I'm not sure that course completion percentage is necessarily the best metric to be drawing conclusions from. I will often sign up for MOOCs and courses for a single talk, chapter, or topic that I'm interested in with no intention of actually completing the course. I wonder I'm an outlier in this regard or if this approach is much more common than the author of this article realizes.
Indeed. Also some platforms (I believe Coursera and EdX were like this last time I used them) only let you access old content if you signed up with a course when it was active. So you are incentivized to sign up for any course if you think there's a possibility that you might want to access some of the content at some point in the future.
People shouldn't confuse completion rate with a particular course with a student reaching proficiency in a particular subject. There have been several courses I've started were I quickly got annoyed by the copious amount of filler in the lectures and dropped the course in favor of a book or web tutorial.
In general I think MOOCs are doing themselves a disservice by trying to copy college courses.
>In general I think MOOCs are doing themselves a disservice by trying to copy college courses.
I agree completely - it seems almost 'cargo cult' - they are just copying colleges assuming it will be successful rather than examining what it was that made that work for colleges and how they can adapt it to the MOOC model.
I've worked in this industry a bit, and MOOCs rarely use "course completion" as their primary success metric. One reason is precisely what you mentioned - that many people simply take the course for as long as they need to get their desired value out of it, then leave. Another was that the team I worked with found that, by far, the single biggest factor in terms of course completion was that a third party (usually their boss) incentivized them to complete it, and of those people, they were more likely to find ways to skip sections, get the minimum scores required to pass, etc.
So what ways do they measure success? I can attest that I have never started a course just for a few lectures, and I've always planned on taking the whole course. I've quit the majority of courses just because they weren't any good (usually poorly designed homework). I have quite some because they moved on to topics that I didn't find interesting, but I never looked at them from the beginning and said "That's where I'm going to stop". The ones I have completed were ones I thoroughly enjoyed, and felt like I learned a lot.
So just from a "course completion" point of view, I'd think it'd be hard to tell the difference between courses I liked, but moved on to topics I didn't like, vs. the ones I just thought weren't any good. But the fact that I stuck with some courses all the way through should at least be good for something.
They'll usually _track_ course completion, but it's not necessary for a course to have a high, or even an average completion rate to be a successful course. From what I've seen, they'll track active time spent in course, how much of the course is completed, use quizzes to reinforce learnings while also getting a check in on how actively the student has been taking the course, etc. They also rely on ratings and qualitative feedback. It's not as precise as something like "completions", but from what I've seen it's reasonably effective at assessing course value.
Agreed. I notice that many MOOCs have this academic mentality that something must be complete and a certificate earned. I could really give a damn about a certificate. Gaining the knowledge I need is all I care about. Udacity really makes me mad when they remove courses that I paid for if I don't do every little exercise (even the ones that are so horribly designed and have little learning value in them).
Course completion metric is one of the worst metric to use to evaluate online courses/MOOCs. It is quite obvious that for other forms of traditional there is an investment that is being made by the student so of course they are encouraged to keep going. People spending money on something is a signal that they are highly motivated to take the course.
For MOOCs, there are very few entry requirements so of course you can going to get low completion rate because lots of people are just "window shopping" so to speak.
Yup, concluding that MOOC formats are more effective is similar to the charter school problem. If you filter for committed people then you end up with better looking success stats. But all it might be doing is finding and filtering those motivated enough to go through a school change process, or willing to put up with some hassle factor of something "online" but still requiring scheduled times, or other commitments. Similar for attendance being a factor for success in the article - it sounded like going in person was the key way to access the extra learning resources.
Filtering for the subset of people committed in a certain way isn't really a proof of a good learning format. And to me, not necessarily the best way to bring education to a wider range of students. Filtering for commitment might be argued that it's effective on some level as an efficient use of teaching resources - but I think that needs deeper examination too.
I agree that there's a lot of shaky assertions made about this pedagogical method. From my own perspective, though, on-demand courses like on udemy essentially solve all the problems I hated about classes for my brick-and-mortar university degree. To wit :
1) No distracting interruptions from self-absorbed students asking 'questions' [more often than not, really just statements] that would have better have been reserved for after class / office hours
2) Prof / TA doesn't show up drunk and disorganized
3) If you miss something while taking notes, no sweat -- just rewind and listen again! As a copious note-taker, this is huge for me.
4) Flexible class times keep me much more healthy [can get sleep when needed, etc]
5) No travel time, finding a seat, wanting to talk to a girl instead of focus on lecture, etc etc with all the frustrations / inconveniences that are just not there in online courses
I could rattle on a lot more, but ca suffit for now
These are aspirational course sign ups, and are of course similar to aspirational book purchases (where I will learn a new language through psychic connection between the desk the book is on and the my hands on the desk) and aspirational gym membership (where calories will be burnt simply because my body knows it might go to the gym and so gets all worried and sweaty anyway)
Yea, gym membership is a good comparison, actually. I know tons of people who signed up for a gym and never went, which means we could use the same argument the article does to insinuate that "signing up for a gym on your own is an ineffective way to get fit."
Clearly there are more effective (and more expensive) ways to get fit, but some people manage on their own with a gym membership and access to /r/fitness or whatever, so it's not exactly ineffective.
There is also the meme of having a lot of never-played games in one's Steam collection, that were purchased during sales. So it affects entertainment too.
That hits where it hurts! I'm the worst offender when it comes to aspirational book purchases. To the topic: On udemy, I see tons of folks leaving reviews who have purchased hundreds of courses [why udemy displays this info is obscure to me - maybe to generate some kind of courseload-envy?]
I’m taking two courses on Coursera right now but only paid for a certificate in one. I plan to view all content from the other course, however Coursera will not grade the end-of-section quiz for non-paying students.
What’s the purpose of the actual certificate? As someone who has done dozens of interviews - I’m not a manager, but for about two years I was responsible for hiring and I’ve sat as part of a panel- most people don’t take most certificates seriously. Some, including myself, take it as a slightly negative signal. I’ve seen too many paper tigers.
But then again, except for entry level positions, few hiring managers care about any formal education for IT positions.
From what I can gather, the few certificates that companies care about are RedHat, Cisco, and AWS certs. I’m sure there are a few more that are outside of my area of expertise.
I went through the Microsoft Architect Certification track as a commitment device to force me to study, but I didn’t put it on my resume and never told my employer. But I was trying to transition from a C/C++ bit twiddler to an “Enterprise Developer”.
If someone has completed a certification or course, it becomes a potential topic for discussion. It doesn't matter much to me whether they paid for it, if there's proof it was completed (a code repo or documentation could be an alternative to paying for a certificate).
I have certifications that people well below my skill level were also able to achieve, but I know I can speak to the topics much more authoritatively. It's not a binary signal.
I agree that certain industry certifications are more legitimate than most, although I think continuing education falls in a different but partially overlapping area. Nand2Tetris is the first MOOC I have paid for, because it seemed like a very interesting course that's recognized as legitimate by a substantial portion of people with whom I might enjoy working. Paying is also a good motivator to see it to completion.
If someone has completed a certification or course, it becomes a potential topic for discussion. It doesn't matter much to me whether they paid for it, if there's proof it was completed (a code repo or documentation could be an alternative to paying for a certificate).
