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Comment by mindo | Hacker News Reader

Just couple days ago I decided to give 5 weeks android course on edx a shot. I'm in week 5, spend like 3-4hrs to complete 1-4 weeks work (including time spent watching videos), wrote probably no more than 30-50 lines of code mostly something simple as "smth++". I feel like the quality went down dramatically compared to first courses they had, now its all about the money...

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Andecdotally, there does seem to be an increase in the number of courses on these platforms. I'm not sure that's wholly negative given that the data has shown pretty consistently that with each week more learners stop engaging. Which suggests that smaller chunking might be more effective.

Of course, it also means that there are more opportunities to sell for a given amount of content, so I certainly don't rule out monetization as a factor.

For me, it's something of a tradeoff. On the one hand, there aren't many courses that are good enough and that I care enough about to devote university levels of work to. On the other hand, I'm taken some that were so trivial that it would be hard to say I got anything lasting out of them.

I understand that the longer the course is the less people will complete it, but at the same time, if you have to write 3-5 lines of code for each assignment what is the value in there? What does the certificate certify?

No argument here. As I said, I've taken or started to take a few courses that were so cursory (at least with respect to my level of existing knowledge) that they were largely a waste of time. I may not be prepared to spend 10+ hours a week over the course of 2+ months for very many classes--but if the whole class amounts to watching a webinar or reading a chapter in a book, it's probably not very valuable.

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