It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven protective bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything.
The self-delusion is so strong that people are denying what Thrun himself said: Udacity was (is?) a lousy product [1]. It doesn't do what it was supposed to do, which is educate more people for less money.
The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds (or at least, maybe the world wants that, but that isn't what Thrun wants, and I admire his integrity -- a lot of folks in his shoes would just be desperately trying to keep the party going, rather than admitting early failure). If MOOCs are nothing more than a place where half-interested techies go to pretend to learn about AI, then they're pretty useless.
I disagree strongly with this statement, having "taken" a couple of courses on Udacity. I didn't complete any of the courses, and from Thrun's point of view I'd be another example where they can improve. But this is an erroneous metric, both because students gain without completing the course assignments and because an in-person classroom only motivates you to do assignments by nature of having you pay $$$ for the credential. Unless Udacity credentials dangle you a job offer, there is much less incentive to do the work.
Does that mean the class is a failure? Not at all. I found the format and interactive quizzes to be superior to the college classes I took. In addition, you got to skip around to take what you needed, and work on what you like. It doesn't fit credentialism, but as a resource it was unmatched.
I didn't do any of the assignments for CS101 or CS253, which taught python and building web applications, but from there I was able to build a webapp far more complicated than their assignments required (basically I chose my own assignment).
I'd never have been able to find the time and patience to sit through a university class just to build a side project, not to mention cash investment. I can honestly say that without Udacity this wouldn't have happened. For the woman quoted knocking the lack of human contact: sorry this wasn't a social club for you.
> The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds
Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be perfect.
It saddens me that Thrun, who I have found to be exceptionally good at the job, is more interested in schooling than learning – but I get it from a business aspect. These results dash the hopes of what Udacity hinted would become their business model.
Actually, that is exactly what the world needs...I don't care about school, I just want to learn.
The disconnect is that you probably don't need to learn as badly as someone impoverished and living in the more closed societies that Thrun is trying to reach.
For them to become competitive in the world market they need to have skills and knowledge that you and most of the people with access to computers and the internet take for granted. So I agree with the parent comment that the world does not need another way for someone with a BS to get marginally smarter on an esoteric topic (for 99% of humanity) like AI. We need a platform for those without access to education to learn how to do basic coding, or learn other skills that will be needed in the coming decades.
I could see paying for a quality educational service. I already pay for Netflix and only spend a fraction of the time watching it compared to what I spend on watching MOOC-style videos. Udacity isn't really there though. The videos are top notch, but the user experience is not very good.
It doesn't seem like Thrun put a lot of effort into popularizing the approach either. He gave 1.5 years and a pilot program to affirm a product that undermines years of ingrained ritual and validity? It doesn't seem like he was ever interested in changing education.
It matters when you think about scaling up to replace colleges. Put 5 million college students / year through that funnel and you won't have an educated citizenry.
No, but if you put 100 million students / year through that funnel, you'll achieve meaningful learning for the same 5 million students, with access to the world's best instructors, at a fraction of the cost.
And the other 95 million will get more exposure to knowledge than they had before, even if they don't take it to completion.
How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? If someone finishes the class, aces the exam, and then promptly goes on living their life as an IT professional without any tangible change, was the course anything more than "infotainment"?
I'm not sure how you measure "real" learning, but course completion doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.
If you stop reading a book after 20% or 50% or 90%, have you wasted your time? Possibly not, but you haven't read the book, either.
A well-designed course isn't a random bag of stuff. It has a starting point and an ending point, and skipping out before the end can certainly be regarded as a failure, at least by the instructor.
> How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing?
Here's the thing: you can't tell.
Why is there a final exam? Because otherwise, you can't tell. It's an exit survey.
This is one of the clearest indicators that Udacity and other MOOCs aren't actually "revolutionizing" anything in education; they're just making an economic gamble on an iteration.
I spell it out with examples in another comment here, but one shouldn't assume that everyone has equal access to the foundation and motivation needed to put out the "effort" to succeed in MOOCs.
The people who are really educationally disadvantaged are often that way because of some other difficult circumstances in their lives (violence, social breakdown, poor parenting, and the associated effects on motivation).