Any technology that I’m able to discuss intelligently is usually referenced as part of what I did on a job. I leave off any technology that I know but don’t want to be asked about or come up in a recruiter’s keyword search.
For instance, I don’t mention C/C++ even though I did it for 12 years or PHP.
I want my interviews to be focused on my strong areas and technologies that I want to use- which are usually the ones that I have real world experience with.
Do you not consider hobbies to be real world experience?
Personally I appreciate the opportunity to not be stuck taking on new work that depends entirely on my previous employment. I find that people who pursue interests outside the scope of their day job tend to be good at thinking through problems and maintaining a healthy attitude, so I’m glad to discuss hobbies with people.
Every job has “must have” requirements and “nice haves but be willing to learn”. I focus on jobs that will hire me based on the must haves where I can learn the nice to haves.
A lot of times that means the line between “work” and self study gets blurry. I might be “working” 60 hour weeks but producing 40 hours worth of work product and spending the rest of the time learning. That also means now my resume has work experience with the new-to-me technology/framework. It helps to work for small companies. You get more opportunities to learn and do low priority side projects on the job.
If that opportunity doesn’t avail itself, then do a side project and throw it up on GitHub and then we can discuss it.
Some, including myself, take it as a slightly negative signal. I’ve seen too many paper tigers.
I take almost any MOOC as a positive signal that this candidate invests their own time in ongoing professional development, but I have encountered some who apparently learned nothing, maybe got someone else to take the tests or used a braindump site.
So if a MOOC doesn’t necessarily show any competence in the skillset that they were studying and you still have to do the same technical screening, then having a MOOC certificate is neither positive or negative.
Also, if you do a proper technical screen, you should be able to find out whether they are keeping up with technology. In that case, why does it matter if they get it through a MOOC, Pluralsight, YouTube, etc.?
Well, it’s a pre-interview signal, like anything on a CV. Previous employers, alma mater, extracurriculars, yadda yadda. If I’m compiling a shortlist to interview, completion of a relevant MOOC from a quality provider such as EdX, the Andrew Ng course, etc, will increase the probability of them being on it. It’s not just the technical skill either, it’s the good attitude of starting and finishing something above and beyond normal duties.
We take certifications very serious in enterprise, but it depends on what type of certification and who issues it.
I mean, I get that a swarm of developers are brushing up on sites like coursea, Udemy, threehouse or whatever, but I’ve seen a few of those courses, and a lot of the instructors really shouldn’t be teaching anyone. I’m not sure a coursea certificate would be an advantage, because the quality of coursea isn’t recognized, but on the other hand, I really don’t see how it would be a disadvantage either. If it’s all you got, I probably wouldn’t hire you, but if you’ve got a CS degree and a coursea certificate, I really don’t see why that would ever be negative.
A Microsoft or Cisco certificate on the other hand is valuable and will get you a long way though. On the organizational site, prince2 is also really valuable even though the prince2 way of doing pm is somewhat dated.
To show you just how valuable they are, we wouldn’t hire a network engineer who isn’t Cisco certified and we wouldn’t hire anyone for operations who hasn’t completed a bunch of Microsoft and Azure certificates. Unless we absolutely had to, but then we would enroll you in the courses and get you certified.
I’m not in operations so I don’t have context. But operations seems to value certs more than development. Why is that? No one really cares if a developer has a certain cert but the infrastructure guys do.
I’m assuming by “Microsoft Cert” you are referring to operations certs and not developer certs.
Like everything on the resume, the point of certificates is to get a first interview. And some people use them to convince others to take them seriously in their daily lives.
10 years ago after staying at one company for 9 years and before that at another for three doing mostly C and C++ with a smattering of VB6, Perl, and JavaScript, I looked at where most of the jobs were in my local market - a major metropolitan area with a lot of Enterprise Java/.Net and web jobs.
I had two offers one for $20K more than I was making as a C++ developer and one as a high entry level .Net developer paying only $7K more (yeah wage compression is real). I took the second offer. I knew in 3 years my options were going to be limited for C jobs.
10 years and 4 additional jobs later and making $70K more, it was the right decision. There are very few jobs making what I make now in my local area for C developers, plenty for “Enterprise” developers/architects.
Going back on topic about certificates, I’m again at the same crossroads. I got to where I am being mostly a backend developer/architect with very little modern front end experience. Also, in my local market, “full stack web developers” are becoming a commodity and make less than I do now.
So along with learning $frontend_framework_of_the_week just to check off the box, I’m working on AWS certs, since they are still marketable and the only way I can make the next jump without going into management is by being an overpriced “implementation consultant”.
There are basically a few parts to dealing with AWS:
Net ops: traditional networking, patching, security groups, manually provisioning resources, web based load balancer, and the kinds of things you do on prem. This part is easily outsourced. Also companies that just do a lift and shift of an on premise mindset usually would be better off with a cheaper VPS solution or even colo.
Devops: CLoudFormation (Infrastructure as Code), Code Deploy, CodePipeline, OpsWork (Chef?). Most of the outsourced labor and honestly most of the AWS support companies don’t have a clue about this.
Development: Databass optimizations with SQL and NoSql data stores (DynamoDB, ElasticSearch), Autoscaling, SQS, SNS, lambda, etc. Again, most outsourced labor don’t have a clue about this either.
Most “AWS Architects” come from a traditional networking background and that’s all they know. They take their knowledge and map it very badly to AWS.
Someone who has done full stack software architecture and knows AWS inside out from a development, devops, and net ops perspective will be competitive.
Just like all other outsourcing, companies keep the “architects” in house or local and outsource the commoditized development.
Straight “AWS Architects” make less than “full stack developers” and wages for both seem to be stagnating in most of the US. Architects/Team Leads are making more but that’s stagnating too. But good “Implementation Consultants” who can combine both are making more. If you can market your consultants as “Cloud transformation consultants” (Yes I died a little saying that) you can make a lot more.
Coursera will not grade the end-of-section quiz for non-paying students.
EdX grades exercises for audit students, on every course I’ve done there the free/paid experience is identical, the only difference is whether they issue a “verified certificate” at the end. Often people audit courses and only upgrade to paid once they have a passing grade.
I just found the first couple of courses on edX where graded exercises are only for those who pay for a "certificate". It's all courses in a UC San Diego "MicroMasters" program around data structures and algorithms. That's all the programming exercises, more than 80% of the value of those courses for most people. Unfortunately I found the quality not worth the price, and I would say that is true even for beginners (I have a CS degree from 20 years ago and only watched to remember a few things I forgot, just for fun).
Anyway, I think this might be a sign for the things to come. A lot(!) of edX courses, despite being okay or even good, have very low participation judging by forum activity. I think the course makers at the universities are going to feel more and more pressure from money-counting management about cost/benefit for the institution.
It's sad that to me to see that everyone does their own (often inadequate) little course instead of working together to create something bigger, better. I would like to see platforms like edX and Coursera not as market places like Ebay for lots of still very traditional little courses, but as platforms that encourage jointly working on something better (in addition to the current model, not as total replacement). Of course, 90% of why they don't (can't) do or become that is that those making the courses won/t or can't do it. Everybody works in isolation on their own small course(s).
Not to mention that if you watch anything at Khan Academy, they jiggle the page and nag you every 30sec to log in to save your progress (even when you dismiss the notification).
