Comment by tsumnia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsumnia | Hacker News Reader

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(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

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