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.
I think especially for Data Science, a lot of the curriculum got taken over by universities and new university programmes for Data Science were created since then so in a way it became common knowledge for fresh graduates.
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.
redbluered|6 months ago
What happened was primarily due to personalities and misaligned incentives.
geodel|6 months ago
The hype was massive. Everyone was supposed to be going MOOCs way. It was supposed to restructuring education system grounds up.
Now all I have seen is many did these big data/ data science courses and joined that great enterprise IT boondoggle of data processing/analytics.
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.
rgavuliak|6 months ago
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.
rgavuliak|6 months ago