Taking this opportunity to gripe about KA : I took their intro to chemistry, and the production quality of the videos was so erratic that I thought it might be a joke -- e.g., first video disjointed, second coherent but sounded like it was recorded over a '50s telephone, etc etc.
Hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this one needs a housecall from the vet
Would you have a link? I found those videos that I did watch pretty good, definitely not lacking in quality. That was mostly math, just a few chemistry videos (some 20?).
You're not. I only ever need specific portions that I can't get on youtube tbh. I don't agree with the assertion that attendance makes a better student. We all learn on the job at some point and that is where the real learning begins.
I do this all the time as well, I audit the entire course quickly to see what gaps of information I don't know. Or search out a specific topic only, on something I struggle with
I'm the same way but I think people like us tend to be heavily over-represented on HN and probably represent a small fraction of the total audience. Similarly, I like to watch YouTube videos for specific technical content where the vast majority seems to prefer pop culture and cat videos.
A couple of other personality types / situations to consider:
1) Some people treat learning the way they treat a workout... procrastination is the path of least resistance. So metrics like course completion % 'gamify' it for them to give them the push they need to keep motivated.
2) In the business world, think of the times someone has said 'I'm not trained in that' (or something along those lines, often to try to get out of doing something) and the boss says 'well, go get trained in that.' Course completion is a thing that can be shown to said boss to 'prove' they learned something. While self-learners would tend to keep their mouths shut about not knowing it and say 'sure, no problem' and then go find whatever training materials were needed to learn said thing.
I was thinking about this the other day. The idea that most people are just watching garbage on YouTube 'might' be true, and that viewing educational or technical content is an outlier, but I'm not so sure.
Sure, there are countless massively popular channels with garbage pop content, but that may be due to the "general" nature of the content. The broad audience keeps it at the top of the most watched lists.
I think if you aggregate all the technical content, the "long tail" might be more numerous than the hump of the curve.
There are channels about programming, woodworking, plumbing, HVAC, construction, 3d printing, PC building, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, knitting, photography, cinematography,graphic design ... it just goes on and on. Sure, most of those channels may only have a hundred thousand or fewer subscribers (with some exceptions in the millions) but I wouldn't doubt that in aggregate they surpass junk like moviemojo and cat videos in time watched.
Youtube is an amazing phenomenon that I think doesn't get enough credit because of all the junk on there, but the fact that I can search for how to remove the abs module on a 2007 BMW 750li and get multiple videos showing how to do it just blows me away and definitely makes it a lot easier to get things done.
> Youtube is an amazing phenomenon that I think doesn't get
> enough credit because of all the junk on there, but the
> fact that I can search for how to remove the abs module on
> a 2007 BMW 750li and get multiple videos showing how to do
> it just blows me away and definitely makes it a lot easier
> to get things done.
One of the garbage things about YT, though, is that the third thing on that video's "watch next" list will be some dude telling you that ABS part of a global conspiracy to get mind-controlling computers into every car.
It doesn't take long to recognize and avoid that type of video. But man, a single click on one of those videos will take you down a rabbit hole so fast.
Right, signing up for a MOOC is basically just a way of bookmarking it. It’s not really any different than how most people don’t buy all the stuff they add to their Pinterest boards.
For me, it's the length of individual videos that matter.
I prefer those with 4-7 minutes minutes per video. I've noticed that many long videos can be much shorter with minimal editing to remove unnecessary pauses, uhmms...
Definitely. Especially for courses in the 20+ hour range, long lectures [say, more than ten minutes] can be a real drain.
Though I think most of the online courses I've taken have delivered exceptional value, as you say, the "one-take-and-done" editing style is ubiquitous and leaves one to sit through a lot of ummmming, digression, and jabbering.
[Come to think of it, so did most of my courses at university!]
I'm the opposite. When searching for lectures on youtube, I filter to remove anything shorter than 20 minutes and then ignore anything that's still under an hour.
Not for me. I've taken and completed well over 50 courses by now (took health-related time off work for a few years but when I felt better wanted to do something), and the most frustrating courses where Udacity courses (and a few of the edX courses) where it felt like I had to click Next Next Next Next continuously, could not take my hand off the keyboard and lean back in my chair because there was the next silly easy question to answer and "Next" to click for the next short soundbite video. I definitely prefer well-made(!) longer videos.
The worst is when they start each and every 3.5 minute video with a ten second introduction, for those who already forgot what course they are in and what they just heard last only three minutes ago.
When I see things like this, or the doctor that I saw yesterday (who didn't know me) immediately switching to a "baby talk" style (for all conversations with her patients, I later observed) I wonder what kind of people (students, patients) they have to deal with in their jobs that they switch to by default assuming the worst.
quite common. Many of my colleagues including myself will sign up for a course online only because we saw an interesting topic in one of their modules. We go straight for the module, learn what we want and move on, never complete the course.
I believe education and testing/certification should always be considered 2 perfectly separate things and, ideally, done by different parties. There should be companies that educate people seeking to acquire knowledge and there should be companies that test people seeking a formal confirmation of their knowledge and issue them certificates. No exams should exist in an ideal university, their job is to educate you an this is what they are to specialize in. But this hardly is a good idea for MOOCs from the financial point of view as charging for certification is the way MOOCs earn money to fund the whole operation so they can keep the actual education part free.
Something I noticed is that exams are what we're always coming back to in terms of education. Employers want a confirmation that you learned something. That's a university degree. Even with respected websites offering confirmations, how can you trust that and how do you keep track of every website's quality?
I noticed this about all those "machine learning courses" that are getting posted here. Facebook and Google basically hand them out for free, hundreds of hours worth of quality learning material. Top universities let you watch all their lectures online. So what's the catch? Why aren't we all machine learning experts already? Because it's hard to muster the energy unless you commit to earning a degree by, yes, studying for exams. Turns out that's actually thousands of hours of work so the "convenience" part of online courses kinda starts to fade.
I definitely noticed that the quality difference between a good university and a bad one is often about how much they value "education" beyond just being an "exam machine". Presenting facts from the point of view of someone new to them, presenting methods of how to deal with edge cases and traps, taking one-on-one tutoring sessions seriously.
But yea, the end result is getting confirmation for having passed a bunch of exams.
In addition to the scarcity of what I'd call "deep dive" materials, companies like Facebook and Google are frequently trying to encourage platform adoption.
MOOCs for purely pedagogical reasons are sometimes hard to find in ML, not only for the aforementioned reasons, but creating a MOOC is simply resource intensive. It follows that many of the producers that truly value education are actual universities. Hybrid models like Coursera and Udacity are still trying to figure out how to get out of the red.
All of this to say that I'm still very grateful for content creators who go beyond simple framework tutorials.
I don't think this is an accurate assessment of education in the ML space. There are tonnes of people who have self-taught themselves the material. The issue I see is that employers do not trust non-university credentials, and so there is a strong hiring bias towards PhD graduates, regardless of whether it is warranted.
I think a big part of this comes from the lack of emphasis on group projects and technical communication in MOOCs. How many MOOCs have you seen where you're actually encouraged to work in groups, and then eventually present your work?
Even though the concept of an MOOC has been around for quite some time now, it's only recently that their curricula at the course level is actually consistently on par with what would be seen in a good university environment (think like "Top 50" University).
