> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype.
I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs.
A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them.
It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialism that is behind MOOCs not reaching their full potential.
Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.
I did projects with skills that I learned via MOOCs, I answered questions in interviews with the knowledge that I started getting from MOOCs. But it was my Master’s in CS which ultimately mattered in my getting interviews. In that degree, they still teach GOFAI, "soft computig", and fuzzy set theory, "expert systems", and more things from the 80s.
MOOCs matter, MOOCs are loved and studied by a serious set of students and professionals. But they still can't get you interviews for most roles in most companies. In frontier AI labs, they are now basically treating PhDs as the minimum qualification for most roles.
MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative".
I know the arguments about making hiring easier for companies, etc.
> Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.
What hiring companies want is to get good employees who can do the job they are supposed to do, and they want to have as low a false positive rate as possible (hiring someone who can't do the job is very expensive).
I am not a hiring expert, but they probably get a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.
Companies don't really care about false negative rates (not hiring a person who would do the job well) as long as they are still able to hire someone else who can't also do the job well. It sucks for the person who isn't hired, but not for the company.
Learning Neural Networks from Hinton was transformative for me. It must be transformative for the industry, they still use Coursera lecture notes for citing RMSprop. I completed the very first MOOC offerings in Fall 2011, Machine Learning by Andrew Ng, and AI by Norvig and Thrun. It’s the first time ML “clicked” for me although I had took ML course in Master’s before. Sadly no one cares about my “Statement of Accomplishment”s when hiring. I carry them with pride, knowing they effectively taught me timely and relevant knowledge from the best experts in the world.
> MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative".
I remember on one of the first of these courses (AI in Berkley?), people were incensed that they would not get an official degree/certificate from the university.
Some were really mad, as if they had been defrauded or something.
Your point about certification is accurate, but I want to add another nuance.
Even if you manage to get a degree from a "good"/prestigious place, if you are "the wrong kind of person" that will only be held against you.
It's like succeeding at that is a violation of natural law and you need to be punished for the violation. It's almost religious and deeply guttural.
Of course that in places like the states, those people usually don't even get the change to graduate from those places since some excuse will be concocted during the application process.
MOOCs suffer from the online version of that.
However in places where admission is "blind" and the cost free or low this is very common.
I have also taken many Coursera courses, and paid for them too. I was considering taking another, but I can't reward this sort of "leadership". Congratulations, they sold out on all their promises and in return they're about as profitable as a mid-sized construction company?
It's true, I took MOOCs because I wanted to learn things, and they were actually good at that. It was actually damn impressive how e.g. Andrew Ng's courses stripped away all difficulty which was not related to the thing you're actually trying to learn. The impact of that when you're self-directed is hard to overstate - nothing kills motivation like getting bogged down in getting software to work or confirming to some professor's favorite citation style.
Yet they seem to not understand that. They're all about my "career goals", they can't seem to comprehend that I would be there for any reason but impressing a fortune 500 company (which, from what I understand, it never does anyway).
Same here. Finally got a dev job a few years after graduating with my Computer Science degree when a boss noticed I was taking a MOOC during my slack time. Graduated just after the dot com crash.
> A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs.
MOOCs are great and I agree: A lot of people have benefited.
The only disappointment is relative to the impossible hype cycle that was happening when MOOCs first entered the scene. You couldn’t open a MOOC relayed article or thread without some speculation that this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen, but MOOCs have been quite valuable on their own when well executed.
The primary disappointment I’ve seen is the half-baked courses that have been put out there. The first MOOC I tried was great and well run. The next two or three felt like they assigned some undergrad student a make-work project to put some old course materials on a website but they left out key parts. I remember it almost felt intentional, like someone didn’t want to put too much of the material online or the professor had objected to sharing their materials. They just wanted to say they got in on the MOOC train.
The later generation of courses that were made for the Internet were far better executed, of course, but they weren’t as plentiful and widespread as the hype predicted.
I never liked MOOCs because I didn't see the value add over youtube. At the end of the day I just want free and unfettered access the full list of video lectures. Accounts, course enrollment, fixed sequences, it's all just friction that gets in the way of actual learning.
They also (at least in my experience) try to force you to watch via the browser. It's far more ergonomic for me to yt-dlp a full playlist and watch it locally.
Luckily MIT OCW exists and an almost unimaginably wide variety of educational material is constantly being dumped on youtube.
Yeah its infuriating to see free high quality education blamed over shitty corporate recruiting and assessment practices. If companies (particularly outside tech) did anything at all to improve hiring practices and actually evaluate skills objectively, Coursera would be very valuable. Even if this didn't happen, it was a great learning platform. Now that Coursera has replaced their CEO with an Amazon hire, it's dead now. Late-stage capitalism claims another victim.