I'm not referring to (typical) hacker news types here (myself included). You could give us all the extra educational access in the world and you wouldn't make a dent in educational inequalities, whether in the US, or globally.
The problem is not the initiative, it is the product. Merely replicate the classroom form of education to web will not cut it. It is not people learn things once they are out of campus hence the high drop out rate. The most agitated group of people in term of perpetrated learning is programmers. This professor needs to get his cue from place like GitHub, even YouTube. His class content design is boring ... Desperate needs innovation.
You're right but I'd like to add that MOOC added a new path to my options into learning, a less atomic one, I can put the effort and complete x% before dropping out of exhaustion, and come back not long after that and gather x% more.
It might better fit adult learning process as, at least I, get distracted more easily (less focus power, more things to handle, different brain). Actually that may be why Thrun is going into corporate education...
Call it 7,000 undergrad students at Stanford. 80,000 courses complete at Udacity would be about 11 courses per student, or a very solid academic year of courses.
So we could reasonably say the number of Udacity student-courses complete is similar to a year of Stanford's.
Call it $40,000 for a Stanford undergrad for a year. A total of $280,000,000 for those 7000 undergrads.
Udacity has raised $22 million.
So an entire order of magnitude less than Stanford tuition costs for a similar number of student-courses complete.
Of course Stanford tuition doesn't just go to classroom operations, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?
Doesn't make an order-of-magnitude change, but two quibbles with the numbers:
1. Stanford sticker-price tuition is ~$44k, but a very small percentage of students pay full price. For example anyone whose family earns less than $100k/year (!) pays no tuition at all. A ballpark guess at average tuition actually paid is ~$20k, though I can't find an official number. Plus Stanford is probably not really the right peer; Udacity is competing to a large extent (in terms of who they might conceivably displace) with cheaper education providers, like community colleges or even the Cal State system.
2. In addition to the $22m, Udacity is currently getting some $millions in donated labor from universities, which are lending out their professors to develop Udacity curricula and teach courses as part of experimental partnership agreements. Long-term it seems that Udacity will need to pay for this labor themselves, if it's to be revenue-neutral rather than cross-subsidized by universities.
1 - It's not about what the students themselves pay, it's about the cost. And I picked Stanford as sort of middle of the road cost-wise for private education. Public schools are of course subsidized heavily by tax dollars, which reduces tuition but certainly not the actual cost of the education. As far as quality, Udacity instructors and courses are far, far above a typical community college.
2. I picked Udacity since their courses are custom developed for the platform. Coursera courses are often very similar to the courses the instructors developed at their "day job" univeristies, the Udacity courses aren't really. They're new beasts.
I think the question was about costs of providing the service, not the tuition charged to students. How much does it cost to produce and operate a MOOC, in terms of total resources put into it? It's a bit difficult to account for, because in this early stage there is quite a bit of unaccounted-for labor. For example, there is some cross-subsidy from existing universities, because much of the Coursera/Udacity curriculum-dev and teaching work is done by professors who're drawing a full-time salary from a university (not from Coursera or Udacity). Nonetheless it'd be interesting to see some kind of ballpark estimate of how many total resources it takes to put together and teach a Coursera course, if hypothetically they were actually all billed.
That's the thing: if we're going to make claims about costs, we need to stop imagining them and actually run numbers. The numbers might be wrong, incomplete, or poorly chosen/framed, but those things can be pointed out and discussed.
There are two types of costs. First fixed cost that can be amortized such as professor's time. The cost is lower if it can be amortized over more students:
MOOC 10000 students enrolled x 10% completion = 1000 students
Stanford 100 students x 100% completion = 100 students
So MOOC can potentially amortize over many more students and thus lower the cost to serve each student. In addition at least for instruction purpose the cost of real estate:
MOOC negligible
Stanford owner's capitalized rent equivalent for the classroom
The second kind of cost is variable cost that is associated with each student:
MOOC: video streaming cost * 10 (to account for 10% completion rate; being very conservative here since students who don't complete likely will also not consume the allotted video bandwidth)
Stanford: transportation cost and student's time to get to and from the classroom; additional room and board living on or near campus vs living at home etc
I'm not entirely sure the faculty cost will be lower longer-term, but it depends on a lot of factors that influence how the market will develop, so I can't say for sure. One reason I think it might turn out higher is that MOOCs may be taught by fewer but more super-star professors than traditional universities. Right now the difference between a top and a mediocre professor in pay is not huge, maybe 2x-3x. But if MOOCs succeed in producing really massive-scale courses, the most popular, charismatic professors could become real media superstars. And if they do, and the market is big and competitive enough to support it, they might be able to garner huge salaries through bidding wars between MOOC providers.