I had a whole post in startupschool.com about this. I was unable to find anybody agreeing with me. Glad you made me feel less alone in this world. And TBH from all the excitement of being in SuS, I think one might launch a startup with this idea
Most self-taught people I have met have come up with their own projects, or at least played with Kaggle, as people are usually advised to do. MOOCs are only a small part of the options people can and do exercise.
Self driven education has always existed. At least as long as you could check out books in the library. The Internet made it more convenient, but it didn't make it any easier. Most people thrive in a structured environment with superiors and peers. That's why universities are so much more successful than libraries.
There's also the problem of knowing what you don't know. If an expert in the field is educating you they will give you a full picture of the field and what's important in it. But if you're self taught you can miss entire areas and never realize their importance from reading academic sources.
I'm not against self teaching or MOOCs at all. I just think they need more structure and require more commitment to be as useful as university is to society. They're a bit too casual, requiring much more self drive which is harder than just setting deadlines and exams.
One thing I’ve realized is that there is a lack of intermediate or more difficult material avaiable.Lots of these courses work on toy examples with data already cleaned up and organized.
I wish there were more courses breaking down the algorithms in the latest research papers and actually implementing the models .
The most interesting self-learning platform I've found is expii.com created by Poh-Shen Lo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po-Shen_Loh It feeds you exercises and judging by your answers determines if you need more practice or not using an Elo rating system https://v1.expii.com/grandmaster though I get the argument of having students pay for certs ergo they actually complete the courses, this other method seems to me to work just as well as paid motivation.
Systems that keep track of your learning progress and automatically schedule exercises are probably the future of learning, but I'm not sure whether the approach taking by expii.com is good enough yet.
I did a few calculus questions and noticed two aspects which I think could be improved:
1) the multiple-choice question format makes questions easier than they appear. I solved a differential-equation question by differentiating all 4 possible solutions, I would have been unable to solve it otherwise.
2) Most questions require combining several pieces of knowledge to arrive at a solution, but the Elo rating only keeps track of a score for the type of question. If you mess up a chain-rule question by misremembering the derivative of the inverse cosecant function, then you should get more questions about the inverse cosecant function rather than the chain rule, and vice versa.
That said, changing those two things would require a lot of work, so I understand why it is the way it is.
As for the second problem, it also applies to DuoLingo: at some point I get bored by repetitive easy questions, start clicking too fast, make a mistake (or even a misclick) purely out of insufficient attention (while the correct answer is actually obvious to me) and get more boring questions on the same topic.
What you get from MOOCs is directly proportional to how seriously you approach them. Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses.
But they are also 100x cheaper and easier to access. If you approach them the right way you can get way more. I do still believe that for your 1st degree a traditional university is still the right choice, but there's no reason to return to university after graduation.
> Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses.
It's interesting how much this varies globally. In the UK I had zero hand-holding for my undergraduate degree. In the last two years of high school there would be constant reminders that this would be coming. You'd turn up to lectures, occasionally have coursework that at most counted for 30% of the overall course. There was very limited access to the lecturer outside of the lectures, and occasionally their grad students would help with labs. Most of that was by design, but there was the ability for faculty to get by with minimal effort and not face consequences.
For some courses, I wish I had had access to the level of hand holding that seems to exist in the US at the undergraduate level. Overall, I think that the experience of being left to my devices has worked out better in the long-run, even if my results at the undergraduate level could have been better.
Yes, the university life portrayed in American tv shows is also quite unfamiliar to Nordics.
Your experience mirrors mine in Finland. You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams. No one cared whether you attended the lectures or the exercise sessions, you were simply expected to be able to apply the material by the end of the course.
However it depended heavily on faculty or even field. I think the humanists had to attend many of their lectures, while the exact sciences didn't have such requirements (although the physics department also insisted on handing in exercises; profs probably got tired of grading people trying their luck).
I felt I was lucky for the freedom I was granted, although I too felt I would have liked more face to face teaching for some courses (it also allowed for making poor decisions regarding priorities, though I have no regrets).
I think other students had the same sentiments, and difficult courses began having more free-form sessions in addition to lectures and exercises. I feel this is a pretty good compromise of sorts, as it allows for different styles of learning, and you could even hold a day job while studying, or live out of city etc. as you're not forced to be physically present.
> You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams
And aside from a few exceptions, this is exactly how I approached my studies. I'd show up on day 1, the day of each midterm, and the last day of class before the final exam.
I did this as well. I had to take “economic statistics”, as it was discovered late in my senior year that AP Stats couldn’t be used in my major.
I didn’t show up at all, as the class notes were available online and all assignments were online submission (on a VAX, of all things in 1999). When I arrived at the midterm, the professor called the UPD, as he had never seen me before.
Back in college there was a class where all exams were take-home, and all homeworks and exams could be deposited in the professor's mailbox. I read the text, did homework with my classmates, passed the exams, and never even found out what the professor looked like.
There I would factor in the cost of education in Europe and US...
I also did what you did in my years at school and I regret it deeply. Noone would take on welding without being next to an experienced welder, why is this any different with other subjects?
I now wish I had been smarter and spent more time with my professors outside of the class to learn by watching them work on problems and work with them.
It's less about having adults behave like adults and more about helping people to build habits of focus, progress and growth, instead of getting sucked into distraction hell on a mobile device.
For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consumable in a short period of time. Have it focus on a specific thing someone would want to do within the domain of the greater problem. This lets people pick and choose which isolated topics (can have pre-req's) they need to take and because they can learn the task quickly they have a high rate of completion.
Creating mountains for people to climb isn't always the best approach. By creating a series of small foothills, learners can pick and choose which tasks they need experience on and I believe this also leads to better skill retention.
While your point is valid, the counter is there are some difficult things that would never be done. Some problems are hard or take a long time.
"War and Peace" is not a book you can study as a single short task. Breaking it down doesn't work because every class assumes you have read it recently and done the previous class - we would end up with thousands of people who complete just one or two classes and very few who complete the entire sequence. If completion is the goal we would still fail. Maybe you can call some units optional, but the value requires you to complete most of the sequence.
Agreed, but you can break down all large tasks into small ones.
We don't read war and peace in one sitting either, we read part of a chapter. Likewise working through materials can be done in smaller pieces while part of a larger whole.
The monolith structure of a course that can't be broken down is the challenge.
Right, but if you read chapter one of war and peace you can't take a year off and then read chapter two. Not only would you never finish, but you would forget to much that the whole wouldn't make sense. If you are going to read the book you can take it chapter by chapter, but you should finish in a couple weeks at worst.
I couldn’t agree more - I’ve made most progress in MOOCs whenever there is a set of relatively small but valuable, achievable goals. And I’m pretty sure the MOOCs I ran out of time for required big chunks of work.
> My free time is consumed by exercise and just spending time with my wife.
Plenty of learning involved with that. Spending time with you wife means constantly learning about her, and about you and her in tandem. Exercising means constantly learning about your body and the exercises you do, and the combination of those parts. Of course, it is possible to spend time with someone as well as exercising without learning anything, but it seems you a voluntarily involved in both, so my guess is that you are not resisting learning but are instead voluntarily learning :)
I think you need a combination of both. Just working on random projects isn't feasible all the time. I've worked on projects where I simply did not know how to complete said project and googling didn't help much. There is real value from taking a voluntary formal course that is comprehensive. It will give you the basic foundation to master the subject. You can use projects to refine your skill.
