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Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

Im Noticing a lot of these courses are coursera, and one of the most frustrating things about the plattform is the fact that most courses close and access to course materials/videos etc. is revoked after the course is over, this destroys the whole point of a mooc for me, and this choice seems arbitrary.

Why cant education materials just be open and remain open to everyone, journals and textbooks included? There are enough tax paying citizens all over the world pumping money into our education systems that there is no reason it should not be freely available 24/7 to all.

The fact that unlimited free education still doesnt exist in 2015 makes me sad everytime I think about it.

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Andrew Ng is one of Coursera's founders. He's big on learning as the development of habits...in American educational philosophy this idea can be traced back at least to John Dewey with academic formality. So it's not surprising that Coursera often chooses fixed schedules and cohesive cohorts over self-pacing. Indeed, Ng's most popular course, Machine Learning is open enrollment, but not self paced and sends reminders when the student falls behind schedule.

That said, there are plenty of courses on Coursera where the materials stay up and online for years. But there's nothing wrong with teachers controlling how, when and where their course materials are accessible, and since many of the courses are from private institutions, e.g. notably Ng's Stanford, tax paying and citizenship (two orthogonal concepts orthogonal to accessibility of course materials) are mostly tangential to major MOOC mechanics.

It's absolutely amazing that the resources are so freely available and high quality. I am not sure where one would get standing to make demands upon the private entities providing them.

I heartily recommend using this[0] tool for any Coursera course you are currently taking.

[0] https://github.com/coursera-dl/coursera-dl

I agree. Coursera's approach seems to capture the worst of both worlds of traditional and online ed. It lacks the live lecture and person-to-person contact of a traditional college course. Yet, it maintains the timeboxed approach of traditional ed, which exists chiefly to provide simultaneity, to scale real-life human contact to lecture-hall size.

Now I realize that some aspects of the way some courses are run require simultaneity. Things like human-powered grading, by TAs or peers. But they don't have to be designed that way. I've taken Coursera courses that are largely machine graded. For those, there doesn't seem to be any real reason why the courses are timeboxed. And even for courses where this is difficult to design around, it seems like it should be possible to tighten the iteration cycle.

I'm not sure "live lecture" is a unique positive of a traditional college course, at least if by live lecture you mean room of multi-hundred people. In fact, I'd argue that this aspect is one thing that MOOCs can handle very well. Of course, it's also something that remote learning has been able to handle well at least since the VCR was created. I'd argue that the other thing that MOOCs can do well is automated grading when that's appropriate for the material.

What MOOCs do very badly is peer interactions whether for discussions or grading. Part of it's scale. Part of it's the vast differences in the levels and expectations of the participants. Of course, as you say, it's precisely for these reasons that we force courses to provide simultaneity.

I've taken a number of Coursera courses. The format works better for some courses than others. The key is that there is a recognizable student cohort and that the students are enthusiastically engaged in live discussions. That tends to happen less in the fifth offering when the primary instructor has moved on to other things.

Anyway, there's pedagogical theory that favors time boxing [and some that doesn't]. Coursera is opinionated in the matter. That's not a controversial opinion in higher education circles upon which Coursera styles itself and from which it draws it's educators.

I'd be interested in reading about that theory, if you have any good resources. I assumed it was for pragmatic reasons. I wonder if the theories consider a context of the opportunities the Internet would create, or if they assume an offline context.

> ... worst of both worlds ... timeboxed approach

Just to provide the other side of the story, I've done about a dozen MOOCs (mostly through Coursera) and I'm most of the way through Georgia Tech's online masters program.

Having to make progress every week is contributes a lot to me actually finishing these courses. The Udacity courses I've signed up for never get touched because there's no urgency. Ditto the textbooks on my shelf that I keep meaning to go through, and the Open Yale and MIT OCW courses I've bookmarked... I obviously have the time, but unless there's a threat of "Do it now or it's gone" I'll probably go and watch TV when I get home from work.

I think that's fine, but if the urgency is manufactured, I'd argue that it should be an additional feature to provide that urgency, rather than the default.

I'm the other side of the coin. I may start off on schedule, but once life intervenes and I fall behind, and I've gotten a couple zeros, I'm like why bother catching up? As a result, I've only successfully finished one out of the 6 or 7 Coursera courses I've started.

That is a big reason why Coursera is so appealing and it won in the MOOC race. By having a few open sessions a year, they can provide official support from course TA and students all gather in an active forum to discuss the material and help each other. It's why MIT's OpenCourseWare is not nearly as popular as Coursera. I'd argue it's a must for the to keep going with this approach, otherwise it will turn into another OpenCourseWare.

There's really no "right" answer to how asynchronous courses should be. On the one hand, if you just open things up, make some videos available, maybe some machinery for auto-grading where appropriate, I'm not sure you can meaningfully call that material a MOOC at that point. It's some YouTube videos with an associated website of which there are already many for all sorts of content.

