Coursera raises Series D
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
My wife started the bioinformatics track and was deeply disappointed by the complete lack of any support on the forums. There isn't even a nominal course TA who helps answer questions posted by paying students. For several hundred dollars, you get the privilege of viewing a sequence of videos and going through assessments that can vary substantially in quality, without any prospect of getting any help from a community.
I've taken my share of Coursera courses in the past, but I didn't even bother with the Hinton's Neural Network class after my wife's experience and after checking it out and realizing that all the courses are pretty much zombie courses with no instructor or TA participation.
If you want quality online education, look no further than edX. There are some amazing courses on there (especially a bunch of MIT, Harvard and Caltech courses) and all of them have a pretty good amount of instructor, student and TA participation. It's so good that I've almost always paid for the certification simply to show my support to the universities in the hopes that they continue providing these classes freely to anyone with the interest and determination to learn something new.
Udacity is okay... it started with similar lofty goals and then pivoted hard to being a very for-profit organization. Nothing inherently bad about it, but I look at most of their newer content as going to a trade school where you just learn the essentials to cobble some things together without a deeper understanding of things. Udacity courses will rarely satisfy a deeper intellectual curiosity, though they will likely help you get started with coding. That being said, they do have some great content from when they first started out, including Peter Norvig's outstanding course on Design of Computer Programs.
To contrast, edX will typically run courses 1 - 2x times a year and any time they are run, they typically will at the very least have TA participation although in the 15+ edX courses I've taken, there has always been active instructor participation too. Moreover, by restricting enrollment to 1-2X times a year, it encourages more participation with very active forums and discussions, even when tackling courses that are 4+ years old. Caltech's outstanding Learning from Data course had over 100 replies on many HW discussions despite being run many years after the original edX course (though the most credit has to go to Prof. Mostafa who is an outstanding professor and educator).
edX does have other courses that are "archived". Some of these you are allowed to study at your own pace but they are upfront about the fact that you're on your own and more importantly, they don't try to get you to pay them money for a certificate when going through such a course. That is the right and ethical approach imho.
The only difference between them and watching some free videos on e.g. iTunes U is that Coursera requires homework, has the nearly useless peer-review and one has to pay for watching.
I also took on eDx "Welcome to MITx's 7.00x! Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life". This is a great course, I liked the videos with E. Lander. But there was little difference in support with the "System Biology" specialization on Coursera. Getting quickly an obvious answer, does not help more than getting no answer at all.
The big difference for me, and in favor to MITx's 7.00x, is that the design of the exam was much more sophisticated than in "System Biology".
From a technological standpoint Coursera is also poor, downloading multiple megabytes of javascript to display text and videos, and to allow form submissions for quizzes. Navigation is wonky and slow. During the final peer review section of one of my courses many students ran into bugs where Coursera failed to register that a review had been completed. Luckily I got a hold of a mentor, who then had access to Coursera tech support. But the official forums seemed to be devoid of any paid employees...
Unfortunately, after these experiences I'll never pay for anything on Coursera again.
The quality of their courses and their offerings is great. Also the very real mentoring is awesome.
I think online education companies are starting to figure out that
Online education != pure self study
I think more and more human support will be injected back into online courses.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I haven't seen a Coursera class that cost more than $79.00 and all the ones I've taken will let you switch sessions as many times as you want (so far as I can tell) making the nominal timeline a non-issue. I recently started a Bayesian Statistics class on Coursera, then got really busy with other stuff halfway through... I've switched sessions like 4 times now with no problem.
- Lectures are divided into small chunks, often 5 minutes or less. I'm easy to be bored, but was hardly when taking the course.
- Interactive review questions are provided for every subtopic of a lesson.
In contrast, Georgia Tech has the seemingly successful comp sci program and the number of K-12 students earning some credits in online courses continues to grow ( http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/virtual-schools...).
Hopefully the universities give it another shot with the impacted courses. Perhaps they just need to qualify students for the online experience, it does take a certain discipline.
Further Georgia Tech allows residential students to watch lectures online in lieu of attending classes and its still the cheapest MS available for just 6000 bucks tops. Its a pathbreaking achievement in online learning.
I was finishing my Masters when Coursera, Udacity exploded on to the scene and my Advisor remarked at the time "In a couple of years, we probably won't need to teach Calculus anymore!". Somehow that one thing really stuck in my mind: what really helped me learn personally was always being able to ask questions, explore and find answers when I was stuck; if I'm unable to do that, I lose any sense of progress and quickly lose interest. I'm really hoping what my advisor said then doesn't really happen.
We absolutely value the college experience. I, personally, didn't complete college; but I consider it a lot like my military experience. It helps develop the "whole person concept" - there's more than just the skills/tasks for the job that helps develop someone into a productive member of society.
But, once that person is a productive member of society, once they've established that maturity; that's where products like our Nanodegree program fall in to place. We're uniquely positioned to offer educational opportunities in that skills-gap between college and career, between life events (like stay-at home mothers) and re-entering the career field, between your current level/position in your company and the next.
These fields move so quickly... a 4yr degree and completely taking over your life - when you have other commitments (children, a career, etc) - is unreasonable. We are life-long learning and firmly believe every X years (3-5 maybe? society will define this), you're going to need to get yourself back on track given your goals. That's where we fit in - we have no intent to replace college.