"I find learning via projects is the fastest and most useful. I am unsure if I will take courses ever again.
"
I also learn mostly through projects but I think sometimes it's good to take a dedicated class to expand my horizon further than the immediate need or just into a completely new area.
I've been a technologist in academic and industry online education for almost 20 years.
Life is not linear. Why are traditional education and MOOCs linear and monolothic? Career paths are no longer linear, but so much education continues to be linear.
The pace of innovation adoption in education is very slow, partially due to the lack of technological abilities of leadership and management in education. There is often little vision, and where there might be, there is fear.
MOOCs do not represent all, or the best forms of online learning. They represent the best of what non technical educators came up with.
MOOC structures are clearly late 90's/early 2000's, I know because I worked on a platform to deliver high school education. Little has changed. Education has moved forward very little, the devices, connectivity, and videos have gotten sexier, but it's too often more of the same.
If anything, MOOCs are a concoction of academia working to deliver traditional lectures digitally, but not using the digital medium as well as it could be.
MOOCs have a place in the world still to be effective, it's just not a gold standard or a silver bullet.
70% of learning is informal and outside of the classroom. MOOCs generally do not address this well.
Self-directed learning is going to be a real thing, because it already is. We search constantly for answers on mobile, to construct new abilities.
Academic Institutions are losing a lot of money and it's estimated at least 1/3rd will close in the next 10 years. Many simply cannot keep up with the rate of change in today's world of disruption in a few years. Most existing curriculum is for positions that don't change often.
A completion percentage is a poor metric because it does not measure comprehension and competencies/skills.
Ditto!
To me they pretty much all sound like the patent trolls that do this old business stuff but "on-the-internet" (it's and old meme..., ossuary if it's not funny). Putting a video of yourself talking doesn't make it "online", it makes "on-demand" like Netflix. I want "online" as in: we had an online meeting with the director of the job site because it was unpractical to drive there in time, online!!!
It really is abysmal, between the ineffecifencies of creating content, delivering it and keeping it looking to the future instead of anchored in the past.
Still I'm starting to feel optimistic for the first time in a long time.
There is a horizon on the future, finally thanks to the convergence of more accessible connectivity, devices and capabilites of digital experiences in the next 2 years.
> There is a horizon on the future, finally thanks to the convergence of more accessible connectivity, devices and capabilites of digital experiences in the next 2 years.
For services and apps to emerge, to make things less abysmal? I don’t see what you are hopeful for, what the given things would change.
It's more about the content itself than the platforms/services and apps.. although those are issues too.
Today most places are creating content a 20 year old way. It can't keep up with today's pace or depth of ongoing changes, or how quickly education content is needed on new topics in the future.
I think it boils down to features which are not currently available, which hamper self-directed learning today.
Is it that what you mean with „new capabilities of digital experiences“ and „creating content a 20 year old way“? Or do you talk about the formats they are created in?
This seems to leave out a large contributing factor, cost.
Many, many of the MOOCs I’ve ever done were free or a nominal cost ($5-20).
When you’re attending a class at a university or even a local community college you’ve put in a lot of initial work to just get into the class (applying, transcripts, student portal straight out of 1977 that makes MSDOS look pretty) compounded that at minimum you’re paying $300 for a 3 credit class before any book fees.
There’s tremendous more skin in the game for those classes than a MOOC so it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
I remember when signing up for classes at my uni circa 2002, the easiest way was to call into the scheduling system. The man speaking to you from the automated system was a professor who had died years earlier.
So I'll one-up your old student portal by saying that to sign up for classes at my university, I had to communicate with the dead. :)
The main justification for the argument in this article is: 'Learn at your own pace is ineffective because dropout rates are high'. However, the source article [1] that references the dropout rates also questions whether dropout rates is an accurate measurement of whether this learning style is effective or not.
I'm not an expert on education, but logically, I'm thinking that effectiveness relies on an end result in the first place. That is, can you measure the effectiveness of MOOCs when the course(s) where not completed to begin with. That's like me saying that traditional in-classroom classes were in-effective because I dropped out of college. I would wager that measuring something such as hiring rate after course completion would provide a better metric.
> Creating this was the driving force behind BrainStation’s Online Live course offerings, which are powered by Synapse, our very own data-driven learning platform.
This is thinly veiled marketing for their services.
I'm currently a student with SUNY Empire State College with their online program, which is semi learn-at-your-own-pace. There are deadlines on the assignments, and you have to communicate with other students in order to get the grade.
Personally, I greatly prefer it. The first statement "Learners Need to Attend to Succeed" is sort of double edged; my first try at college, I didn't attend class for a variety of reasons (mostly depression), and I know well enough that if I were required to go to a physical classroom while working full time, there's no chance I'd actually show up. By allowing me to work at home when it's most convenient for me, I actually do the assigned reading and homework.
Also, the line "Learners Need Access to Expertise" strikes me as a bit strange; do people have problems finding experts on stuff? For my online school, I can bother the professor for help whenever I need it, but I also don't have too much trouble finding someone smarter than me on IRC.
The main problem is that most people taking these courses also have a “main” thing going on (job or school) and can’t dedicate 100 percent to self education. If self education was considered a legitimate third option besides job and school, the opinions would be different.
I’ve spent the last two years self educating myself (in addition to working on something). I’ve never felt so intellectually engaged and just idk alive? All the hard shit that you might struggle with becomes trivial if you spend a little more time on it.
Well, the author is assuming that high grades are perfectly correlated with learning and retention - I'm not so sure that's the case. I understand why we need grades as a motivator and a metric, but they're only part of the story. I got a decent grade when I took undergraduate calculus 25 years ago, but I didn't really learn or retain much - at best, it was in my mind that if I ever needed to figure a rate of change, then I would probably have to go look up how to do derivatives. On the other hand, I recently came across my old undergraduate calculus textbook and started re-reading it just for the heck of it, working all the problems, taking as long as I damned well pleased on each one. And now I feel like I _am_ actually learning and retaining, partly because I'm not rushing to meet an artificial deadline.
Georgia Tech's OMSCS program addresses these issues very well in my experience (I'm finishing my 3rd and final year). Assignments and exams follow strict schedules, student collaboration is very strong (via Piazza, Slack, Google Hangouts), each student receives a grade, and the cost is cheap but not trivial (i.e. there is a financial incentive to make the most of the class.) I am very happy with the program and feel it should serve as a model for other institutions who want to offer MOOC like degree programs.
A lot of disagreement here based on the premise that "completion" is the wrong metric. No argument there, but maybe that's not the premise.
I believe the best way is to offer options for all people. (Not going into the proven-debunked-proven-debunked learning styles rabbit hole here).
I've tried both a Bachelors and Masters by correspondence and performed dismally in both. I had due dates, I was financially invested but I just couldn't get engaged with the materials. The Blackboard BBS was not even close to a community of my peers and lecturers. (Seriously Blackboard fix that).
I'm now 2 years into a 4 year part time MBA at a university that I attend on campus. I am engaged because I go to classes & I discuss things with both tutors, lecturers & peers, my lecturer is a person and not doing my best and then showing up to class is disrespectful and frankly embarrassing. I have gone from not even submitting some assignments because <insert excuse about life/work/busy> to a GPA that isn't perfect but is closer than I ever expected.
I've also not finished a number of Coursera, PluralSight, Lynda and Linux Academy courses, but I've got value from them.
