

Coursera raises $16M - NonEUCitizen
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/technology/coursera-plans-to-announce-university-partners-for-online-classes.html

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ilcavero
I don't understand what's the need to constraint these courses in X weeks
duration when one of the advantages of this presentation is to allow self
paced study. I started the PGM course and found it interesting but cannot
spend +10 hours per week on it just to get an email certificate in the end. I
can do Kahn academy classes anytime I want right? why in coursera do I have to
pretend I'm taking a college class?

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SatvikBeri
Psychology. The vast majority of people show significantly better results with
specific deadlines. Here's one study showing the difference:
[http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenb...](http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenbroch.pdf)

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0ren
There could be other time-based methods to encourage students, rather than
hard deadlines. For instance, suppose the class had a bag with unlimited (or
large) number of question, and required each student to score 100 points to
pass. Students would have unlimited number of attempts at quizzes/assignments,
but their score decays with time (think HN submission ranking decay). That is,
if you worked hard and scored 70, but then you were busy/away for a month,
your score drops to, say, 50. So you are encouraged to finish the questions in
a timely manner, but on the other hand, you can also make up for that missed
month by putting more work when you are back.

With this method or a something similar, you do not "lose everything" when you
miss a deadline. IMHO, "losing everything" for missing a deadline is part of
the reason for the (exponential?) decay in the number of students
participating in Coursera's PGM class[1,2].

[1] Based on PGM's "quiz's highest score" statistics, the total numbers of
participating students are 6950, 3500, 2650 for week1, week2 and week3
respectively (other weeks' stats are not complete as of this writing).

[2] Another interesting stats is the ratio of perfect scores to all other
scores: 25.2%, 34.3%, 49%. This could suggest that the deadline system filters
out most students but the very top ones (assuming uniform difficulty of
quizzes, and uniform quality of lecture videos/slides, etc.). This may not be
what you want from an educational perspective. And, yet it may actually be
what you want to support a business plan similar to Udacity- discovering
talent. (see my comment below)

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SatvikBeri
Interesting stats. I would love to see some stats on classes using different
deadline models. For example, the Machine Learning course gave you 80% of the
grade if you were late, and the NLP course gives 50%, as opposed to losing
everything. I wonder how that affects the drop-out rate.

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robrenaud
This isn't about coursera, but there was some interesting research in
presented in Predictably Irrational about deadlines and student performance.
Basically, deadlines help a lot, and having many small deadlines to ensure
continuous work helps prevent procrastination.

[http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%...](http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%20Irrational)

> Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got
> the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the
> middle.

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SatvikBeri
This is wonderfully circular-the study I posted in my original post was by Dan
Ariely :)

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robrenaud
Argh, sorry. One of the grand parent posts was too long, I didn't read the
parents above it.

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chrisaycock
Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, iTunes U, YouTube University,
OpenCourseWare...

Seems like we need a service just to keep a handle on all the content out
there.

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kqr2
Class Central has a pretty good list.

<http://www.class-central.com/>

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pitt1980
"Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences,
the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’
work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Dr. Koller said that
this would actually improve the learning experience."

wonder how that would work

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signa11
> wonder how that would work

one possibility might be to have multiple students grade a students work, and
final score then weighted by the 'judging-student's' score on the same topic ?

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pitt1980
yeah, wonder if you could do something like, here's 3 essays, rank them from
best to worst

fancy algorythm

fit all the essays onto some sort of generous curve

grade

seems like essay a > than essay b > than essay c would get you better results
than having each grader come up with a number from 1 - 100 or a letter from A
to F, as everyone has different norms as to what they think should count as a
90 (or an A) or whatever

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brosephius
I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to
take a class and earn a certificate.

On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while
employed at a university?

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DennisP
MITx is planning free courses and pay to get a certificate. Udacity is
planning free everything while making money by hooking top students up with
recruiters. Coursera doesn't seem to have decided yet.

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rudasn
Can you link to the source for that info?

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0ren
Regarding Udacity's business plan: In June Thrun "took the next step:
cofounding KnowLabs... He pulled in David Stavens... as CEO… Thrun decides
that KnowLabs will build something called Udacity… Stavens is thinking about
potential business models. Though Thrun cringes at the notion of charging
students, people might eventually pay for add-ons—say, TA services, study
aids, or offline materials. He also considers other revenue streams. Near the
end of the term, he emails his top 1,000 students, the ones with perfect or
near-perfect scores on homework and tests. The subject: Job Placement Program.
Thrun solicits résumés and promises to get the best ones into the right hands
at tech companies, including Google. A recruiter who places a hire typically
earns 10 to 30 percent of an engineer’s first-year salary, which might be
$100,000. Stavens figures he could charge much less. After all, KnowLabs
discovers talent in the course of doing business."[1]

[1] <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/>

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nickik
A year ago I was talking about how cool something like this would be. I knew
it had to happen but it happend faster then I thought.

