I used to take a lot of courses on cousera and EdX. I still take some here and there, but not as many as before. Some of the courses are amazing and unbelievably rewarding, like Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models, Robert Sedgewick's Analytical Combinatorics, and Gerald Sussman's course on system optimizations. I'm very grateful for such learning opportunities. Unfortunately over time, I also found that these courses had diminishing returns for the following reasons:
- Due to the nature of MOOC, the assignments are largely either multiple-choice questions or programming assignments that merely asked students to fill in some blanks in some functions (there are a few exceptions of course). What a descent US university does really well is challenging students with tough yet insightful and inspiring assignments. That's how students learn deeply and retain the knowledge, at least for me. Merely listening to lectures and ticking off a few ABCDs hardly helps real learning.
- Lack of feedback. A university course assigns TAs, gives tutorials and office hours, grades assignments with detailed feedbacks, and it is so much easier to form study groups and have high bandwidth discussions. MOOCs try their best to offer such help, but they don't work as well or at least not as conveniently.
- Many courses are watered down. For instance, Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera is far less rigorous than that (229? I forgot) offered in Stanford? The course is great for students to gain some intuition, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for one to build solid ML foundations.
I don't really like how any of the MOOCs run, and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers. They all have the Same courses and the same degrees. Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees.
A successful MOOC in my mind isn't one that will have some credits for an online certification for programming or nursing that can transfer to a Real school. A successful MOOC is one where I can take a course on Ulysses or Semantics or Mathematics or Plato or whatever just like I could in a real undergrad, but without the same financial and time constraints. I want to be able to spend $5000 taking classes that I find interesting, and accidentally have an English degree Or spend $5000 and really focus and get my degree in X.
I worked in this field - I've met Anant, John Katzman, and Bonnie Ferri. The MOOCs (and any well-run university, probably the minority) have excellent data on what classes students want to take.
Well over 90% of the searches on their site are for tech-related topics. And most of the remainder are probably for business.
You can fantasize about a USA where people want to read Plato and accidentally get English degrees. I also think that would be great. In our current reality, only the trust-fund kids, who already know they never need to work, will want to pay for that. (I mean, their dad or grandpa is the one paying.)
> Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees.
that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation.
Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.
It's because the primary purpose of these institutions is cultural filtering. The only reason we have name brand unis is to sort and filter people into a very small (i.e. 1%) cultural/economic elite. The point is for you to go "ooh, stanford" or "ooh harvard" when you meet a partner at a big law firm, VC, or hedge fund.
In order for there to be a 1% there must necessarily be a 99%. The percentages are fixed; they always will be. Acceptance rates (public, reported) tend towards the filtering rate (implicit, hidden) as the college educated in the broader population tends towards 1.
Look at the endowments of these institutions. They are comparable in magnitude to elite hedge funds and VCs.
Of course they do top research and learning as well -- but only because they must. Under the old system, which worked simple, you'd be selected for an Ivy based on your blood relations and receive no education at all (for a recent example of this, Brett Kavanaugh: Supreme Court Justice).
I guess it is an improvement on the old system that these places offer a "world-class education" ** to at least some of their students; and that some of their students are pleased to receive it.
** whatever that means. My degree isn't printed on vellum Ivy league stationary, only the coarse public Ivy stuff (public Ivy: isn't that an interesting turn of phrase?); but I received the finest education of my academic career from a California community college. My classmates were navy veterans, part time auto mechanics, and young single parents.
How do you inexpensively scale the personalized work done by professors and TAs in grading your work, making sure you're not cheating or plagiarizing, and clarifying your misunderstandings when you're not "getting" the educational material? If a firm hires someone with a degree, what they're paying for is knowing that a person actually learned the material, which requires human intervention to do grading and to prevent cheating. That costs a lot of money, because technological innovations don't really make the grading or cheating prevention any cheaper. Education is the prototypical example of an industry affected by Baumol's cost disease.
The cheapest part to scale is the educational material and lectures, but that's always been the case, even before MOOCs. It has been possible for more than a century to go a library for free and get access to more educational material than one person could read in a several lifetimes. What has never been cheap are teachers who care, and I don't think that MOOCs can technologically innovate so much so that they reduce the cost of a teacher that cares.
I think the only reason this doesn't happen is economics. If someone were to "fix" the education system and start giving out bachelors for less money, the value of bachelors degrees would go down. In part, because more people would have them, but also because schools have systems to prevent abuse such as fraud.
