Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

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> some never even log in to take MOOCs they register for

I've done this many times. Why? On some platforms (like Coursera) you retain access to the content of a course you have registered for, but that content isn't available for people who didn't register once the class is over. If I think I might ever want to view that content, my best bet is to register (there's no cost) and then have that content available when I want it.

I've also done this on platforms like Udacity where that's not the issue, because by registering I can create a curated list of courses I'm interested in possibly looking at in the future.

In my experience, the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time. Many people don't find lectures to be useful at all, but the vast majority of MOOCs focus on them. After the fifth time I'm stuck waiting for the teacher to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook.

I don't think I've ever seen a MOOC that had written content anywhere close to the quality of Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way.

Also, MOOC efforts for community building are (at least were) focused on a particular class rather than a particular subject. This doesn't lend itself well to long-term community building, especially when people are going through these courses and very different paces.

There seems to be lots of discussion about how MOOCs can be improved, but not much effort into actually trying different approaches.

> the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time

We are still trying to understand what makes for better "learning". If I practice the piano everyday, I will no doubt have a better ability to play, but I may not understand music theory. As a shameless plug, I am trying to add practice to be a core part of learning Computer Science and a link to my research platform is in my profile.

This is the same separate of vocational schools and coding bootcamps to graduate schools. The traditional 4-year school sits in the middle ground between application and theory and is probably why we have such difficulty deciding "success".

> to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook

This is ultimately student preference. Some students like a more affable teacher, some don't want a social-able instructor (so long as its not interfering). I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community building.

I will argue larger-scope community building is difficult and MOOCs struggle with it; I would say because of its availability. It is harder to build community when the individuals come from such diverse backgrounds. Many factors can make it difficult to build bounds (social, cultural, temporal, etc.). Furthermore, you cannot control why the student wants to take a MOOC. They may not want to give that additional effort to community building for a subject they do not perceive as having higher priority to other life decisions.

I would disagree with "actually trying different approaches". This is being done and academic journals are trying to study them (the deadline for the Journal for Education Data Mining just passed). There are also non-academic approaches like Duolingo and Khan Academy, and they are trying different techniques as well.

Ultimately, there is no panacea for learning. We know engagement can lead to learning and therefore if we can maintain engagement, we might be able to teach. Community-building can be that engagement. Self motivation can be. At that point we need to research these things more to know for sure.

> This is ultimately student preference.

Sure. But the last time I checked, almost all MOOCs were lecture focused. Like I said, I've yet to find any with a text component as good as Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way or other free online textbooks. Perhaps there's are a few out there, but every time I've browsed MOOCs I've found just about everyone to be lecture focused. Out of the dozens I've looked at (on multiple platforms) I can only think of one that wasn't, and that was eventually removed.

Plenty of people use the internet to learn plenty of things. I think it's time to consider how much of the "failure" of MOOCs is due to the failure of online learning, and how much of it is due to the fact that university classes aren't a great way to teach people things (at least for a large chunk of the population).

> I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community building.

Instructor anecdotes were an example of why I don't like lectures. With a book you can scan over content that is superfluous and get to the information you need. You can re-read or take slowly the parts you have trouble with, and quickly skip over the parts you already know. All of this is much, much harder to do with lectures.

I'm confused as to why you think professor anecdotes are related to large-scope community building? They're quite different things, and if people view them as serving the same purpose then there's even more of a misunderstanding when it comes to education than I had previously believed.

As for the difficulty of community building, I think you should broaden your horizons a bit. For instance, if you're a bit late on a Coursera course the forums are pretty much dead, and you're better off discussing things or asking questions on another site. Likewise with Udacity - the course might still be active, but everyone that has completed the course has moved on and won't see your message. This isn't because of a difficulty in community building, but because of a conscious decision that most MOOCs take to segregate their forums by class.

(I will ask if you could define "community building" a little more. You did not in your original post, and it seems my assumption was incorrect. Before trying to address better, I'd like to have a more concrete definition)

While I cannot speak for all MOOCS, I have not had the same experience. MIT's CS 6.00x course on EdX was work heavy, Udacity's Web Development course was work heavy, and even Coursera's Design of Everyday Things had participation components. In the only (barely a) MOOC that was video only, it was predominantly a "follow along with me" coding process.

For instructor lectures, I give more positive responses than negative about my anecdotes. At the end of the day, I'm human and I'm trying to enjoy my job (which students can tell if you don't). Development of tutoring systems is still in research phases as we identify knowledge components for different subjects. A history course operates different than a computer science course.

I will say EdX has produced research on instructor lecture videos. Users prefer 3-5 videos and so instructors should design courses like that. Instructors that simply upload a classroom lecture are not appropriately transitioning their material for online use. This satisfies your being able to flip from topic to topic.

I will end the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that students are not the best at assessing what they know and that a professional instructor has a better idea of what "knowing" something means. This again gets back to my discussion on vocational vs. graduate school and again, humans are flawed, imperfect beings. While an intelligent tutoring system can alleviate this issue, humans are still building them for the foreseeable future.

> Users prefer 3-5 videos and so instructors should design courses like that. Instructors that simply upload a classroom lecture are not appropriately transitioning their material for online use. This satisfies your being able to flip from topic to topic.

In my personal experience, it really doesn't. Breaking something into segments can make things a bit easier, but it still leads to a lot of wasteful time if there's a minute and a half of useful information within an 8 minutes block. You can't scan through it the way you can with a book, and it's much more difficult to review a difficult piece of information you just received (it's easy to re-read a sentence slowly, whereas rewind a video to the beginning of the last sentence is more cumbersome and you're going to be watching it at the same speed).

Text also tends to be much more succinct, where as lectures are often repetitive and meandering.

I think the assumption that multiple video segments solves the problem is instructive. Might not a large part of the problem be instructors saying "We've done X, which has solved Y issue" instead of saying "We've done X, let's look at whether or not it has solved Y issue"? I appreciate the fact that people are attempting to solve these issues, but if there's no differentiation between attempting to solve something and successfully solving something than it shouldn't be a surprise

> I will end the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that students are not the best at assessing what they know and that a professional instructor has a better idea of what "knowing" something means.

This is a pretty big assumption, and one that I don't think is accurate (based on personal experience, and my experience talking with both students and professors). The best way I've found to test one's ability is to actually apply it to a task, where it usually becomes quickly clear to the individual where the holes in their understanding are.

I searched for The Design of Everyday Things but I could only find a course with this name on Udacity, not Coursera.

Can you check and confirm?

Ah, it was Udacity, not Coursera; my apologies

I still miss the excellent Dive into Python. Last commit was 7 years ago.

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