Kudos to brainstation for trying to build a better platform. In the meantime I'm working like crazy to finish my MBA before my uni follows too many others into the world of online classes.
This is a very good idea, and could be used by Google or other advertisement agencies (if only they want to.) You may pay the revenue the ads make and get the stuff you want to learn instead. This way, Google gets its money, and you get to learn. Also, this could be uesful in that it doesn't require too much tracking of the users. It is definitely not fully sustainable, but it could be better than nothing.
Many MOOCs are beginning to address the "expertise" and "other students" issues that the article mentions.
For example, in my spare time I've been taking music production and gamedev courses. In both cases, the courses are still at your own pace, but they provide official ways to contact the instructors and they respond within 24 hours, and they also provide either a discord/slack channel or a facebook group for sharing/pairing/asking questions with other students.
While I'm typically the 10% completion type of student the article mentions, I've found both provided forms of communication to be very helpful in keeping me motivated to work through the courses. When I get stuck on a concept I can take a break and reach out to the instructors, and I find the ability to share and see others music/games gives me some inspiration to continue learning and working.
MOOCs make explicit something that has always been implicit for me about education. In the absence of the herd, the authority figure, the degree, the deadlines with teeth and all the other motivational tricks to get me to learn the content, we're just left with the content itself.
Is it great content? Does it inspire my curiosity? Is it memorable? Does it teach me things I can apply? Does it add layers of needless complexity? Is it an exercise in abstract curriculum box-ticking? Is it an ideology in wrapping paper?
I think the gap between 100% and the actual MOOC completion rate also represents the gap between our ideal of education was and what it actually is. Without all the academic window dressing, most people just learn the parts they want. The pedagogs doth protest too much, methinks.
Bingo! Although the completion rate was low—single digit—more students completed the the first 6.002x offering on edX than have completed the course at MIT in the entire history the course has been offered. As others have mentioned, the completion rate will always be low for numerous reasons. However, if you compare the raw number of students completing the courses, and the costs paid by students, MOOCs come out ahead.
IMO, I think we need to get over this whole idea of "completion rates". Honestly, who cares how many students took the class. The only important metric is how many students obtained a comprehensive understanding of the subject after taking the course. We need side-by-side examinations to really see which is superior.
I think learning at your own pace is perfectly fine, so long as your okay with mitigating / dealing with inefficiencies of roadblocks. It depends on the topic, but I'm assuming this is towards computer science / webdevelopment in general
Online learning is cost-effective though. You can effectively specialize in anything computer-science based for less than $100 with all the free content / cheap MOOC's available. Or you could attend a live seminar / webinar etc where you can work with other people, etc. But this comes at a significantly higher cost at a faster learning rate.
Why not take the best of both worlds? It all boils down to the best value for the buck
1) Learn things online at your own pace, 2x speed, playback as necessary.
2) Take the extraordinate amount of money you would have spent elsewhere, use a fraction of the cost with hackhands / make your own ad-agency for hiring upwork specialists in issues you have. This scales indefinitely, now you always have an expert on hand and consequently, form a long term business relationship with. There's no roadblocks anymore.
3) You get on demand help onpar with in-house training / tutoring, assuming its a popular topic. For example, learning nodejs /react. There's tons of qualified tutors that will charge $1/minute from india/europe with hackhands and/or similar.
4) There's always forums and or Q/A on MOOC's who have had similar issues to you. Assuming its a popular course. Stackoverflow / reddit / etc is always available too
5) Techmeetups and my city's dev channel has lots of great people. Also, techtalks to explore different topics
Learning on your own effectively does require a small investment paying for tutors, but its significantly cheaper and arguably sometimes even more efficient than learning through a program.
I know exactly what I'm getting everytime, from the comforts of my own workarea. No wasted time driving, 2x playback speed, triple monitor setup/mechanical keyboard, on-demand tutoring within 5 minutes, etc. I don't have to worry about the instructor being subpar compared to what I can find online.
I am highly skeptical of the research that shows low attendance causes poor grades. I attended 2/24 lectures for one subject, and I got the highest grade for the year, out of both semesters. And I have friends who don’t attend lectures often and do similar.
We focus on assignments - programming & software engineering assignments eat far too much time to get top marks and still attend classes. When I finish assignments, I binge watch lectures and write notes like a madman.
It sounded like questionable methodology- students had access to notes and slides, but it noticeable didn’t mention videos. Professors can communicate what they consider relatively important (and therefore what’s likely on the test/evaluation criteria) verbally and non-verbally during lecture, which can be captured by decent videography. If the non attending section didn’t get the video they were not given full course information.
That being said, as others have pointed out attendance likely increases skin in the game and results in more work in general. Another improvement across the general population is the social aspect of class, forming study groups or informal support structures, as well as increased attachment to material by being part of a group in general.
While as professional I much prefer MOOCs (even if I don’t finish them) I don’t think I would have gotten through my college curriculum without that social context. Just too many distractions. In fact, the most common reason for people failing out of my program was over use of video games and other media (drug and alcohol abuse got you placed into a rehab cycle with possibility of return). Being wanting to keep up with my known peers definitely motivated me to work more and consume material better
It is definitely possible to lecture in such a way that students gain no benefit from turning up. The classic way to do this is just click your way through a powerpoint, reading out the slides as you go along.
That doesn't disprove the claim that it's possible to lecture in a way that students do benefit from turning up.
This is classic anecdotal thinking. Your statement is equivalent to someone who has smoked a pack a day for 40 years saying they don't think cigarettes cause lung cancer because they don't have lung cancer.
Not that this particular study is necessarily convincing -- but your anecdote has no value in determining if it is or isn't.
I recognize that this is just anecdote v. anecdote, but from TA-ing a number of college courses I have found the correlation between attendance and grades to be extremely strong. There are undoubtedly exceptions such as yourself and your friends- interestingly I myself was such an exception as an undergrad- but in general students with better attendance seem to get better grades.
_That said_, I suspect that this effect is almost entirely attributable to lurking variables such as discipline and interest. A lot of students with poor attendance are either students with poor work habits, or ones don't care about the course. Both of those tend to produce poor grades. The study cited addressed study habits, and maybe touched on interest a little, but It's hard for me to say exactly how well they adjusted for those since it's paywalled.
I actually think there are some new models emerging that will help address this - Springboard, for example, has learn at your own pace, but students also have a mentor assigned to them who helps with accountability and goal setting. From my experience the completion rate is substantially higher and students actually learn the skill set. Insight and other data science accelerators are opening up things like this too.
I feel this article doesn't understand what "learning at your own pace" means.
Yeah sure you can say "learners need this environment, this attendance, etc" but you're falling into the trap of what we have right now -- we think we know what's best for people to learn.
And while true for many people they definitely WILL learn with established practices, not everyone will learn as well as they could.
100% I agree with you. The student should be the final decider on what type of course to take. From what I've seen when I ask people about MOOCs, lots of people say they want classroom environment but when you tell them about what if the MOOC is free. Then they all switch to MOOC because they figure they can just hire a tutor if they really need the human help.
Most of the people I see making that argument are "education experts" who are extremely arrogant. My prediction is they made these arguments because they feel threatened by the potential that MOOCs have. If MOOCs become very high quality then there is the very real threat that people will start asking if the preference for physical classroom time still has value.
