs and professors who work
diligently to make the courses execute smoothly. Udacity just gives the
platform for online video access, discussions happen on Georgia Techs internal
portal which uses Piazza forum and TAs hold face to face Office Hours on
Google Hangouts, assignments, quizzes and resources are all provided on the
internal board. Udacity provides no such feature to support the whole gamut of
needs that running a massively online course such as this requires. In fact
Udacity had the clunkiest UI of all the MOOC providers and have just recently
upgraded to a better looking Coursera clone.

Further Georgia Tech allows residential students to watch lectures online in
lieu of attending classes and its still the cheapest MS available for just
6000 bucks tops. Its a pathbreaking achievement in online learning.

~~~
pm90
I think this is important for universities to understand: online education
doesn't mean that traditional education systems are obsolete. It means that,
one can utlize the best parts of the online systems to make quality education
available to many more students than would otherwise have been possible.
Gatech seems to have done just that: not cut down on their TA's/Classes, but
added more to serve the growing online community, and used Udacity as a
platform for content sharing.

I was finishing my Masters when Coursera, Udacity exploded on to the scene and
my Advisor remarked at the time "In a couple of years, we probably won't need
to teach Calculus anymore!". Somehow that one thing really stuck in my mind:
what really helped me learn personally was always being able to ask questions,
explore and find answers when I was stuck; if I'm unable to do that, I lose
any sense of progress and quickly lose interest. I'm really hoping what my
advisor said then doesn't really happen.

~~~
walesmd
Udacity person here (Director of Content Development - but this is my own
personal commentary)! You are exactly right - Sebastian has gone pretty public
on record in explaining the initial rollout of Udacity (competing with
colleges) wasn't right for us.

We absolutely value the college experience. I, personally, didn't complete
college; but I consider it a lot like my military experience. It helps develop
the "whole person concept" \- there's more than just the skills/tasks for the
job that helps develop someone into a productive member of society.

But, once that person is a productive member of society, once they've
established that maturity; that's where products like our Nanodegree program
fall in to place. We're uniquely positioned to offer educational opportunities
in that skills-gap between college and career, between life events (like stay-
at home mothers) and re-entering the career field, between your current
level/position in your company and the next.

These fields move so quickly... a 4yr degree and completely taking over your
life - when you have other commitments (children, a career, etc) - is
unreasonable. We are life-long learning and firmly believe every X years (3-5
maybe? society will define this), you're going to need to get yourself back on
track given your goals. That's where we fit in - we have no intent to replace
college.

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nafizh
Coursera has been the pioneer in the MOOC revolution. I have always been very
grateful to them for making world class courses available to the mass people.
But the recent choice of not letting someone submit an assignment without
paying is a bummer. That said, they do offer financial aid, which EdX or
Udacity does not. Hopefully, they can also make the forum experience better in
the future.

~~~
walesmd
We offer scholarships -
[https://www.udacity.com/scholarships](https://www.udacity.com/scholarships)