I still get substantial value out of Coursera. I started with Andrew Ng's original Machine Learning course way back when, and recently completed classes that I thought were well worth my time on Claude Code, Crew AI, AutoGen, and MCP.
While not revolutionary, a recent improvement is AI-based review, which is much appreciated for it's near instant review.
From a transformative perspective, I like the AWS Skill Builder SimuLearn classes. They say teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and I found the chat-based role play where you are the expert to be very interesting.
MOOCs have always given value to a certain group (about 3% of people who are motivated to self learn) and are basically useless for everyone else. Which is why they are primarily virtue signaling devices to fluff your LinkedIn.
When I started learning to code for data science I appreciated the lectures and examples. Once you reach a certain technical level these MOOCs aren't really helpful though.
The early hype of MOOCs wasn't "a few people in handful of fields will get up-skilled".
If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential.
Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition).
From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs:
'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.'
Never happened.
'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”'
Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.
In the early days, Coursera was transformative. I took some amazing courses and learned a lot.
...but the vision was always automation and as courses were rerun, the instructors were more likely to be disengaged, and live interaction via the forums fell. Finally when courses went to ongoing enrollment, there were no longer cohorts, and the experience was a correspondence course.
So in the end it was not transformative. It is pretty much just Youtube plus a website plus a payment platform. A less expensive, less interactive, unaccredited version of Phoenix University.
There's nothing wrong with teachers getting paid. It is the standard model. But of course the standard model is the standard model, not transformative.
Your community college is probably accredited and people actually will care about that one. I went back and picked up an additional associate's degree pertaining to my job.
You're right that employers don't care that you take a coursera course in the same way they don't care you watched a YouTube video.
But in both cases, if you learn something from that course or video, and then go off and create something based on that, that something can be something employers care about.
Sometimes I wonder what an MOOC-like education that went all-in on signalling/credentialism would look like. You convince some real down-on-their-luck university to lend you their name to provide eduction for lower income adults, you rent a big empty room with folding chairs in downtown where people actually live a few nights a week, a contracted PhD with a tweed jacket and a blackboard lectures in person, curriculum straight from an old edition textbook with pen-and-paper tests.
What would it cost without the overhead of a whole university around it? Would adults attend?Would employers accept it? Hard to change eduction more than a little at a time, since the buyer is literally buying a "you did it" certificate for 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are justifiably risk averse. The person examining the credential also doesn't want to do individual research on every single person's eduction.
MOOCs are still going strong at India's NPTEL , which started distributing university-level video courses for engg in 2008:
- 5m subscribers, almost 2B views on youtube
- 30m enrollments
- 600+ courses every semester in 22 disciplines
Anyone from the world can signup. Proctored exams are optional and cost about $11 per course. Not taking VC funding and setting up local chapters for supporting students seems to have worked out well for them.
When did Udacity fell off the MOOC discourse? That's my first experience with MOOCs; have fond memories learning robotics with Sebastian Thrun there. I used to prefer its short lesson and frequent quiz too.
Simple idea.. delivers value. Gets a monetary evaluation. The product is already too good.. water down the product and paywall what was previously free. All too common of an internet story
__rito__|6 months ago
I don't get this gloom and doom about MOOCs.
A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs. I am one of them.
It’s not the usual suspects like, "people don't have self-discipline", "one learns much more in university", etc. that have limited the perceived influence of MOOCs. It is pure credentialism that is behind MOOCs not reaching their full potential.
Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.
I did projects with skills that I learned via MOOCs, I answered questions in interviews with the knowledge that I started getting from MOOCs. But it was my Master’s in CS which ultimately mattered in my getting interviews. In that degree, they still teach GOFAI, "soft computig", and fuzzy set theory, "expert systems", and more things from the 80s.
MOOCs matter, MOOCs are loved and studied by a serious set of students and professionals. But they still can't get you interviews for most roles in most companies. In frontier AI labs, they are now basically treating PhDs as the minimum qualification for most roles.
MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative".
I know the arguments about making hiring easier for companies, etc.
cortesoft|6 months ago
What hiring companies want is to get good employees who can do the job they are supposed to do, and they want to have as low a false positive rate as possible (hiring someone who can't do the job is very expensive).
I am not a hiring expert, but they probably get a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.
Companies don't really care about false negative rates (not hiring a person who would do the job well) as long as they are still able to hire someone else who can't also do the job well. It sucks for the person who isn't hired, but not for the company.
j45|6 months ago
Starting was fun, finishing was another thing. Credentialing another.
They helped get a lot of content out in the open.
The sharing of knowledge is great and should continue, hopefully with more modern digital interactions of 2025.
ozgung|6 months ago
77pt77|6 months ago
I remember on one of the first of these courses (AI in Berkley?), people were incensed that they would not get an official degree/certificate from the university.