> student success is directly related to student attendance. In fact, they concluded that attendance is the single most important predictor of high grades, a better predictor than SAT scores, high school GPA, study skills or study habits.
This reeks of selection bias and conflating correlation with causation to me. The abstract of the linked study does not seem to draw causal conclusions.
I never understood online-learning ([1]) for non-trivial topics. I need to discuss stuff to really understand it and to also have fun with it! I don't know how somebody could do a complete degree or even some harder lectures purely by watching some videos on your computer. Having access to some smart phd-students, talking with peers and solving hard problem-sets together is part of the fun.
I can only imagine doing this for things like a math-light "intro to neural networks" (my only completed MOOC and more of an tensorflow-tutorial) or "Accounting for dummies".
EDIT: What I want to say: to me, it feels nearly impossible to learn the stuff I learned in my more challenging lectures completely on my own with online-videos.
The issue is - online learning isn't just watching videos.
In the case of software related tasks, it's learning skills, competencies, and building software, which is on the computer.
Digital learning is not happening, because current implementations have been anchored in the past (recording lectures) instead of creating meaningful digital experiences. Educators generally don't have the technology skills to create meaningful digital learning experiences.
The technologists that can create meaningful digital learning experiences are often not in the decision making capacity that they could be.
Hmm, maybe i didn't clearly communicate my opinion.
What I wanted to say is that I can't see how you could learn (without being exceptionally dedicated) challenging topics. Things you normally go to university for. Things where you constantly have to do difficult exercises, where you find yourself wanting to quit, but you have to keep pushing yourself through it. In the end, it's fun. But the path you have to travel to get there is not (always).
I did a masters in maths with the OU. It was effectively eight months of full time work, spread over five and a half years (when I started, I was thinking about doing it in a bit under four, but once I realised how many hours just one topic was going to take me, I had to lengthen my timetable). As you surmise, difficult exercises and textbooks were the key; the occasional video was good only for mining something very specific. I watched three or four geometry videos while learning the history of geometry from Euler to Minkowski, but geometry is particularly suited to that medium.
You say you can't see how it can be done without being exceptionally dedicated; I don't know what counts as "exceptional dedication", but I feel there's a context missing here. Is it expected (not necessarily by you - but are you seeing this expectation in other people) that it's possible to learn large amounts of difficult material without putting the time and effort in?
Ok, interesting. I don't think I've really reflected too much why I feel this way before posting (hello internet!). I also may have probably over-generalized ;)
In germany, if you study at a university, you are completely on your own. Nobody is forcing you to do anything and you can push your exams into the next semester until they kick you out for studying too long. So, there are some similarities to online-lectures.
I think I have found my strategy for "getting good" at stuff:
1. I need to be motivated: I am currently motivated that I want to understand how machine-learning really works and can be improved. Getting exposed to research is super fun and currently the reason why I am doing all this. What's a good notion of generalization? What's representation-learning? etc. We have a very active community here and I get to know many people from the industry, academia etc. and through my research-assistant student-job I learn how they work on stuff.
2. Don't do it alone & and have a regular schedule: Solving hard problem-sets together is one of the most-rewarding things I have ever done in my life. I even try to do proofs from papers with others in my free time! But also: train with old tests together, do the problem-sets together etc. There are a lot of groups quickly forming during lectores or before tests that I can just join. I don't need to do everything together, but meeting one or two times a week is an immense boost to my dedication and everything is just way more rewarding. I had a few lectures where I was completely on my own and it was way harder to develop the drive I usually had.
I don't think I can really replicate this for online-courses. I'll adress the points from above:
1. A university is a place where there's always something interesting. So many people studying interesting things. When I started CS, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. The intellectual stimulus is better than I have thought it would be. An online CS-course would probably have also thought me about the topics, but I don't think you get to know any research groups and their topics. I don't think this is a fundamental problem with MOOC, because the situation can be different. But at this point in my life, it was quit important.
2. I think this is the deal-breaker. Reflecting on my life, I don't really do that much completely on my own. Most of my hobbies are not something I do alone. I also don't live alone (and I don't think I ever want to). Doing stuff in a team is just a real Value-Multiplicator (this probably reads weird, but I think it captures best what I mean) for me. It's not that things are not fun to do alone ("=" 1fun), but they are way more fun to do in a team ("=" xfun for some x > 1). I don't know whether organizing local study-groups for an online-course is really the same experience, especially if you're taking just a few courses.
Because we are in the real world, there are always exceptions to the rule. For example, I can program alone without any problems. I could probably program for days without anyone bothering me. It's not that it's inherently more fun, i really don't know why. I always get interesting ideas when I am alone and I like to develope them (before speaking with friends about them). I also like to read, but I haven't done this in a while. Some things are not that fun to do in a group.
I want add that I have already completed one and finished 30% to 70% of a few other online-lecture (some where not really interesting after a while, others I didn't have time anymore). So I am not speaking about the entire concept.
I think I am not alone, because this is a very common pattern at my university.
EDIT: after thinking about it: I really think that some things just don't make that much fun alone. And that includes a lot of things I do in university.
That's weird. The only serious competition to public higher education-insitutions in germany is in part-time study programmes. One of them, the FOM, is even branding itself as the "higher education institution for working people".
The difference to full-time university degrees is that they are (usually) not research-focused. So you just learn, for example, business management, but they don't try to teach you how to do research, read and understand papers. It's a big difference. You mostly don't need much math if you don't want to do research.
But I've always wondered...is there a differentiation in america between universities and other higher-education institutions?
One of the things not mentioned, and maybe it is unique to my personality, is that I often don't like the exercises given in courses and come up with my own. If something is obvious and intuitive when hearing the concept, it is usually enough to internalize it. But if something is vague, I like to write some code and experiment with the concept to see how things interact.
MOOCS too often penalize you for not doing their exercises that don't always provide that much value and don't credit you for exploring other concepts further.
Additionally, when you have questions, office hours, message forums, Slack channels, and external sources (youtube, other courses, blog articles) are good sources.
Yeah - but it's on the student to seek out those additional resources, just like it is at College for students to seek out extra textbooks, use office hours etc.
Ultimately, it just comes down to how much the student wants to learn the material and MOOC's are just another helpful tool to do so.
Very well research supported points in the article.
Four things physical classroom teacher-led course offer which is often missed in an online course are:
1. well formulated Lesson Plans
2. Regular Homework assignments with Timelines and Deadlines
3. Periodic testing & grading
4. Peer students who are a huge source of motivation and inspiration
Online courses may offer some of the above in one form or another, but not nearly as effective as Classroom lead course as pointed in the article.
> Of course, another time-honored source of extrinsic motivation are deadlines.
> Course timelines and deadlines hold students accountable, spurring them to produce, keep up, and complete their work. In the ‘learn at your own pace’ model, timelines and deadlines are negotiable, at best, non-existent, at worst.
Its actually about perseverance and not some made up conclusions..
People who keep on attending classes simply have higher perseverance to anything they do and perseverance is the most important trait determining person success in life.
I don't think MOOCS are the solution unless utilized in schools. The role of a school teacher working along with a MOOC would be more motivational and disciplinary, which is what most teachers seem to specialize in anyway. Separate the content from the distribution. Only problem is when every student is learning exactly the same things and having no room for thinking out of the box, but again that pretty much already happens...