If you just want to take a class, there are plenty of MOOCs that give the lectures, exercises, and tests out for free.
Another reason is that different universities may emphasize different things as part of the curriculum. Lets say a philosophy degree at harvard emphasizes Greek philosophers, but a philosophy degree at UT emphasizes post modern philosophers. Taking a class at one doesn't transfer to another. Mixing classes at different universities simply doesn't work because you weren't educated at the university so why should you get a degree from that university?
The way I see it is that if you just want to get educated the resources are out there, but if you want degree, you gotta go to school.
> my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers
I think part of the tricky thing is that this is what HR/employer/MBA-type cultures increasingly see a degree as. So why not just go right to that?
I don't agree with this perspective, to be clear, but if you look at it from a certain viewpoint it's not too difficult to see why there would be pressure to approach with that tack. You might even go a step further and argue that if these things are failing as the article states, it might say something about the viability of that hyperspecialized perspective on degrees. Or maybe not.
Well I can tell you that the university of Michigan has exactly what you want. And the professors teach the same class in person as well as online (with some modification to fit the format).
If you can take the same degree for $5K instead of $50K, no one will be taking the $50K degree. Most people go to university for the credentials of the university.
Check out the Open University then. It’s the real thing and online. It costs and there are time constraints but they are the experts in remote teaching
The best MOOC Í‘ve attended was Balaji Srivivasan’s Startup Engineering, 10 years ago. Like many, I dropped out in the middle - in my case I wanted to spend more time with my little daughter. I still think it was the right decision, but I probably would not have dropped a presence course.
> and I think my issue is that they are not run like universities, they are run like job training centers.
It is my understanding that that's how most of the universities are now also run.
Granted, I haven't set foot in an university in almost two decades now, so maybe my view is skewed from I what I've read online and based on the not so numerous interactions I've had with people who attend university.
Udacity pivoted from seeking to be a new way of giving university level education to the masses to job training.
I think the market spoke. There are still universities that also offer online degrees, but generally on their own platform, with live streaming - not in own-paced, pre-recorded MOOCs.
Worked for 2U. It was the most incomprehensibly incompetent place you could imagine. Terrible people with zero real skills all backstabbing each other.
> Terrible people with zero real skills all backstabbing each other.
You know, without you saying another word, I feel like I know them, down to being able to describe their clothes, haircuts and of course powerpoint decks. It's like some bad business school archetype that just re-appears by itself in nature.
Can anybody who has enrolled in an online-only degree program comment on the experience?
I retired last year from teaching full-time at a conventional university. All of my teaching was in-person until the last few years, which were online because of the pandemic. My impression, after I got used to the new format, was that online is fine for small discussion-based seminars but that it is harder to keep students engaged in larger classes, especially students who are new to university study.
I really liked the potential of online at first—it was exciting to lead meaningful academic discussions among students located in several countries—but as time passed I started to wonder about how well it can really work for university education.
I am halfway through an online degree in ICT. We had a Instructional Design course that went over the differences. There is a textbook that has a chapter on it called Trends in Instructional Design but it is pricey. My position is adult learning works better online to reorganize cognitive schemas but children benefit from social learning theory. It is something like 1-5% complete MOOCs, they really need some kind of personal feedback. But generative AI may change this too. Look at Math Academy for example (Skycak has a book about it) (and they don't use gen AI for the tutoring either). https://www.justinmath.com/books/
I've been following classcentral for a few years. They make money from affiliate commissions but as far as I can tell it hasn't stopped them from producing decent quality coverage of the MOOC industry. I like their occasional writeups of new MOOCs coming out though it's been a while since I took one because I'm currently wrapping up a full time masters.
MitX math and science classes are (were?) outstanding. The few I tried from other participating universities were a grade below in quality. Then EdX/MitX just... stopped publishing new content. I learned (re-learned?) math and science from these and Khan; fundamentally changed my life. Too good of a resource to last? At least Khan's still kicking.
2U did no due diligence. A minimum might have been to contact the author of the platform to check on IP issues (or anything else). This never happened. Lots of other things never happened either.
What they bought had little resemblance to what they thought they were buying. They got fleeced by MIT and Harvard. Wasn't the first and won't be the last.