For example, imagine that someone like Richard Feynman, rather than giving his famous lecture series at Caltech for his regular Caltech salary, were doing it in a future era of well-developed MOOCs. He announces he's going to do one final series of physics lectures, but he hasn't decided which MOOC company he's going to do it for. I bet he could negotiate a huge fee for that, much more than even a top-end professor is currently paid. Moving back to the modern day, what if, say, Elon Musk offered to teach a MOOC? You could go for a cheaper, less well-known lecturer, but then you risk looking like the 2nd-rate MOOC company compared to your competitors.
If that's how the market develops, MOOCs might have to pay fees closer to what the public-speaking circuit currently pays prominent lecturers, if they want to attract the top speakers. And those fees are orders of magnitudes higher than what a professor currently makes.
That is why I didn't put it as dollars and cents. If Musk is teaching a class, whether to 100 or 10000 students the cost to him is his time. If he teaches for free then the students capture all the value. Or he could try to capture most of the value for himself. Think of it this way suppose there is total value (or utility) V created through teaching and the cost is C, then the value added is V-C. The value added could go to the professor or the students but either way there is a net benefit to lowering C.
It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything.
Course completion is a valid goal, and an important number. The point that I'm making is that a 5% completion rate is still a success, when multiplied by the massive number of people enrolling.
For an individual, if you watched the first three videos of linear algebra and stopped, you didn't learn the subject and can't honestly claim you took the course. If you finished it past-deadline but did all the exercises, you're probably ready to take the next course.
Udacity and Coursera are a step forward. Perfect? Far from it. Ready to replace Stanford? No, not even close. Is the world better with them than it would be without them? Absolutely.
Education, in technology, is there mainly to give you a root set and confidence. If you actually want to get into machine learning, you have to start reading papers anyway. That goes whether you're a graduate student or a DIYer who's been in industry for almost a decade like me.
It seems like they have a chicken and egg problem. If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), then why bother completing them? Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.
They can't expect valid results until the utility of the product is valuable.
> If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means),
The combination of lecture, graded exercise, guided reading (usually) and time constraints that Coursera and EdX courses have is, IMO/IME, a very good combination for learning that makes them better than many other alternatives for the purposes of learning (Udacity is, comparatively, fairly bad at some parts of this.)
> Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.
I think that completion is a bad metric. One of the benefits of MOOCs is that it lowers the sunk cost of entry which encourages broader enrollment, particularly enrollment by people who are experimenting with the content or less certain that outside commitments will be able to be contained in a way that allows completion.
The idea that % complete is a measure of how many people are deriving an educational benefit is wrong.
Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores).
The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference.
The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional social component. If they were viewed this way, a different business model might emerge.
I wish that was possible with Coursera. I often need way more time then the structured course time. I don't interact with people on the forums so I don't care about that but locking me out of the videos means I don't get to see a lot of things I would like too.
I know for me, one of the things I found very helpful about college vs just reading stuff in books, is that the social obligation to learn made it harder to be lazy and keep blowing off a topic. Perhaps Coursera is trying to replicate this w/ its "everyone together, limited availability" model.
It's definitely not my experience that "most" Coursera courses do this.
Of my 12 completed classes, only one does not allow access to the videos. Some of these classes are 2 years old. The one that doesn't have the old videos sent out an email saying they were removing them when they re-ran the class with new videos a year later.
The old model of education is a cathedral, and DIY is the bazaar, and each approach has its weaknesses.
MOOC is about as silly as "horseless carriage". The old model of education similar to a mathematical proof, with technical lemmas built up progressively until there is a macroscopically interesting result. That has a lot of value. Linear algebra is useful in so many fields, and learning it when you have the time, because you have to, gets it out of the way so you can progress to the fields you actually care about (machine learning, signal processing, physical sciences).