On the other hand, if you run things on a tight schedule, real life will get in the way for a lot of people in that many of the better courses are fairly significant time commitments.

>There's really no "right" answer to how asynchronous courses should be.

Sure, but given Coursera's popularity it seems to be doing something right.

>On the other hand, if you run things on a tight schedule, real life will get in the way for a lot of people in that many of the better courses are fairly significant time commitments.

But is it? The time commitments are watching few videos, learning and doing the assignments, all of this in a week. I think it's enough even for people working full time. If you don't have enough time on your hands to do all this, I'd argue you don't have the time required to complete the course.

Furthermore having time constraints is very important for students to keep on track.

I don't really disagree. As I said, if you take away all the constraints, what's unique about Coursera or any other MOOC, really?

That said, people with busy schedules, travel, etc. can easily get behind on a more time-consuming course and, at that point, the natural reaction is just to drop it.

My personal preference is to have structure but to build sufficient wiggle-room in that someone can catch up a week or two.

Can't remember exactly which courses, but there were some which dropped off your lowest assignment grade. Of course one could argue that it isn't really about the assignment, but still psychologically, I felt that was a good compromise between maintaining the balance between flexibility and continuity.

One of the things I've always found a bit odd about Coursera is the lack of general subject forums. Sure, you can meet with and interact with some students in the forum of a particular course, but then when that course is over the forum empties out. And if you are taking the course on your own schedule, the place is often empty because you're doing a lot of the work after the course ended.

I understand that open ended courses might not have the volume to create an active forum, but why not create subject forums where people can discuss things and create a community? In my experience, communities are a very important way to give people the motivation to complete some of these courses.

I eventually settled on using edX exclusively[1], which I don't anticipate changing except for specific advanced courses on the other platforms.

My intuition is that the venture-backed model of the other platforms will make it extremely difficult to maintain a long-term vision of free, ubiquitous education. I did find one edX course which decayed, simply because it required student journaling and deeply personal discussion, which would have been inappropriate to open to the public.

1. Not as exclusively as I thought - I just saw a great course from Coursera and signed up. To date I've only completed edX courses though.

It may depend on the copyright agreement Coursera made with the instructor and institution. Understandably many course creators may not wish their course materials to be consumed indefinitely for free without themselves ever receiving any compensation.

That said, I agree with your main point, which is that if the billions that go into the journal and textbook scams were redirected to instructors (via higher salaries and resources) and students (via lower tuition costs), we would have a much stronger education system.

I did a maths course with Coursera that finished early this year. I've just checked and I can still access the course materials [1]. This is a course that is still running new sessions, and that may not be true for courses that end.

And its worth remembering that Coursera allows videos and pdfs to be downloaded, which I get into the habit of doing as I progress through a course.

[1] My Courses -> Archived -> Course Page -> Select session that I did -> Go To Course.

I remember the same thing, but it may be a case by case option. Many coursera courses had subtle differences (grading rules and process).

Yes, I think it is a case by case thing. The stanford courses are always available Im pretty sure, I know others fall out though. Also the fact you cant just click and download the whole course as a compressed file (like MIT) is a shame, especially for people with limited or no internet connections like where my family lives. There you really do need to be able to go to a library and download the course which you can then take home for your studies. People in tech forget this but believe it or not over half the world doesnt have internet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm).

The problem is that this only works if you where signed up for the course when it was active. If you find an interesting course in their archives that has already closed, you often cannot look at the course material.

True, I guess. But then again Coursera isn't a library.

As other commenbters have said, course material can often be found on the net if you look in the right places.

It looks like Coursera has recently opened up a lot of classes that had been closed.

For example, Hinton's class on neural networks from 2012 seems to be open again. https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets

I believe that Coursera courses are popular exactly because they only allow watching archives if you have signed up before. What I mean is people sign up to a large number of courses, just for being able to view the course any time in the future.

This also means that Coursera courses have naturally the highest "total enrollment" numbers, even though probably only a few percent of the students are actually taking the class.

I don't think this is the case will _All_ courses... Most of the CS courses allows you to access resources even after the course is completed.

Also if the course you want to enroll is not scheduled for near future, you can go to the course page and view the older version of the course.

I know I have had my eye on a few courses just to do the class.

I usually can find the course material online in a tar or zip file which has the home work and answers. Youtube usually has the videos. Still prefer to just open up the Coursera classes.

Coursera courses don't always close: I've been doing the compilers recently one and I've not come across any restrictions on access even though the last session was a year and a half ago.

Isn't it possible to just right-click the video and save a copy of it?

Last I looked at a Coursera course, there are explicit download buttons as well. It's not hard to save the course materials while the course is ongoing, the problem is that the materials are unavailable after the course finishes. You're not always going to know what will or will not be important in the future.

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