Coursera’s co-founder Daphne Koller set to start anew at Calico
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The majority of people are in college because you get (rewarded for | penalized for not) going by Mr. Market, however you want to spin it. It doesn't matter whether it becomes apparent in your work that your degree was basically irrelevant. Booming education among a market where the fastest growing and largest job sector is shit jobs in service is just nation wide stack ranking.
We're all on a treadmill and we can't all win.
I enjoy learning, I really do. I spend my freetime reading texts about what I love and talking to other more educated people who've studied it. It's not why I went to college, and not why people told me to go to college ever since I was old enough to understand arguments about my future life prospects and career and etc. It's not why my aunt who's been a nanny for 20 years is going to com-college, It's not why my mom is becoming a CPA, it's not why my dad went to engineering school, etc.
I still took a few Coursera classes because computer science is just damn interesting to me :)
So it doesn't matter if no more Americans want to learn there's billons in other countries who'd love to have access.
I think the American education system is awesome the respect of opening their system up to the world. My native UK has basically nothing. Cambridge and Oxford have a few online courses, but barely even one UK university will even bother to run a course on Coursera.
Incidentally though I've found Coursera to be the first online course that inspired me to complete multiple courses.
Every generation invents distance education and gets excited all over again. It's good every time, and each round leverages the new technology, but it quickly becomes the new normal.
In stead of building a framework for iterative improvements, and an online educational material, Coursera focused on building "classes" and "credentials" and trying to monetize. It isn't surprising that I learnt the most in college from Wikipedia. Which isn't even meant to be a teaching material.
Truly a shame.
Hopefully Khan Academy or even Wikipedia doesn't eventually disappoint.
The courses are awesome just for you to learn things. It wouldn't even matter if you got nothing at the end. However they do provide a genuine way to show that you've taken a course. It shows willingness to learn above and beyond your degree. You can stick it on your Linked In profile and Stack Overflow profile, it's a way to differentiate yourself from the masses.
Also it's a way of finding better employers. If you're employer is open-minded enough to take your Coursera courses seriously then they're more likely to be a good employer.
This is probably something employers like.
> Though both have now officially moved on to new challenges, Koller and Ng remain co-chair’s of the Coursera Board of Directors
They are clearly both still involved.
What's surprising is that people who've been professors for 18 years at Stanford or frickin heads of a Ivy League university didn't realize this until 5 more years into the business side of education. Shows how narrow academic's wheelhouse is.
> the companies you describe are in such high demand by applicants that they have more qualified applicants than slots to fill
That applies to every company you named. It's great that you managed to get one of those slots. There are plenty of people who don't, though, and they can end up in a much worse position if they spend their time on learning that the majority of companies don't recognize.
The issue is that if all MOOCs were was another way to view lectures and do some exercises in an online setting for free/cheap, they wouldn't have been viewed with any particular excitement. But that's pretty much what they turned out to be.
I'm sure they've been a useful way of learning for some. But they haven't fundamentally changed anything.
But these are neither VC-sized opportunities nor anything especially disruptive.
Leaving aside a few useful tools like online code evaluators, MOOCs largely solved a problem that was long-ago solved. Namely, access to quality broadcast-style lectures and other course content. At the same time, peer interactions and any genuine coaching pretty much didn't work with MOOCs.
The issue is that, to a large degree, they mostly solved the easy thing. Making videos of university lectures widely available isn't hard. Neither is making other broadcast aspects of the syllabus available (e.g. in MIT OCW). A lot of good material was made available through Coursera and edX. But, frankly, a Wordpress blog with embedded videos and links would have worked nearly as well for a lot of this material.
Yes, CS somewhat uniquely benefits from the opportunity to reasonably evaluate code written for problem sets. But, for the most part, evaluation is at the multiple choice level.
My understanding is that a lot of schools already videotape their big lectures and many students just watch them online while doing study groups, going to recitations, working on problem sets, etc. more or less like they always have.
However, that Coursera certifications would be valued (presumably by employers) on a mass scale was always an aspiration without an awful lot of evidence behind it. (Yes, there are certifications that people pay a lot of money for but they're essentially all focused on a very specific set of skills and tied into some sort of ongoing program.)
No, at the beginning another model was seriously discussed: Giving employers access to people who love to learn new things on their own. Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311744
I agree that Coursera has it's problems, with the insistence to stick to class start and end dates as one example.
But to extrapolate that therefore online learning doesn't work as a medium is absurd.
[0]: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/208279866
[1]: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/208279776
everyone realized you go to college for the rubber stamp.
* Face-to-face contact with professors.