I think the new model will be graph-based and open like Wikipedia, but it will have to be aggressively curated for correctness, quality, and coherence. In 10 years, one should be able to take a query like "I want to be employable as a data scientist in 3 years" and turn that into a spanning tree of the relevant subgraph.
There'll also be a need for an offline/online hybrid approach like Meetup.com and dating sites-- some interaction offline, some in person-- and that part of it won't fulfill the dream of squashing geographic inequality. Perhaps education will be the first killer app for true "Metaverse" technology (but it won't be the last or biggest).
> In 10 years, one should be able to take a query like "I want to be employable as a data scientist in 3 years" and turn that into a spanning tree of the relevant subgraph.
You should also be able to invert that, by saying, "I've found all these subjects interesting; what might I be employable as?"
This seems like the kind of thing a recruiting company ought to start working on now. You'd be able to spot likely recruits really early on, brick-and-mortar or MOOC or whatever.
I think the motivation component also needs to be figured out. There's a huge amount of motivation in keeping up with a real world course, not falling behind your peers, and getting your money's worth.
MOOC's can't really provide that. I've toyed with doing a startup in this regard. Perhaps something like gympact but targetted at MOOC's. I.e., you pledge a certain amount of money that you'll finish a course and lose it if you don't.
Even better if you pledge with a group of people and the whole group loses their money unless the whole group finishes. That way you could harness some major peer pressure.
The part of this discussion that gets swept aside in all the high-minded posturing about education is that most people see coursework as a chore, as something they have to do to get the piece of paper they want.
As such, the unspoken "secret" about college courses is that most people do the least they feel they have to do. The majority of students are simply marking time.
That's deadly in a MOOC because, well, there's no consequence to failing. The least you have to do is... nothing. Combine that with the fact that there's no tangible reward in the way that there is with a degree from a college and you get a lot of people doing nothing.
People, as a group, really aren't interested in learning any more than the bare minimum they need to get what they want. That's what MOOCs are really up against.
As long as there's not honest discussion about that, MOOCs are going to have a hard time of it. High-minded idealistic the-people-want-to-learn approaches ignore reality.
I would imagine most people doing these courses are looking to either improve their work or get into new work. If all the major companies started to somehow make these MOOC courses similar to requiring a degree, the completion rate would likely skyrocket overnight. If there was a way for a company to say "if you have done these MOOC courses we will give you preferential treatment in your job application", it may make a big difference.
I also think the approach that Udacity is now taking could be very effective. Instead of going on offsite training for a week, employees can be rewarded for taking and completing a MOOC course over the span of 6-9 months.
I've had the pleasure of co-organizing a lunchtime Meetup at my work for folks taking Andrew Ng's most recent Machine Learning class on Coursera.
Having taken a few MMOC's over the past couple of years, the addition of a Meetup was, for me at least, a key motivator to keep me involved in the class. Based on others in the group, I think they feel the same.
> the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic.
That's still thousands (tens or hundreds) of students who passed. So perhaps the 'click-through' rate for MOOC is the same as it is for ads?
I feel Professor Thrun's work has had a positive impact on my work, even though I'm one of the students who didn't pass on time. I gradually worked my way through the material while riding the Caltrain and have a greater understanding of ML and AI topics. So it's not a total wash.
Also, by admitting he may not have been right publicly he disarms critics overall. Smart.
Personally, I have signed up for maybe 50 MOOCs, but only completed 2, and really engaged in any level with maybe 3-5. But this was intentional. Signing up lets me:
1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open).
2) Try out different courses / professors
3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all, if there is no real credential involved, I might only care about gaining an understanding of the subject, rather than prove I understand it through testing.
I am a full time student (not in CS), and in addition to my real life course load I am currently taking Networking, Cryptography, and Algorithms. There is no way I will have the time to complete more than 1, or MAYBE 2, of the 3.
In other words, I view my low completion rate as a huge success. Coursera seems to have realized this fact. They have just started doing pre-course surveys that ask you how many videos you intend to watch (none, 25%, 50%, all), and they ask how much of the homework you intend to do.