Maybe even let studebs choose their own MOOCs from a list so that their education is mostly based in interest and is self guided?
IMO, I think MOOCs will be the future of education going forward. The simple fact that a MOOC can deliver on-demand education for basically nothing on a per-student basis is significant. You are looking at MOOCs based on what they are now, which I agree, are generally low quality, not comprehensive and lack sufficient tools for students to self-study. Overtime, these issues will be worked out. New tools will be created that will allow MOOCs to deliver higher quality of education. I could even see MOOCs being superior to classroom education because a MOOC has the added benefit of having computer based algorithms which could be designed to analyze student data and adapt the course or give precise help to the student on-demand.
I think solutions could be created to solve the "lack of motivation" issue.
What solutions though? Students, especially kids, still need some kick in the butt to actually do the work required to learn. I don't see MOOCs ever accomplishing that unless someone somehow finds a way to make an addictive and legitimately educational computer game that students are REQUIRED to play. Or some medication that helps students focus and absorb information without ruining their brains. I agree MOOCs can deliver superior quality education, but it will be a long time before they are motiviating in their own rights. And a lot of motivation in school comes from being near peers and having human connection with teachers and other supervisors. MOOCs fail that requirement almost by definition.
MOOCs in their current incarnation of recorded lectures will only go so far, because the delivery method is anchored in the past.
MOOCs need to evolve. Many are just using the same pattern (Video/Question) that has been around since 2001. It's ridiculous, especially when creating video content is expensive, let alone updating it quickly enough across a plethora of topics.
MOOCs, or a better solution must support 30% of learning that occurs inside a classroom, and 70% of the informal learning that occurs outside the classroom for the same student.
Very few systems are paying attention to how students are actually learning today in academic environments - it's pretty interesting how large the disconnect is.
Not just the textbook, but the teacher. The current teacher role will be supplementary and act more like a psychologist or counselor in keeping students on track, providing more one-on-one support, encouraging movement and release of physical energy, guiding students toward their own goals rather than dictating requirements, helping students recognize the value of learning, sending disruptive students to a separate (possibly more physically oriented) workspace, recognizing and helping students through mental health and other issues. Using MOOCs, content can be swapped out like battery packs. The counseling role is uniquely human and can become much deeper service than is currently available to students.
I wish for an online learning platform where I incur financial penalty to not completing milestones on time.
Today... I can do whatever the hell I want 247 (effectively nothing compared to what's possible under stricter circumstances). We could talk about self discipline or whatever but that's a whole other objective too, so why not just focus on root issue. Command of choices.
If for example my credit card were charged $100 every day I slide on a target? The specific implementation is obviously up for grabs but the context has been stated.
Hmm brainstation, an institution that makes money off of people paying for and attending its courses, is making the case for it's own existence. I sense no bias here /s.
I'm going to go against the grain here but just putting cameras in classrooms and dumping that on Youtube works just fine. The content on MIT opencourseware feels a lot nicer than things like Coursera or others even if it's more traditional. At the end of the day you just want to communicate efficiently, and imperfect access to information is a lot nicer than no access. Don't sweat the details.
The only problem here is sound. Sound can be hard to get right, and I've stopped watching lots of interesting "meetup recordings" on YouTube because they just used the on-camera microphone and the audio was awful. It's a shame, but it makes it nearly impossible to watch.
That's an interesting study. I feel like maybe engagement is the wrong metric, much how like A/B testing gives a good local result but a poor global result. I finished a dozen or so of the traditional courses but can't be bothered to complete the split up ones. I'm surely not the only one.
I've taken an online natural language processing course. I've spent much time on assignment because I want to get full mark. I searched the web and learnt something extra. Due to the deadline, I missed other sessions of the course and I couldn't take it back until the next semester. Finally I've just taken a few sessions of the course.
MOOCs are great but a more experienced tutor is however needed for a nudge, fruitful exchange of ideas and testing progress. The subtle aspect of freeriding linked to not giving too much importance is maybe true for younger or wealthy people, but everything works like that in life as well: you only care and put the effort if you have an inner motivation.
I think 'at your own pace' is great if you dedicate yourself and put in the time. But to actually get the desired outcome, you still usually need some sort of guidance and timeline to move along. I think this shows with a lot MOOCs vs Lambda School.
From looking over your website before and reading your reviews on coursereport you guys look great. From a marketing perspective you need to sell your students’ success more though. Following Austen Allred of lambdaschool.com on Twitter is just ridiculous. Job offer, job offer, job offer, this student tripled their annual earnings, this one quadrupled it, this one only doubled it but he’s working remote and travelling. Why did you acquire bloc if you’re not going to integrate the two courses?
My comment is merely anecdotal, I guess, but I believe if I were part of this study my data point would have been considered a 'statistical anomaly'.
I am a career changer who moved from admin roles to software development. This part of my life started in 2014, when I decided to make the change. My first instinct was to get a degree, since I had never got one before, so I started an evening presential course with a local university.
During the course, I often noticed that I wasn't taking much in from the lectures, so I'd come in on weekends and do my study then. I'd still attend classes, as I was always afraid I'd miss something important for the exams, but this turned out to be rarely the case. In my last year, I was already so frustrated with spending 3 hours in class each night after a day at my full time job, that I decided to completely skip my lectures altogether. Surprisingly, these were the modules where I had the best performance.
There's a lot of correlation here, but in my case I'd say that what motivated me were not the classes themselves, but the deadlines. I tried online at-your-own-pace classes before in my previous career (accounting), and they did not work at all. It was very hard to keep myself motivated. Again, the correlation here does not necessarily indicate causality -- it could be argued that the lack of motivation came from the fact that I didn't like the subject. But I still believe that what works best for my case is to have a deadline, and learning resources other than presential lectures.
TL;DR: career changer who tried learn-at-your-own-pace resources for previous career path and wasn't successful. Then tried presential lectures + self study for CS career, was moderately successful. Best results were obtained with self study + externally imposed deadlines.
> No-one to guide you if you misunderstand a big concept. You are just left with a lot of reading around.
Good MOOCs have tests to ensure that doesn't happen. This is in fact how you solve this problem in all large courses, even those taking place in actual physical universities.
> Time.
That doesn't make any sense. MOOCs require minimal time investment, and are the most flexible.
Are you saying that being forced to attend at more restrictive times would somehow increase one's time supply?
I think that should certainly help procrastinators. When there's also some human interaction, fixed schedule, the cost, the incentive to finish up the course is higher, even if you hate the course...
> No-one to guide you if you misunderstand a big concept.
That's partly true, but I've found that stackoverflow is actually full of people who are (surprisingly) happy to explain things and check your work when you get confused.
Stackoverflow is great, and is really one of the most valuable learning resources ever created (seriously, quantifying the total value generated by SO would result in an astoundingly large number). I use it all the time.
That said, for particularly difficult concepts (in spaces that I am not an expert), I've found that having a friend or mentor that I have a personal relationship to be more effective in helping me understand in way that makes sense to me. This is mainly because said person has a better feel for the types of explanations that make sense to me than what would be a more useful answer to a more anonymous person.
TLDR; MOOC model isn't working well in the sense that 90-95% of students dropout because (1) when students gets stuck, the flounder (2) without classroom peers there is no pressure (3) deadlines are important to keep motivation.
