Life After MOOCs | Hacker News Reader

Life After MOOCs

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26 pointscedricr10 comments

MOOCs are a great resource, for myself, that goes with books and other attempts to educate those who can't be in an ideal learning environment. I really dislike this quote:

"If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear."

Sorry but there are some great MOOCs and some poor MOOCs but we are certainly off better with them as opposed to without them.

The presenter is making the same argument, as evidenced by pairing the above quote with a quote criticizing the printing press.

"Life after MOOCs" is portending the replacement of low-feedback, low-engagement MOOCs with the more social, self-paced, text-based offerings. I think they have the right idea. Learners feel more mentally engaged editing and browsing wikis or documentation, solving problems with peers, and participating in Q&A with TAs rather than the traditional MOOC activities of viewing tests and answering quizzes.

Code-learning platforms are already evolving past video, copy-pasting code, and quizzes. freecodecamp is embracing social learning and forming peer relationships. Codewars and codecombat are employing gamification elements to increase engagement.

I was disappointed after the title. I was hoping to see something about the actual benefits and end outcomes of MOOC students, not just more "I come not to bury Caesar" level rhetoric.

My programming "education" such as it is, has all been through online courses, and let me tell you it's not the life-changing experience in the real world that its proponents are so desperate to sell. I'm curious as to whether anyone has actually managed to become employed this way, because from where I'm sitting I'd be better off sticking to good old fashion usury in the form of student loans.

I'm not sure I follow. So you have programming "education" through online courses, but you are essentially not sure whether you have made any professional gains from it?

I think I am hearing that you are disillusioned by the rather unstructured and disorderly state in which online "MOOC" type education is. There is no quality or accuracy assurance due to a lack of common standards and practices, and there is essentially no means for replicating a curriculum across systems and content.

Is that about right? Or is there some other issue I am missing why you would rather load yourself up with tens of thousands dollars for a brick-and-mortar education?

I'm by not means a fan of this subject approach, but I'm more generally curious about the issues.

In a market where even people who have actual degrees struggle to overcome the experience demands, someone without even that is pretty much fucked, especially in a country like I live in where higher education is free.

I have managed to be, briefly, employed on an internship basis, but that was short-lived, and once I started asking for and looking to more permanent positions suddenly the opportunities started looking more than a bit scarce.

It seems like in an age of massive degree inflation, the self-taught basement hacker doesn't really have a place anymore, while a lot of those same basement hackers who actually made it and have been in the industry ten or twenty years keep giving the same bad "you don't need a degree" type advice.

As a matter of fact I became a programmer by only doing online courses and as far as I know many other people have done it. I did have a BSc in Economics and Finance though, so I have some formal education that definitely helped me do further studies.

Also, the transition wasn't easy at first and I had to work/study/code quite hard, but now after some 3 years in the industry since I first started I feel quite comfortable with my skills. :)

I took the Intro to Programming and Web Development MOOCs at Udacity back when they first launched. Combined with the knowledge I learned from the free books "How to Design Programs" and "Learn Python the Hard Way," I was successfully able to gain employment as a developer (previously I was a Windows sysadmin with no real knowledge of programming).

However, I didn't show off any MOOC certificates or anything like that. I think what mattered was that I had a combination of a real world project (Django site for a paying client) and a diversity of other "non-school" projects. Even though those projects were mostly exploratory, they demonstrated that I actually enjoyed programming and was capable of learning a variety of things, which was important to my employer. I tried to present myself in terms of a portfolio, and not my MOOC education / lack of a CS degree.

Without those courses and materials, though, I really don't think I could have become a programmer.

Gonna chime in here with a similar story. I was working at a call center a few years ago. Mostly sales stuff, but it was for a web company. I was taking moocs on the side, Udacity first, then coursera. I was always studying and that was noted by my superiors (in my spare time between calls for example) and eventually an internal opening was offered to me. I got luck there, chance to get off the phones and become an excel monkey. But not as lucky as what happened next, at the same time I’d finished the Stanford Databases class, a number of internal reports tied to a database broke. I had exactly the right about of experience to fix the issues and gain a little credit internally. I moved from a temporary role into a perminate one and started coding vba/sql stuff for the office.

From there I continued to learn and was eventually poached to another company. It could have gone faster if I’d been more visible, and I got lucky, but my degree is in Sociology, I learned to code in books and moocs. It can happen if you’re diligent and hard working.

>> if we had a wand, we would not wish away MOOCs but rather transform them into a more effective educational product called a massive adaptive interactive text (MAIT) that can compete with a professor in a classroom. We further argue that computer science is a discipline in which this transition is about to happen.

Makes me think of the interactive books in Neal Stephepsons 'The Diamond Age'.

The authors start by quoting an anti-MOOCer: "If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear."

There are many fantastic MOOCs that are on par with or exceed the best college classes I took at a top ranked school.

Yet article after article from certain sectors proclaims MOOCs a failure and asserts or suggests students are getting ripped off or cheated of a proper education, doomed to failure, should be erased from history, etc.

Since these people clearly do not know what they are talking about, yet clearly choose to intentionally misrepresent things to promote various agendas, they are unreliable sources and their opinions about everything else are unreliable as well.

However, in this case, this article is written by Compeau and Pevzner. I have taken their Bioinformatics sequence, which I found to be among the better MOOCs around. It is very challenging and the interactive textbook which compels the student to write code in any language they fancy and solve problems with that code works quite well. Therefore these authors do know what they are talking about in this case. Whether this approach can or should be extended to history or art classes is not clear.

Textbooks are expensive and can be difficult to access for students outside the western world. A lack of texts has been an issue in many MOOCs and has limited the depth of some classes. This has been addressed in many well done science classes, such as Melbourne's remarkable Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression by selecting open access academic journal papers and assigning them to students to read, and requiring the articles be understood to pass the assessments. Some other classes have arranged with publishers to make copyright restricted materials available for a limited time period to students enrolled in the class. These approaches, are quite good as well compared to a textbook, perhaps even better as they can cover cutting edge results for which textbooks have not even been written.

Yet another approach is to recommend textbooks as a supplement to the class material. I have found this useful for some classes, especially when I am able to get previous editions used for close to the cost of shipping.

Another approach is when the professor self publishes a print on-demand text for the class, and makes it optional, with the text also available for free. In these cases these texts have often shot to the top of the sales rankings in their category.

It's very true that interactive texts that give immediate feedback are a valuable pedagogical tool which when implemented well approaches the value of working with a tutor. It's also valuable to have well designed forums where students can discuss problems they are having with other students who have solved the same problems. Compeau and Pevzner's texts have comments per page and don't ban discussion of techniques used to solve problems, or tricky bits that were not obvious. These discussions are very helpful for non-trivial problems that take hours to solve when one gets stuck. Students need to refrain from posting actual code of course and this has been the case. These context tied mini discussions are comparable to having a very good study group or TA session available in a university class. General and sectional discussion forums not tied to specific pages, are also needed as well. On Coursera in particular this is well designed and there are often fantastic contributions to new research posted by knowledgable students, as well as the discussions by students that one would experience at a brick and mortar school, but with a transcript and references built in, which makes them in some ways even more valuable than face to face conversations.

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