Of course, offering degrees or college credit, especially in exchange for cash, will obviously increase completion rates, but mainly by dissuading people like me from signing up.
I am pretty sure that if most MOOCs would offer a demo of the first few week courses without having to sign "officially", the attrition rate would be much lower.
I see plenty of interesting courses on Coursera, but the one page + one video description is not enough to understand how the course will feel like and if I want to commit few hours of my life to follow it.
I always hesitate to sign because I have the feeling that by signing, I take a solemn oath that I will finish the course... (so at least I am not contributing to the bad metrics, but I feel like the metrics is skewed for wrong reasons anyway)
I'm not sure I agree. If the course is interesting, I will sign up anyway, while still not completing it. That is, unless I can access the content without signing up, but that does not seem to be common.
I think the real problem is that MOOCs are not brick and mortar schools, and any attempts to mirror a brick and mortar school will only detract value from the offerings. I don't sign up to do homework or take tests, I sign up to learn something. I will then take what I learned and apply it to something practical in my own life. If successful, it proves to me that I understand the content well enough to accomplish what I set out to achieve. I don't feel the need to prove that to anyone else. A certificate of achievement hanging on my wall means nothing.
Of course, the real issue here is that the business model was based on the idea of selling graduates to interested industry partners. If I don't successfully complete the tests, I'm not valuable to them.
I've finished about a dozen MOOCs, even TA'ed a couple and my story is similar. I'm usually enrolled in at least three courses with no intention of finishing all of them.
Agreed. I took 90% of the AI Udacity class and it completely changed my thinking on many things. I didn't "finish" it though, but it's impact has been very large on my career thus far (and I'm really trying to not be hyperbolic). At the very least, he gave me confidence. He's very good about that.
The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them.
Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."
If people merely wanted to get the information out there, and make it possible to self-educate, then they would develop... well... wikis. Websites. YouTube videos explaining concepts. And that'd be it: they'd judge their success on outreach, on page views and maybe comments and emails. You'd have Khan Academy, full stop.
But that's not actually all they want. They want to know that their students understood. And to do that, they need to have the student prove their understanding as feedback. That's what completion rate really means. It is the metric that professors and teachers are accustomed to measuring themselves by. They've been trained to recognize the quality of their work based on the pass/fail rate of their class.
It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure
MOOCs can't expect to replace universities right now, it just won't happen. But if they integrate their platforms in a way to HELP college students and even adults, their popularity will blow up so that in the future, it will be more realistic to think that MOOCs may be THE go-to for a higher level education. Focusing on the college population and growing that is the best way to begin...being ubiquitous from the start has not and will not work, it's just too big of a problem.
There are two large problems with MOOCs right now that are documented in the article but not well enough supported IMO: 1) There are no transferrable credits to colleges and 2) They are free.
And the two problems go unsurprisingly hand in hand, and they both have to be solved simultaneously if MOOCs are going to work. The ideal scenario would be that each course costs somewhere around $150 and courses can be transferred WITH credits to as many accredited institutions as possible. Why? Well firstly, once you pay for something, the average persons's conscious will naturally have that commitment in the back of their minds and will not want the investment to be a sunk cost. Furthermore, if credits are offered, college kids will be able to take a variety of courses in fields that they may want to try out and the more institutions that allow credits from MOOCs, the more students will feel comfortable taking these courses. It will be a great outlet for students to use in a variety of ways. The SJSU example is extremely poor as the sample is way too limited and as mentioned in the article, the bulk of students who signed up for courses were in limited situations.
If I had to pay $150/course, that would end my usage of MOOCs.
In contrast, I'd be happy to pay $5-$10/month for overall access to Coursera or Udacity (probably just Coursera actually given the quality issues I've seen on Udacity). But the minute you try to shoehorn me back into the traditional mode of learning, I'm going back to reading books at my own pace and timing. Can we pretty please finally have the 21st century that should have started sometime during the last decade?
The problem IMO is believing that not completing the course is in any way actually a problem. Ala carte learning for fun and profit works for me. I'm saying what it's worth to me as well. Maybe such beliefs should be studied across the customers of Coursera and Udacity to refine their business model?
