That the rich can easily buy and that the poor must work hard to acquire.

Case in point the article says,

Then there's this fascinating bit from the article,



Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

I think that education should be subsidized. Education in CA used to be totally free. I am concerned that the rise of MOOCS to fill requirements for credits will widen an already-wide class gap. There will be small bespoke credit classrooms for the wealthy and large-scale online classes for the rest of the students.

The assumption that everyone has internet access is problematic, as you highlight.

The original AI Class had a plethora of wiki's, groups, forums, and pages dedicated to it, with people learning together on the subject.

I think Thune used this overwhelming, decentralized, method of learning to start Udacity, but didn't understand what made AI Class good was the communities' involvement in the learning process. It wasn't just him lecturing and having people do homework. It was the overall internet community at large building the process and discussing it.

Now you can go and look at each of those resources I have linked. What do they have in common? They're all dead. Indeed the original ai-class.com actually redirects to Udacity (proving that the original resource became a stepping stone for the venture capitalist attempt to educate). It's gone. The original community just vaporized. And Thune threw away the biggest resource that ai-class.com had going for it. The community interaction and development.

I didn't know the online open-source roots of Udacity. Usually by the time products like this hit the colleges, they've been massaged to fit a certain narrative.

I'm in a privileged situation where I teach a subject that is almost totally analog, ceramics. I know that community-based information sharing is the best way of disseminating learning on this subject. There are online resources that I rely on to supplement my classroom, but there really isn't any substitute for students all being together in real-time learning from each other.

I agree that you can't learn that truly without a hands on experience. I think MOOC can work for that if you had publicly available learning centers so people could go and get that hands on experience but that would require capital investment which people like Thune aren't really concerned about (I mean, here he is backing an agreement with a school and he couldn't even be bothered to make sure some poor kids had internet access?).

I think edX makes a better alternative to Udacity (primarily because it's non-profit) and ultimately I like MOOCs for personal learning because I don't place much emphasis on credits or proving myself in the current credit model.

Whether they can evolve to help educate people better, I am uncertain, but I think it'd be wrong to throw technologies like them under the rug because they don't meet certain satisfactory requirements (for instance, ai-class.com had a 20% pass rate; that is really bad, true, but I am simply not concerned about such a number, that's still utterly incredible, a course that if you'd paid for it out of pocket would've been thousands of dollars). The pass / fail model needs to change and the merit-based aspect of learning needs to end.

I think some of these schemes were left over from the austerity culture of cut cut cut education. Now that they are being shown to be ineffective for education, I think we will see their popularity wane.

MOOCS will likely work very well for some, but its hardly a failure because it doesn't work for everybody. If that were the standard, then every school environment would fail. Different people learn differently, and the diverse options that are becoming available now are a very good thing.

In my own experience, I failed in high school because I am very poor at learning or retaining spoken information. Lectures put me to sleep, even if I was trying to learn. I didn't know at the time why things didn't make sense that way - it just made me mad. Later in college I developed a strategy of reading the textbook all the way through before even starting a class. Then I was familiar enough with the material that I could follow lectures, more or less.

Even later, working toward finishing a degree, I find that one of the best resources for learning difficult material is youtube, where you can find some of the best teachers in the country have put together tutorials on all sorts of specific topics. If one explanation or perspective doesn't work, there are dozens of others a click or two away.

Most kids will probably continue to benefit from a classroom environment, but we need options.

There is local input and control. MOOCS are a solution in search of a problem and are geared toward eliminating in-person classes, in lieu of classes that can be scaled to service large audiences.

I'm not sure when you attended college, but the ADA and other policies accommodate learning differences. There is no need to full-scale scorched earth eliminate traditional class offerings.

I really don't see the current college system, whether community colleges or state universities, as being so fragile that they need to be protected from an alternative. For the most part, regular college works well for the majority and should continue to do so.

are being sanctioned by an accreditation body, ACCJC, for things other than academics. If they lose accreditation, 1-4 community colleges could be closed or transformed. Yes, this is a fragile situation.

...and I hadn't heard of the sanction issue.

A bit of reading then ( http://www.dailycensored.com/skyline-college-slos-the-accjc-and-accreditation-the-privatization-of-california-community-colleges/ , and http://www.saveccsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ACCJC-Facts-and-Analysis.pdf ) and I see your point. The last part of the saveccsf makes the larger point of the problem of "regulatory capture" is the US pretty clear as well. Thanks for the info!

That's the stuff.

especially community colleges. They are a great place for someone to start when they maybe are still trying to figure out exactly what they want to study.

The problem is in many areas the community colleges are becoming overwhelmed. In the area I grew up in the community college has continued to expand, but can not keep up with the demand. I see no reason why they shouldn't offer online sections if someone wants to take it. Also think about places out in the boonies where there may not be many colleges. People who live in small towns and want to continue their education while working.