Some were really mad, as if they had been defrauded or something.
Your point about certification is accurate, but I want to add another nuance.
Even if you manage to get a degree from a "good"/prestigious place, if you are "the wrong kind of person" that will only be held against you.
It's like succeeding at that is a violation of natural law and you need to be punished for the violation. It's almost religious and deeply guttural.
Of course that in places like the states, those people usually don't even get the change to graduate from those places since some excuse will be concocted during the application process.
MOOCs suffer from the online version of that.
However in places where admission is "blind" and the cost free or low this is very common.
vintermann|6 months ago
It's true, I took MOOCs because I wanted to learn things, and they were actually good at that. It was actually damn impressive how e.g. Andrew Ng's courses stripped away all difficulty which was not related to the thing you're actually trying to learn. The impact of that when you're self-directed is hard to overstate - nothing kills motivation like getting bogged down in getting software to work or confirming to some professor's favorite citation style.
Yet they seem to not understand that. They're all about my "career goals", they can't seem to comprehend that I would be there for any reason but impressing a fortune 500 company (which, from what I understand, it never does anyway).
loco5niner|6 months ago
Aurornis|6 months ago
> A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs.
MOOCs are great and I agree: A lot of people have benefited.
The only disappointment is relative to the impossible hype cycle that was happening when MOOCs first entered the scene. You couldn’t open a MOOC relayed article or thread without some speculation that this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen, but MOOCs have been quite valuable on their own when well executed.
The primary disappointment I’ve seen is the half-baked courses that have been put out there. The first MOOC I tried was great and well run. The next two or three felt like they assigned some undergrad student a make-work project to put some old course materials on a website but they left out key parts. I remember it almost felt intentional, like someone didn’t want to put too much of the material online or the professor had objected to sharing their materials. They just wanted to say they got in on the MOOC train.
The later generation of courses that were made for the Internet were far better executed, of course, but they weren’t as plentiful and widespread as the hype predicted.
fc417fc802|6 months ago
They also (at least in my experience) try to force you to watch via the browser. It's far more ergonomic for me to yt-dlp a full playlist and watch it locally.
Luckily MIT OCW exists and an almost unimaginably wide variety of educational material is constantly being dumped on youtube.
__rito__|6 months ago
Edit window is gone.
zaptheimpaler|6 months ago
Grokify|6 months ago
While not revolutionary, a recent improvement is AI-based review, which is much appreciated for it's near instant review.
From a transformative perspective, I like the AWS Skill Builder SimuLearn classes. They say teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and I found the chat-based role play where you are the expert to be very interesting.
robertritz|6 months ago
When I started learning to code for data science I appreciated the lectures and examples. Once you reach a certain technical level these MOOCs aren't really helpful though.
rgavuliak|7 months ago
I would disagree, I saw a lot of people, especially in the Data Science field that got up-skilled by back then free Coursera.
freddie_mercury|6 months ago
If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential.
Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition).
From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs:
'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.'
Never happened.
'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”'
Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.
brudgers|6 months ago
In the early days, Coursera was transformative. I took some amazing courses and learned a lot.
...but the vision was always automation and as courses were rerun, the instructors were more likely to be disengaged, and live interaction via the forums fell. Finally when courses went to ongoing enrollment, there were no longer cohorts, and the experience was a correspondence course.
So in the end it was not transformative. It is pretty much just Youtube plus a website plus a payment platform. A less expensive, less interactive, unaccredited version of Phoenix University.
There's nothing wrong with teachers getting paid. It is the standard model. But of course the standard model is the standard model, not transformative.
aaron695|6 months ago
And this is what the early success really was.
It'd be interesting to see if what they "up-skilled" on is now common knowledge in Data Science.
klipklop|6 months ago
ocdtrekkie|6 months ago
margalabargala|6 months ago
But in both cases, if you learn something from that course or video, and then go off and create something based on that, that something can be something employers care about.
recursivecaveat|6 months ago
What would it cost without the overhead of a whole university around it? Would adults attend?Would employers accept it? Hard to change eduction more than a little at a time, since the buyer is literally buying a "you did it" certificate for 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are justifiably risk averse. The person examining the credential also doesn't want to do individual research on every single person's eduction.
nileshtrivedi|6 months ago
- 5m subscribers, almost 2B views on youtube
- 30m enrollments
- 600+ courses every semester in 22 disciplines
Anyone from the world can signup. Proctored exams are optional and cost about $11 per course. Not taking VC funding and setting up local chapters for supporting students seems to have worked out well for them.
Website: https://nptel.ac.in/
ACM report about this from November 2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3550473
Former-director of IIT Madras has talked about how NPTEL came together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoGegFLY
OutOfHere|6 months ago
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