Hacker News Reader

> Another example is Coursera and the like. You have Ivy League schools recording their lectures. Well... if I can learn CS 101 from MIT for free...

This is an interesting train of thought, and I don't think it plays out that way for most people.

My son recently started college. At the orientation sessions, it was stressed to us parents over and over that students are more likely to succeed (graduate) if they interact frequently with professors, assistants and other school resources.

The poor graduation rate of US colleges is getting a lot of attention. Some people graduate, some people don't. According to the studies cited at our orientation, which sounded reasonable to this tired father sitting in a lecture hall absorbing Too Much Information, the ones that do are much more likely to have interacted and integrated, and the ones that don't are much less likely to have done so.

Which leads me to ask the question: where is the interaction and integration in Coursera et al? It sounds great for a la carte, targeted needs, but maybe not for the broader in-discipline education you get from a degree program. Of course, the question is begged, do you need a degree program to succeed? I think for most average people (and most people are closer to average than not, what with the bell curve and all), the answer is probably yes.

Today's NYTimes has an interesting article on this very subject. Spoiler: engagement is key (though not sufficient in itself, obviously). http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/conquering-...

> Another example is Coursera and the like. You have Ivy League schools recording their lectures. Well... if I can learn CS 101 from MIT for free...

True! Abstractly, 100% perfectly true for everyone.

However... most people don't really learn well in a non-interactive environment where they most be completely self-directed. So in practical terms, it's far from ideal for most learners. It's not a coincidence that non-completion rates in MOOCs are quite high.

"I can watch recorded CS 101 lectures from MIT" is really not the same as "I learned CS 101 while attending MIT and being in an instructional environment".

Completion rates (as a percent of sign-ups, anyway) are rather irrelevant. People sign up for free classes, poke around, move on. But you could easily see a world where--regardless of drop-out rate--more people completed an MIT-taught Coursera class than actually took the "real" MIT class.

I can easily see such a world is possible, yes.

That said, completion rates do matter. If completion rates remain so sharply low, it will suggest that perhaps MOOCs are not quite the perfect replacement for instructional institutions they are often cast as.

After all, success rate is the difference between telling a randomly selected American kid "Anyone can become President!" and them actually doing so.

You can compare completion rate for a free course and a paid course based solely on how many students enrolled and how many completed the class.

You will have to set some point in the course at which you begin to compare, say for example you will start to compare all students who have completed the first half or third of the class.

Dunno why you would expect them to be equivalent, this doesn't put pressure on MIT any more than being able to video call a doctor doesn't put pressure on the world's best surgeons.

Comparing an MIT MOOC to night school is much more accurate. Completion rates there suck too.

I, personally, would not expect them to be equivalent. Self-directed learning with no feedback is much more difficult and error-prone than a guided process in an instructional environment. I use the comparison because a number of people seem to believe that the substitution is flawless and advocate for policy on those grounds.

If you turn up for an interview having learnt CS from Coursera and another candidate turns up with a degree from MIT I think we can all guess who is most likely to get the job.

In fact it's quite likely that only the MIT educated candidate would get as far as an interview.

This might change if employers see a benefit but at the moment a degree from a recognized institution will trump any amount of actual expertise for most jobs unless you can show decades of relevant experience.

Edit: s/Harvard/MIT/

This assumes both candidates have the same salary requirements.

Of course, those details are usually only discussed at the end of the interview process. So, while I actually think you make an interesting point - student loan burden requires higher salaries or, the lack of it could allow lower salaries - it won't be a competitive advantage unless our hiring process changes.

Even if education is left off the resume?

I read an article about how you don't need to go to the doctor anymore for most problems (persistent cough, fever, etc) because you can just pull up your smartphone and video-conference with a doctor 150 miles away.

For the most part, that doesn't really eliminate medical jobs, though; the doctor will spend the same time whether the patient is local or remote.

What could reduce those jobs would be automated diagnosis systems, but I really doubt they'll be allowed to issue prescriptions autonomously for a long, long time.

> you'll need... two (really one, but you'll want a trainee/backup)

I'm amused that the canonical Sysadmin humor series (BOFH) always had two, the master and the apprentice, er, PFY.

All of the things you mention work only on paper.

Like most things "about to be automated". "The most frequent jo in America is about to get automated". Yeah. In about 100 years of constant infrastructure investment. About 80% of truck driving will be automated.

Doesn't quite ring like other titles though, does it? Or the wet fantasies?

> you'll need... two

Or even less than that. At the level of everything's automated just hire another company or even the DC you're housed in to handle the odd issue.

>Pretty interesting stuff! Exciting times we're coming to live in.

Exciting? Hardly. When you have everything you have nothing. How do you get over the asocial aspect of self learning?

"When you have everything you have nothing."

I don't see any real meaning in this statement. The "nothing" of having all your material needs and wants met at your whim, is better than having to struggle all day every day just to survive - except for people whose entire value system is built around the virtue of hard work and struggle, or for people who think it's valuable and important that humans rely on other humans, and therefore like arrangements in which individuals will fail on their own and are forced to cooperate with others in order to survive.

Those value systems are not inherently right, and not everyone holds them. Why is there anything to "get over" about the not-necessarily-social aspects of individual freedom and opportunity?

As an individual, having everything is great, can't deny that, but as a society, it could be a disaster. Asimov described very well the risks of such a society in the "Robots Series".

I think that the phrase "When you have everything you have nothing." alludes to commoditization.

>How do you get over the asocial aspect of self learning?

Meetups for the weekly and conferences for the monthly / quarterly.

There are a number of slack channels I'm on for various interests. That gives me the daily.

All said there is no substitute for real human interaction. But you have to play the cards you are dealt.