MOOCs have provided incredible value to society and it's unfortunate that we're only able to view them through the lens of profit/loss. I wish that universities would have committed to providing these products despite cost just as a halo project to improve their public image.
As a member of the Open edX technical oversight committee, and a long time core contributor, I’d like to comment on the future of Open edX — the open source project. I’m not an employee of Axim or 2U though, so I can’t say anything about their plans.
As OP explained, Axim is the only “cash-rich entity” to have emerged after the edX acquisition. They retained control of the open source Open edX project, and are now in charge of its maintenance and improvement. That is with the support of many open source contributors, of course.
For those who don’t know, Open edX is the piece of software on which runs edX.org, but also MITx and many other open online learning platforms around the world. It’s a big software project that has managed to carve a niche in a complex ecosystem.
The analysis that Axim is mostly a grant-giving organisation is very far from the reality. Yes, Axim is allocating part of its endowment to grants, though I don’t have much insight into this aspect of their mission. What I do know, is that Axim is also investing a very substantial amount of time and money in the development of the open source project, and that is no trivial feat. You can make your own opinion by checking the project activity on GitHub and the Open edX forum.
To put things simply, the open source project is undergoing an important transition where we have fewer dedicated engineers (because of the layoffs at 2U) but much better project management and focus (because the project roadmap is no longer dictated by edX). There’s also a lot of internal debate of where the project should be headed, strategically speaking (I have my own opinion, which you can find elsewhere). None of this would be possible without Axim and its financial independence.
This transition is long and complicated, and it’s not one we can accelerate just by throwing money at it. Also, I like to think of education as a complex ecosystem that improves in incremental steps. AI and personalised learning might play a role in that process, but they are most certainly not a panacea. It would be meaningless to invest these $735 million in such a narrow scope. Instead, it makes much more sense to to build a stable foundation for the future of open online learning.
In a nutshell: don’t give up on Open edX just yet, the best things are yet to come :)
RIP. I always wondered what was going on with edX. They were great back in the day. I was introduced to the Stanford CS curriculum through them. At least MIT OCW lives on! Don't see that going anywhere ... unless somehow they sell to some shitty private company and invest the profit into nothing.
if the original eDx can take the $800M and make a new open and free ed content platform (like the original idea of MOOCs before vultures like 2U starting trying to monetize it), then I'd say its a win for Harvard and MIT. 2U going bankrupt may also be a win.
The original non-profit edX sold its brand and most assets to 2U. The remaining non-profit entity was temporarily renamed “The Center for Reimagining Learning.” Last year, this organization was officially named Axim Collaborative and appointed a new CEO. ... Axim appears to have become primarily a grant-giving organization. Besides supporting Open edX, there’s little evidence of using its “substantial resources” for innovation as initially promised. ... Axim’s current assets exceed the total amount edX spent during its entire non-profit phase.
A nonprofit built something, sold it for a lot more than it cost to create it, and now has the cash which it is legally required to spend furthering its mission. This seems generally reasonable to me, though of course Axim may end up spending its millions poorly.
I don’t know how this transaction went down, but it’s very likely they didn’t purchase the organization itself, but rather its assets. The surviving organization would then dispose of the resulting cash in a mission-oriented fashion and shutdown thereafter.
And, almost to demonstrate the digital divide, almost every MOOC there is lacking true Accessibility, therefore making it even harder for blind and visually impaired people to piggy-back on existing education infrastructure.
Attention span is dropping like a stone. I think MOOCs should re-format more like Tik Tok and web video games. Maybe have an interactive AI professor as a guide.
I didn't know edx was bought by a company that went on to go bankrupt. I have two courses on edx that I consider exceptional, and worry I might lose access to them.
[+] [-] hintymad|1 year ago|reply
- Due to the nature of MOOC, the assignments are largely either multiple-choice questions or programming assignments that merely asked students to fill in some blanks in some functions (there are a few exceptions of course). What a descent US university does really well is challenging students with tough yet insightful and inspiring assignments. That's how students learn deeply and retain the knowledge, at least for me. Merely listening to lectures and ticking off a few ABCDs hardly helps real learning.
- Lack of feedback. A university course assigns TAs, gives tutorials and office hours, grades assignments with detailed feedbacks, and it is so much easier to form study groups and have high bandwidth discussions. MOOCs try their best to offer such help, but they don't work as well or at least not as conveniently.