Bonus points for figuring out that I download and save a lot of lecture material for later viewing because some professors force their content to expire and go away. This stuff is gold for passing the time on transcontinental flights.
Negative points for the absolutely godawful official Coursera mobile app in an age when Coursistant is both free and 100x better. Why did they even bother with such an obvious Acqui-hire in plain sight?
Finally, if people pay $X for a fancy certificate and then don't complete the course, sometimes it really should be considered their problem, not yours. You can't save a world stuck in a infinite loop of its own making. What's the old joke? How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.
I don't see why MOOCs are pitched as revolutionary in teaching. They're still fundamentally lecture-based, and lectures are a terrible way to teach. I'm most familiar with research in physics education, where an average intro physics class fills only 24% of students' gaps in understanding.
On the other hand, some professors are experimenting with more interactive methods -- not less interactive MOOCs -- and getting three times better results:
Based on the conclusion of this link, it would be interesting to combine MOOC courses for the lecture part, with a technology like knewton, which by monitoring exercises you do , learn about what areas you have problems(and perhaps about misconceptions) , and can guide you to relevant content.
I enjoyed the Udacity AI course, but I was repeatedly frustrated by the many errors that were never corrected and especially Peter Norvig's nails on blackboard scribbling sounds with his felt tip. Am I the only one who could hear this?
Overall, I think there was a real lack of attention to detail after an excellent job on getting the big picture right.
That said, MOOCs have revolutionized my ability to keep up with technology trends and I spend 1-2 hours daily on Coursera and Udacity. I do not care whatsoever about certificates or completing courses. I just care about raw knowledge acquisition and reviewing previously learned material (i.e. refreshing my calculus, statistics, algorithms, and linear algebra skills).
I personally think the future of this business will involve celebrity teachers like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun putting together more polished versions of their courses and then allowing a cottage industry to grow around tutoring people through them at their own pace rather than shoehorning a freestyle approach to learning into effective semesters and quarters.
If this is infotainment, it sure beats the likes of Fox News and MSNBC.
> I personally think the future of this business will involve celebrity teachers like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun putting together more polished versions of their courses and then allowing a cottage industry to grow around tutoring people through them at their own pace rather than shoehorning a freestyle approach to learning into effective semesters and quarters.
This is actually fairly similar to my own classroom designs, so I wanted to call it out for emphasis.
I don't sign up for courses that have self paced study unless I feel like I want to take the final exam which may at some point mean something.
But courses with deadlines I spam subscribe the hell out of. The majority are available indefinitely once you subscribe and I may be interested in revisiting them at some point over the next year or so. Even if they delete the content after the class finishes I just use a small script to keep track of the dates and download everything once the final lecture is delivered.
You can try and recreate scarcity online but it will backfire. I only complete about 1-5% of the classes I've signed up for because I want the option of picking one that might turn out to be interesting later. Places like udacity and coursera would be much better off having class material public forever while having recurring deadlines for submissions only. The only people who would sign up to classes then would be those who are interested in submitting materials.
+1 to the "high course join, low course completion" crowd.
One thing that I did at work was establish a betting pool with two other co-workers on the Coursera C++ course that finished in December - completers would collect from non-completers. That is my one Coursera completion.
I'm pretty sure that attaching betting pools to MOOC sites would make a major difference to completion rates for participants.
I put about 20 hours a week of my time over the past 6 months or so into MOOCs, primarily on Coursera. I've also used Khan Academy, edX, and some non-MOOC materials like Code School in the past. I've definitely learned some great things, but it hasn't actually been the most efficient use of time. Rather than write a mini blog post here, I'll link to the actual blog post I recently wrote on it:
To summarize the problems, the pre-requisites aren't always clear and are sometimes incomplete, the courses don't generally offer enough work that students can get help on, and set-up for the computing classes is often a huge pain. Finally, for me personally, the set pace is a serious detriment. I do much better if I can get the materials all at once and do 25% or more of a course in a weekend.
Thrun's new objective - to give industry a voice in the education process, is a valid objective. Most of the research shows that what people learn in school only contributes in a minor way to what they do - they learn most of what they need to know on-the-job. Udacity's new direction will allow companies to help potential prospects acquire those skills beforehand, in this general education-augmented way. It's not a bad idea, and it's definitely something that was needed.