Again, I think the difference between MOOCS and online courses is important. The MOOCS probably won't work well for credit with the number of students they are enrolling for the free classes. The European law and Common and Civil law classes I took had around 40,000 students a piece (this was of course for no credit). If a professor had to try to evaluate that many students they would be headed for the insane asylum (even if they had a couple dozen TAs it still wouldn't be enough).

The only way it could work is to put severe limits. What would those be? I don't know. A guess would be maybe 2,000, but I'd start lower than that maybe at 500.

The online classes cost a hell of a lot more, but in the end they are worth the better quality.

Showing that for most people, lectures are the least effective way to teach or learn. It drives me nuts when I hear students tell me that they sit through daily, hour long lectures. Most people's brains just shut off from boredom after ten or fifteen minutes. A teacher should be there to guide learning -- answer questions, lead discussion, provide alternative viewpoints, suggest avenues of exploration, et cetera -- not simply provide the same data that Google does.

It was great, we'd get a week's worth of assignments, and turn them in by midnight at the end of the week.

If anything, it was harder than when I went to college in person, because there was no lecture and you had figure things out for yourself based only on the material.

We had to show up in person to take midterms and the final.

It's not for everyone; required a lot of discipline and initiative.

doing this successfully for a long time. Colorado State and literally scores of other public universities, (the library at the colleges of education have the research from the aforementioned schools and a number of others) and we are surrounded by countries which have nowhere near the facilities we have, yet they are sending a constant stream of highly qualified experts onto our shores who studied in a variety of non-traditional ways, online and outside of a classroom, sometimes just in their own homes and village with books, no instructors, And they are successfully working right alongside people who studied in traditional classrooms.

There is a whole realm of published literature about online learning, and to broad-brush it as bad ignores the success of tens of thousands of hard-working students who gained as much or more from that as any sleepy-ass, hung-over 20 year old did from kissing the ass of a series of sorry instructors in a years-long ritual of barely attending in overcrowded lecture halls. The results vary, and depend on the course of study, the mode, the students, the instructors, and a number of other factors. In some categories people who study online do better than traditional classroom students, and sometimes the reverse is true. When intermingled, the strengths of both can enhance each other.

There is nothing new about it. It has been in the prime-time world of accredited college education in the U.S. for for over 30 years, and just counting degrees at least thousands of public employees owe their degrees/learning to those methods, as well as tens of thousands in the private sector.

Just sayin...

MOOCS are a fairly recent thing and didn't start to take off until about two years ago. The idea has been experiment with for about 10 years. Also when you talk about MOOCS you have to look at the fact that Coursera, Edx and Udacity are not traditional universities (even if the class itself is run by one) and comparing the two are like comparing apples and oranges.

Many traditional universities have accredited online programs that have much higher graduation rates. Online classes aren't for everyone and they take a lot of self-directed learning.

My masters degree program was a mix of on campus classes (both weekly and compressed weekends) and online. We had the choice of which classes we wanted to take in what format. In the online classes we had interaction with both other students and the professor.

I am now three quarters of the way through my doctoral program and it has been completely online. It is essentially being in a class by yourself with a professor assigned to you who you contact either by email or phone.

I have taken MOOCS (the free ones) and had pretty good luck with them. All the ones I have taken have been law classes (though my masters and doctorate are in Business).

I do know the difference between MOOCS and online learning and the author was writing specifically about a MOOC program at SJSU.

As a person with two kids and a job, I could see this being a convenient and inexpensive way to pick up a new skill or some credits toward an a degree. But for the average student, it does not seem optimal. And it would be depressing and boring for anyone to try to do too much learning this way.

The business and tech community needs to accept that growth and learning requires effort and self-discipline from the student, regardless of the bells and whistles you attach to the process. Good teachers have a gift they have developed through their own education and practice. They are not expendable. This idea that we can short cut dealing with serious social problems and not pay teachers by spoon feeding unmotivated and/or unintelligent students information with enough technology is bad.

Also, this is a little hard on the kids, being used as test subjects for an experimental system. I've read the sales pitches for these programs and the creators are aware that there is the chance that MOOCS will only successfully serve a small group of students. But they pushed themselves into schools anyway.

Absolutely love it.

The failure rate in intro level courses is usually quite high to begin with - some students just aren't really meant to be there, some drink their way through their first year, some aren't prepared, some have interests elsewhere and need the experience to notice that, etc. A good quarter to a third of a typical first year class not being around in the second year - and a higher percentage in some programs - doesn't surprise me at all. That gets higher if you have a couple of weeder professors in the intro levels of a program, of course.

When you add the reduced costs of MOOCs to that, there's less financial risk involved and a bigger incentive to feel comfortable shopping around even at the risk of falling on one's face. If I had to pay a couple hundred bucks instead of several thousand in my first year at university, I actually likely would have tried a different program (and likely would have flamed out of it).

I'm not much of a fan of the courses overall - I've poked at a few for pure personal-interest sake, but don't think they're at all a substitute for in-classroom instruction or well-organized online courses of reasonable size - but I think the higher failure rate for these ones in particular is as much the fact that they're less "risky" as it is due to problems inherent to them.