- Many courses are watered down. For instance, Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera is far less rigorous than that (229? I forgot) offered in Stanford? The course is great for students to gain some intuition, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for one to build solid ML foundations.
[+] [-] ecshafer|1 year ago|reply
A successful MOOC in my mind isn't one that will have some credits for an online certification for programming or nursing that can transfer to a Real school. A successful MOOC is one where I can take a course on Ulysses or Semantics or Mathematics or Plato or whatever just like I could in a real undergrad, but without the same financial and time constraints. I want to be able to spend $5000 taking classes that I find interesting, and accidentally have an English degree Or spend $5000 and really focus and get my degree in X.
[+] [-] hilux|1 year ago|reply
Well over 90% of the searches on their site are for tech-related topics. And most of the remainder are probably for business.
You can fantasize about a USA where people want to read Plato and accidentally get English degrees. I also think that would be great. In our current reality, only the trust-fund kids, who already know they never need to work, will want to pay for that. (I mean, their dad or grandpa is the one paying.)
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|1 year ago|reply
that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation.
Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.
[+] [-] mlsu|1 year ago|reply
In order for there to be a 1% there must necessarily be a 99%. The percentages are fixed; they always will be. Acceptance rates (public, reported) tend towards the filtering rate (implicit, hidden) as the college educated in the broader population tends towards 1.
Look at the endowments of these institutions. They are comparable in magnitude to elite hedge funds and VCs.
Of course they do top research and learning as well -- but only because they must. Under the old system, which worked simple, you'd be selected for an Ivy based on your blood relations and receive no education at all (for a recent example of this, Brett Kavanaugh: Supreme Court Justice).
I guess it is an improvement on the old system that these places offer a "world-class education" ** to at least some of their students; and that some of their students are pleased to receive it.
** whatever that means. My degree isn't printed on vellum Ivy league stationary, only the coarse public Ivy stuff (public Ivy: isn't that an interesting turn of phrase?); but I received the finest education of my academic career from a California community college. My classmates were navy veterans, part time auto mechanics, and young single parents.
[+] [-] Edman274|1 year ago|reply
The cheapest part to scale is the educational material and lectures, but that's always been the case, even before MOOCs. It has been possible for more than a century to go a library for free and get access to more educational material than one person could read in a several lifetimes. What has never been cheap are teachers who care, and I don't think that MOOCs can technologically innovate so much so that they reduce the cost of a teacher that cares.
[+] [-] mu53|1 year ago|reply
If you just want to take a class, there are plenty of MOOCs that give the lectures, exercises, and tests out for free.
Another reason is that different universities may emphasize different things as part of the curriculum. Lets say a philosophy degree at harvard emphasizes Greek philosophers, but a philosophy degree at UT emphasizes post modern philosophers. Taking a class at one doesn't transfer to another. Mixing classes at different universities simply doesn't work because you weren't educated at the university so why should you get a degree from that university?
The way I see it is that if you just want to get educated the resources are out there, but if you want degree, you gotta go to school.
[+] [-] derbOac|1 year ago|reply
I think part of the tricky thing is that this is what HR/employer/MBA-type cultures increasingly see a degree as. So why not just go right to that?
I don't agree with this perspective, to be clear, but if you look at it from a certain viewpoint it's not too difficult to see why there would be pressure to approach with that tack. You might even go a step further and argue that if these things are failing as the article states, it might say something about the viability of that hyperspecialized perspective on degrees. Or maybe not.
[+] [-] a2tech|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WWWWH|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mitjam|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|1 year ago|reply
It is my understanding that that's how most of the universities are now also run.
Granted, I haven't set foot in an university in almost two decades now, so maybe my view is skewed from I what I've read online and based on the not so numerous interactions I've had with people who attend university.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|1 year ago|reply
I think the market spoke. There are still universities that also offer online degrees, but generally on their own platform, with live streaming - not in own-paced, pre-recorded MOOCs.
[+] [-] pfortuny|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 2-3-7-43-1807|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jakozaur|1 year ago|reply
In fact, Harvard and MIT invested $30M each and sold EdX for $800M to 2U: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-06-29-2u-buys-edx-for-800m...
So, likely, Harvard and MIT made some money.
It's 2U who lost the money. It's the public that suffered from the loss of EdX.
