Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

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> The company has created a series of courses that add up to mini-degrees that students can earn quickly, and pay a small fee to certify that they successfully completed them. “It’s mostly people in their 20s and 30s who are interested in learning more skills and making themselves prepared for better jobs,” said Mr. Levin.

Has anyone else noticed that since this recent pivot, the quality of Coursera's classes have declined?

I recently tried a course hosted on Coursera from an Ivy League school, as part of a business "specialization" that consists of 4 classes at $90 each. The class was 4 weeks long and was taught by 3 different professors. The only material provided was a series of video lectures (10-20 5-minute lectures per professor) and a smattering of blog posts and news articles for optional reading.

There was some discussion in the forums that the lectures seemed to jump around, and didn't cover all the material represented in the final exam. Some previous students were guessing that the gaps in instruction were because the course used to be 9 weeks long before they started charging for it.

I enjoyed the class but didn't feel like I got my money's worth. In the end I decided I could get more value by just buying and reading books on business development on my own.

I've only taken a couple courses from one of these mini-degrees. I did feel like the quality was iffy, but I don't feel like I've seen enough to make a call on whether the problem was the instructor or the mini-degree.

The main problem was that the course was unfocused and rushed. It felt like the instructor was trying to touch on every single thing a person might learn over the course of a graduate level course. But since the class was shorter both in terms of number of weeks and time students could be expected to spend on any one week, it just resulted in a lot of very shallow treatment of an immense number of topics. Some lectures were barely more than a recitation of paper titles.

Agreed. The courses seem to lack depth. And the video-only method of instruction makes it feel like an infomercial. It's a shame, because the Coursera platform has a lot of potential. Andrew Ng's machine learning course was as good as a real university course.

To be fair, the specialization I was on included a final project which could have been cool.

Yeah, the video-only thing is problematic. But I think they're stuck there. If you're having a hard time convincing students to pay $50 for the class, can you really ask them to buy a $200 textbook?

I think the "only" part isn't referring so much to the exclusion of a textbook as the exclusion of projects and exercises. Videos and textbooks are both too passive. The biggest issue with MOOCs in 2015 is the relative lack of active engagement with the material through checked exercises and with teachers, tutors, mentors, and peers through one-on-one engagement (whether in person or via phone or chat) rather than one-to-many forums. Both issues are more expensive to solve, but I'm disappointed that Coursera hasn't used their paid courses to attack them. I suspect that the price of those courses isn't high enough to justify it.

I think that while we've added a couple educational tiers above reading books and articles on one's own, we're still missing one or more between paid MOOCs and "real" higher education.

I think the passivity of videos and lack of exercises is just half the problem. The other half is that there is no human supervision of each student. There is no feeling of accountability to a professor. In real life you compare with your colleagues and are evaluated by a teacher. That tends to make all this activity much more involved.

I think the problem can be solved by organizing study groups and paying for a tutor to see you through your online learning career. Regular meet-ups in real life with a person, to check the state of your studies and discuss strategies and future courses to take up would be better than just creating a free account and starting to learn on your own.

MOOCs could be complemented by in-person educational coaching. That would reduce the dropout rate and make it seem more "real". MOOCs don't need more teachers, they need more coaches - people with experience in the psychology of learning.

We're in violent agreement, and I meant to allude to the things you spelled out more clearly. I'm disappointed that Coursera hasn't (yet?) started using their treasure chest to push this sort of thing, but maybe that just means it's a market opportunity for someone else.

At Tuva (tuvalabs.com), we are creating an environment to learn foundational statistics and data analysis concepts and skills that go well beyond just video instruction. To get a feel for experience, check out a 30 sec demo here: https://vimeo.com/137256993

That looks nice, but people want problems to solve - gradual problems, that have a nice gradient of increasing difficulty, and are sufficient in number, until they can bring up the student to a feeling of mastery over the field.

I was looking for such a set of problems to gradually learn functional programming by exercises but all I could find was a video course that also had a set of 10-20 mini-problems to solve as it progressed. That was by far too shallow for this learning task. And to think that FP is the love child of Hacker News, with tons of posts in the last few years, yet, there is no comprehensive resource of exercises.

What about project Euler and the like?

Fair point. I just don't think they've found product-market fit yet. Before, they were giving too little value to the schools, and now they're giving too little to the students.

Maybe if they switched to selling textbooks and bundle the video course with the textbook. I would never go out and buy a $200 textbook to something I have no foundation in, but if I'm getting a video course with it, maybe.

I think I did some classes of the data science nanodegree (forgive me for not remembering the exact name) and I found the quality to be on par with other courses.

But having taken a dozen of them on coursera, I feel there isn't really a standard that is declining, it's just that some classes are fantastic, some not very much so, and it has been like this since the beginning.

I often noticed that some books are phenomenal, and don't really have a mooc, but should definetly have something.

I wonder if there's a place for a site that:

1. Gathers recommendations the best book on a given subject + some set of practice material

2. Helps to forum study groups or classes, gives them forum/hangouts,etc,offer some structure, etc

3. Enables P2P grading by students

Basically ,helps as much as it's possibly can for students to form great classes around great books.

What do you guys think ?

I prefer for something like this before paying for online classes: a curriculum to learn on my own, a peer group for feedback, and a mentor for guidance.

The problem is there are many things I want to learn and I may be willing to invest 40 hours in one week to get the required knowledge instead of having to wait 3 hours * 8 weeks.

I think it's a neat idea. This thread has got me thinking too. Email me at p2peducationideahn@gmail.com if you want to brainstorm.

Honestly, I think that's the best way to learn. A lot of great programmers/entrepreneurs end up taking an autodidactic approach to learning whatever they need to learn to become successful. I always use Sean Parker as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker

I don't buy into the belief that the only way to learn something is by taking a course or getting a degree. I can buy the same programming book or the same physiology textbook used in a course and read it on my own. The only problem is that, unless you really do something outstanding to prove that you know the material, its not something you can put on an application/resume.

"The only problem is that, unless you really do something outstanding to prove that you know the material, its not something you can put on an application/resume."

Which is why the Education industry is really the Accreditation industry.

It depends on what you're learning.

I wouldn't want to waste my time on a class that just teaches you how to use Hadoop. On the other hand, there are some topics that I'd have a much harder time believing can be treated well outside a classroom setting. Classes that deal with softer skills such as project management strategy or research design really seem to benefit quite a bit from the group learning environment. You could certainly learn them other ways, but probably more slowly. If you're trying to build a career there's an opportunity cost there.

It is okay for CS classes, but not for chemistry...

I think a difficulty with this approach is that a textbook often contains more information than you actually need. In that regard a class is better because you have more guidance. The best way is possibly to look through the syllabi of classes at various top universities to get an idea of what is important.

Also, a textbook doesn't have everything you need, and knowledge and technology change; there's no substitute for a human with expertise.

We launched yesterday reviews for modern day credentials like Specializations and Nanodegrees to tackle this problem. Sorta like 'Credentialing the credentials'. It can be found here:

https://www.class-central.com/certificate

It still early but this might help potential students get a sense of quality of the credential before hand.

Meant as constructive criticism: the page is really blue... kinda an eyestrain -- have you considered going for more readability-friendly colors?

edit: just saw the other comment -- yeah, same dealie

OT, but let me mention this: the contrast of white on blue on this page is so strong it made me close it.

If you want to see a well done business class, check out these classes from the University of Michigan (disclaimer-my wife was involved in the creation): https://www.coursera.org/specialization/valuation/45

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