However, it is sad to see one of the most vocal people toss aside the original goal of providing education to the under-priveleged to help them escape poverty. Just saying that poor people have a different set of challenges that make online classes a "poor fit" for them is the easy way out.
It's also sad to hear him say that the true value proposition of education is employment. The notion that education and employment are hand-in-hand related is the thing that holds back the education system the most. Education is about allowing people to move forward - advancing culture, science, technology, etc. so that we're not all stuck plowing fields with oxen. While capitalism ties these advancements to employment and profit, the connection is based entirely on how things are done now, and not how things could or should be done (or even how they were done in the past).
While I like the idea of making courses as independent as possible, some kind of suggested course track might help completion rates.
I passed the original ai-class on schedule with distinction. Then when Udacity started I zipped through intro to CS as a review. When I took Norvig's 'Design of computer programs', it was a kick in the teeth. I knew pretty quick that I wasn't going to finish on schedule, then that I wasn't going to finish at all.
I disagree that these are simply "books" and cannot supplement courses. There are many college students who simply attend lectures, turn in homework, ask a few questions and take their tests. MOOCs provide everything you need to have that experience virtually. I agree this model does not describe everyone, but I believe this is more an issue of motivation than resources.
Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased. Instead, people do their learning (online or in person) under the umbrella of a College, who can offer them "credit" / verification to the rest of the world, which in turn increases employment prospects and marketability. The MOOC product does not offer that benefit upon completion (they give you a certificate, but right now it is not respected at all and therefore does not give the desired effect), so only those interested in the intellectual knowledge have motivation to complete the MOOC courses (not surprisingly, a very low number of people).
But I think if they give it more time they / the market could develop products that provide value for completion of these courses. Maybe some sort of independent service that tests and certifies completing students (i.e. what College Board has done for high school courses with the AP program). They could even track combinations of courses students complete to ensure a rounded knowledge of a subject area.
That is just one idea off the top of my head, but the point remains that this is an economic issue of motivation and benefits for completion, not an issues of resources.
>"Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased."
I intend to put that assumption to the test. I suspect that once GRE subject tests start falling, both my prospects and marketability will jump dramatically.
I took and take several classes, so far on coursera and edX - and I love it. Taped lectures with quizzes, weekly assignments, exam and maybe even a peer-rated project are definitely a great way to learn something! My goal always is to finish with a certificate because this gives me an idea on how well I am doing.
As a matter of fact I do not like Udacity very much. It is too playful and too unorganized compared to a lot of courses on coursera and pretty much all courses on edX. Udacity tries too hard to educate everybody by being very friendly at all times - this either leads to courses which start out all bubbly and funny and all of a sudden turn complex too suddenly - or courses that stay on that trivial level.
MOOC is awesome but what Thrun apparently doesn't get is that this concept still requires dedication and disciplin from the student. And you can design your class whatever way you like - either the student has it or s/he doesn't.
Also he is comparing apples and pears with his ratio #succesfull/#registered.
#registered of course is a marketing driven KPI and sould be as high as possible, so every time somebody clicks "Learn free" it is counted. But you have to "register" to just figure out what the course really is about and whether it is worth taking!
Also he is a business man and by switching to the new course format it is much easier for Udacity to monetarize - what a surprise. Opposed to edX and coursera, Udacity is kind of a one-man-show and he is maybe too ambitious and lacks patience (see biking with somebody else).
As others have noted, these MOOCs work great for people who already have a solid foundation in the skills of learning, whether they are highly-driven and parentally-supported high school students, college degree holders, or people who are equivalently self-taught.
If you don't fall into one of the above categories, it is _very_ difficult to overcome the practical, and motivational challenges that stand in the way of success in these classes.
Examples: a poor inner-city kid with serious challenges at home and at school, an out of work high-school/college drop-out who is years out of any sort of academic setting.
At least in the US, the disadvantaged side of educational inequality spectrum is defined by these types of of people. Without a great deal of in-person support (whether by government via schools, their communities, or their families), it is unlikely that such people will be able to increase their education, MOOCs or otherwise.