<sarcasm>As hedge funds with schools attached, they are doing extremely well.</sarcasm>
[+] [-] wrentopher|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sho|1 year ago|reply
You know, without you saying another word, I feel like I know them, down to being able to describe their clothes, haircuts and of course powerpoint decks. It's like some bad business school archetype that just re-appears by itself in nature.
[+] [-] cjbgkagh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hilux|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tkgally|1 year ago|reply
I retired last year from teaching full-time at a conventional university. All of my teaching was in-person until the last few years, which were online because of the pandemic. My impression, after I got used to the new format, was that online is fine for small discussion-based seminars but that it is harder to keep students engaged in larger classes, especially students who are new to university study.
I really liked the potential of online at first—it was exciting to lead meaningful academic discussions among students located in several countries—but as time passed I started to wonder about how well it can really work for university education.
[+] [-] 2snakes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jollofricepeas|1 year ago|reply
The EdX brand was amazing. It’s sad what it’s become.
I don’t know too much about classcentral but I hope that the blog post was written in the interest of seeing MOOCs thrive.
[+] [-] raybb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] the__alchemist|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fsckboy|1 year ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/@lecturesbywalterlewin.they9259/vide...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWnfJ0-xXRE&list=PLyQSN7X0ro...
[+] [-] grobbyy|1 year ago|reply
What they bought had little resemblance to what they thought they were buying. They got fleeced by MIT and Harvard. Wasn't the first and won't be the last.
There's a sucker born every minute
[+] [-] orsenthil|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] regisb|1 year ago|reply
As a member of the Open edX technical oversight committee, and a long time core contributor, I’d like to comment on the future of Open edX — the open source project. I’m not an employee of Axim or 2U though, so I can’t say anything about their plans.
As OP explained, Axim is the only “cash-rich entity” to have emerged after the edX acquisition. They retained control of the open source Open edX project, and are now in charge of its maintenance and improvement. That is with the support of many open source contributors, of course.
For those who don’t know, Open edX is the piece of software on which runs edX.org, but also MITx and many other open online learning platforms around the world. It’s a big software project that has managed to carve a niche in a complex ecosystem.
The analysis that Axim is mostly a grant-giving organisation is very far from the reality. Yes, Axim is allocating part of its endowment to grants, though I don’t have much insight into this aspect of their mission. What I do know, is that Axim is also investing a very substantial amount of time and money in the development of the open source project, and that is no trivial feat. You can make your own opinion by checking the project activity on GitHub and the Open edX forum.
To put things simply, the open source project is undergoing an important transition where we have fewer dedicated engineers (because of the layoffs at 2U) but much better project management and focus (because the project roadmap is no longer dictated by edX). There’s also a lot of internal debate of where the project should be headed, strategically speaking (I have my own opinion, which you can find elsewhere). None of this would be possible without Axim and its financial independence.
This transition is long and complicated, and it’s not one we can accelerate just by throwing money at it. Also, I like to think of education as a complex ecosystem that improves in incremental steps. AI and personalised learning might play a role in that process, but they are most certainly not a panacea. It would be meaningless to invest these $735 million in such a narrow scope. Instead, it makes much more sense to to build a stable foundation for the future of open online learning.
In a nutshell: don’t give up on Open edX just yet, the best things are yet to come :)
[+] [-] raybb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] manav|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whoitwas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kapitanjakc|1 year ago|reply
Although it's just a platform, you'd need to create your own courses.
[+] [-] yieldcrv|1 year ago|reply
How do you sell a non-profit?
Or, more specifically, how do you purchase to gain control?
Board members aren't supposed to sell board seats or do anything for self enrichment
[+] [-] jefftk|1 year ago|reply
A nonprofit built something, sold it for a lot more than it cost to create it, and now has the cash which it is legally required to spend furthering its mission. This seems generally reasonable to me, though of course Axim may end up spending its millions poorly.
[+] [-] ahazred8ta|1 year ago|reply
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/digital-... - They put $80M into edX and got back $800M.
[+] [-] red_phone|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbr1|1 year ago|reply
Consequently, when the non-profit in question has something valuable (like market share or branding), there are some misaligned incentives.
[+] [-] lynx23|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alecco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] momo_O|1 year ago|reply
I fear that shifting to a TikTok style education is just another lead towards an Idiocracy.
[+] [-] PaywallBuster|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|1 year ago|reply
What are your thoughts on that?
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tourmalinetaco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] grobbyy|1 year ago|reply