* Face-to-face contact with classmates, with the possibility of forming in-person study groups and suchlike.
* A structure to help your self-discipline; lectures follow a strict schedule so you don't fall behind, thinking "I'll watch it later", then never get caught up.
* An environment where your peers are doing the same thing you are - rather than being the one guy in your office who watches coursera videos at lunchtime, you see hundreds of your fellow students every day.
* A widely understood and non-stigmatised social status when pursued full time. You're not "unemployed for 4 years and not even looking for a job" a.k.a. lazy freeloader. You're a "student" a.k.a. future member of the middle class.
* Clubs and societies where you can make friends. Friends who are close to your age, with similar backgrounds to yours, and with similar interests to you, and who are looking for new friends at the same time you are.
* Networking opportunities (at least if you're doing an MBA or something where other people want to network)
* Parties full of nice young people of your preferred gender.
* Etc etc
Now granted, the rubber stamp is important too, but to say college is only a rubber stamp is IMHO an over-simplification for a lot of people's college experiences.
I use these classes as additional support to my education (when i dont understand something or if my class just scratched the surface and i want more). Other cases are classes that aren't offered that i find interesting like advanced databases from CMU that was posted a couple of months ago.
It is definitly not a replacement, but helps you dwell into topics that you may not be able to or are unsure of.
Having said that each of the individual courses that I've taken on coursera were significantly better than any courses I took during my degree.
The reality is the 3-4 year educations, unless high quality, have a lot of unrelated fluff, except for the recognition.
Same goes for online courses - both are a crapshoot and what I like about your point is the overarching theme that we should pay attention to the quality of the education we're receiving and focus on our ability to create value with it.
At the end of the day, it's not what our education makes of us, but what we make of our education.
I don't have the data. But I guess that although Coursera has 20 million members, their overall engagement rate is decreasing. Because without new courses, many users will likely not return to the site.
In my opinion rather without free Statement of Accomplishment many users will likely not return to the site. It might be different in the US, but in Germany there is a culture of "certificate or it did not happen". I have heard that the same holds in Brazil, too. Thus being German I stopped attending Coursera courses as soon as free Statements of Accomplishment were dropped. I also have the impression that after this step the quality of courses dropped.
Originally I remember that it was seriously considered that as a way of monetizing MOOC sites there was the thought that MOOC participants are people that love to learn new stuff on their own. This is something many employers like. So the idea for monetizing was: why not allow employers give (for money) access to the list of participants to find potential employees. Does anybody know why this route to monetizing MOOCs was left?
Did you feel that being able to list the free statements of accomplishment has some specific value to you as an employee or a job seeker? (But, presumably, not sufficient value to pay for a certificate?)
Otherwise, it seems a bit of an odd attitude. Do you avoid reading books for educational purposes or watching videos on professional topics because you don't get a certificate for doing so?
I do get that there's value in some certifications. But, except for some limited circumstances (continuing education requirements, as something to show in the absence of a traditional degree) my impression is that Coursera certifications don't have a lot of value. Which has been sort of their problem.
I have never been in this situation (but I will be in near future), so take the following with a grain of salt. I think employers see Coursera Certificate of Accomplishments not as a qualification that I know the topic inside out. But having a Certificate of Accomplishment to show for MOOCs that I took is a clear sign to potential employers that I'm willing to invest a lot of my free time to learn about new topics on my own. Which shows willingness to learn, being able to work independently on hard topics on my own under difficult circumstances (only help in the forum instead of having a tutor etc.). This is something that I think employers like.
> Do you avoid reading books for educational purposes or watching videos on professional topics because you don't get a certificate for doing so?
I read lots of books for educational purposes. But I read them because I'm deeply interested in the topic. I will probably never get any monetary gain from it (as I said: certificate or it did not happen). Videos on professional topics are rather uncommon in German culture (as I see it in opposite to the US-American culture). One reason for this is indeed that they don't deliver a certificate.
No, just look at the "XSeries" and "Professional Education" programs at edX. These are not free.
However, the Professional Education programs--which I think are relatively new--do seem to be fee-based only. I stand corrected.
Of course, even though it's a non-profit, edX is doubtless still under pressure by its sponsoring institutions to more or less pay its own way. That's a lower bar than "make VCs a bunch of money" but it still can't survive as a bottomless money pit.
I stand partly corrected, but there are also XSeries tracks for courses from Professional Education.
MooC's themselves are not the reason for it, nor do they represent much evolution in how content has been delivered technologically in the last 15 years.
Here's to hoping the next, and actual innovative level of cracking the online education innovation is found vs reinventing the technology curriculum of the 90's with WebCT with newer themes.