May be they need to incentivize people differently: charge money to sign up for a course. If you finish it, you get it all back (or a certificate - your pick! If you are in the top 10% of the completers, you get a degree as well as your money). If you get through 75%, you get half back. If you get through 50% you get 25% back.
Another thing that lowers course completion rates, unmentioned yet, is that most of Udacity's classes are on the challenging side of college courses. They are mostly STEM classes and many equivalent to upper division courses as well. So it isn't surprising the NPR article reports only the most studious SJSU students benefited. The vast majority of SJSU students, and students from other colleges as well, would find these courses challenging also, with or without in-person support.
I don't think that's an insurmountable problem, with the course notes being better designed and readily available (as compared to a disinterested professor + textbook). On the other side, many students don't bother talking to their professors and TAs anyway.
I have been using online courses for a while, here is my pitch:
Most online courses are still under the old mindset of the conservative education model. Why does a course have a start and end date? I learn on my OWN time since I'm constrained by full-time employment. Why does a course have tests/exams? I came here to learn not obtain a badge, degree, or a set of meaningless numbers/grades. Why does a course NOT have a programming/application-centric method of learning? Why does an online course not have GREAT material and resources (i.e. lackluster application tests, labs, programming projects)? All these block me from doing what I want when I join an online course - to learn.
I think the point here is that if the goal is to provide at least some information (and entertainment, which is not worthless) to at least some of the numbers of students that sign up, then Udacity specifically and MOOCs in general are successful.
On the other hand, if the goal is to provide an education that is as solid and as valued as a university, which Thrun seems to think his goal was, then Udacity and MOOCs are not succeeding.
Further, if Udacity, which is a company that needs to make a profit, is going to succeed then it needs to change its focus.
Udacity does not equal MOOC - It is just one platform offering online courses and it is inferior in quality and conception to most courses on edx.org and coursera.org. Thrun has a big ego and thinks because he didn't succeed with HIS goals - then the concept of interactive and gradid online learning is doomed. No matter how smart he might be - but that is simply stupid.
As Thrun was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students--1.6 million to date--he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic.
1.6 million times 5% = 80,000. Still an impressive number.
I've probably started 20 MOOCs and completed 3.5, so I'm part of that "low completion" statistic. I often fall behind the posted deadlines because I have so much on my plate. That's not a knock on MOOCs; if it's a knock on anyone, it's on me. The quality of MOOCs is (IMO) as high as for most big-lecture college courses. (It's not yet as good as for a 20-person course.) However, when you have a full-time job plus side projects plus family, and you don't have the social pressure of having to pass 8-10 courses per year, you have to be really motivated to complete the work, especially within the deadlines. But is it a loss or gain to the world if someone completes a MOOC 6 weeks late? Or gets only 60% of the material? It may not be as much of a gain as the traditional college course provides, but it's a gain in absolute terms.
If those 80,000 students are getting the same quality of course as they'd get at Stanford, that's fucking huge. Not a small accomplishment at all.
I wish people wouldn't write off MOOCs because, yes, they're the crappy first iteration that only early adopters care to power through. They're not ready to replace traditional education, the latter being a gigantic trillion-dollar problem that touches all sorts of deep sociological problems.
The problem is that you have a lot of hucksters in education (cough Knewton cough) who massively overpromise, raise a lot of money, and don't deliver much. They've damaged the reputation of the space immensely. The truth, however, is that online education is a good thing and it's (albeit slowly, with fits and starts) getting better. If there's anything worrying to me, it's that our ability to educate each other is, while improving, not doing so quite as fast as the rate of technological change. But I guess that's a good problem for the world to have.
The self-delusion is so strong that people are denying what Thrun himself said: Udacity was (is?) a lousy product [1]. It doesn't do what it was supposed to do, which is educate more people for less money.
The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds (or at least, maybe the world wants that, but that isn't what Thrun wants, and I admire his integrity -- a lot of folks in his shoes would just be desperately trying to keep the party going, rather than admitting early failure). If MOOCs are nothing more than a place where half-interested techies go to pretend to learn about AI, then they're pretty useless.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...