Hacker News Reader

To address your first point, Edx.org is very similar to Coursera, but is a non-profit organization that releases all it's software as open source (https://open.edx.org/.) For your second point, EdX Studio (https://studio.edx.org/) is focused on being accessible and easy to use for instructors - we hear good things from course staff about usability compared to Coursera.

(I work for EdX.org as a developer)

Out of curiosity: Any news on the hosted version of edX (mooc.org).?Site went up quite a while ago, but I haven't heard any developments since.

Interesting observations and notes. Glad to see a little bit of background / context regarding the mechanics. Regarding my perspectives, I have a background teaching and an advanced degree in education course design.

Regarding point 1, my understanding of Fair Use within an Education environment is that an instructor using protected material in the context of a lecture or assignment is, by default, an instance of Fair Use. A lot of the pivot relates to the scope of the use - as in, photocopying an entire chapter or short-story is okay, but photocopying the entire book is not. With images, I think you're well in the clear. I can understand where you're coming from with your concern, I just don't believe it to be material.

My university has a dedicated team who help out instructors with putting their material online and even they are often confused about how to edit this or upload that.

This scenario strikes me as counter-intuitive from a savings perspective, because now there's two layers involved: Instructors and IT Support. Actually, it sounds like a terrible waste of overhead and expense the University is laying out. Will Coursera reimburse your institution for the burden, or is it so small compared to the revenue brought in through Coursera that the expense is immaterial?

I get a macabre laugh out of learning Coursera actually kind of sucks at its main value proposition of being a technology platform for education, in that it's not user friendly for actual educators. Yeah it's a 'disruption' platform, sure. Just seems to me like throwing a Basball into an Olympic Swimming Pool.

> This scenario strikes me as counter-intuitive from a savings perspective, because now there's two layers involved: Instructors and IT Support. Actually, it sounds like a terrible waste of overhead and expense the University is laying out. Will Coursera reimburse your institution for the burden, or is it so small compared to the revenue brought in through Coursera that the expense is immaterial?

If it's anything like my university was, the team he's referring to didn't exclusively support Coursera; their purpose is to provide faculty assistance with managing online content in general. Whether it's the university's internal Blackboard site or Coursera, they support whatever platforms the professors are using (assuming it's a university approved platform).

So the marginal expense of supporting Coursera is likely negligible, unless they've somehow managed to make a worse interface than Blackboard and it's particularly resource intensive to support.

It hasn't launched yet but you may be interested in checking out snowdrift: https://snowdrift.coop/.

I brought this thread up in #snowdrift on freenode and there was some interesting discussion around coursera's model and this critical talk by Eden Moglen: https://boingboing.net/2012/05/27/innovation-under-austerity.... There's a full transcript here: https://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2012/freedom-to-conne.... I've mostly viewed coursera as a good thing even if it's a for-profit company, but I'm not as confident any more.

Have you looked at http://www.donorschoose.org/? From their site:

DonorsChoose.org makes it easy to help classrooms in need. Public school teachers post classroom project requests which range from pencils for poetry to microscopes for mitochondria.

I bet there's a way you could sneak in support for your Coursera teaching.

As for uploading content, that seems like a really tough and time consuming problem. Are you allowed to put together a wiki or webpage? I was doing some prep for an Operating Systems course and read this excellent blog post about why textbooks should be free [1]. In the post, the writer mentions that "perfect is the ultimate enemy of good", so he decided to write the initial draft of a textbook purely in plain text rather than properly format it with something like LaTeX. Getting the necessary content out there seems like a good first step for you and your team.

[1] http://from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-for-fre...

> * I wish there were a way to fund online education through philanthropy/donations. Coursera being for-profit leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. At a practical level, it complicates what images I can use in my lectures and qualify as fair use.

There are ways to do this. The problem is that they don't readily scale. Self-funding systems scale much better than systems that require ever-increasing amounts of external funding.

That's a bit hand-wavy. Can you elaborate why you claim this?

It's a matter of requirements for external resources. If a system needs constant infusions of external money, its ability to grow will be determined by its ability to bring in such external money. This is how non-profits tend to work and why they dedicate such attention to fundraising.

Systems that generate what they need to grow don't have the same constraints. If money is what your business needs to grow and it generates a significant yearly profit, then your business can meet its own needs to enable growth.

Is that clearer? Some sorts of systems, when functioning correctly, will tend to be self-perpetuating. Others will, as an artifact of structure, require endless external resourcing.

OK. Find me an example of a system that doesn't require external resources :)

It's not about that. It's about not needing continual fresh infusions. This is why GE, which doesn't need to raise money every six months, is more likely to be around in ten years than any given startup trying to raise a B round.

Yes, that clarifies your point a lot. Thank you.

There are ways for the developers to earn the donations asked. Edx is an example of the other one. I live off of mooc courses I learn everything from there, and that's coming from a current college student.

hi @randomwalker, I enrolled to that course a few hours ago! I hope that the course is not too bad because of the limitations you mentioned above.