Why we need more than “learn at your own pace” online learning
blog.brainstation.io
blog.brainstation.io
People shouldn't confuse completion rate with a particular course with a student reaching proficiency in a particular subject. There have been several courses I've started were I quickly got annoyed by the copious amount of filler in the lectures and dropped the course in favor of a book or web tutorial.
In general I think MOOCs are doing themselves a disservice by trying to copy college courses.
I agree completely - it seems almost 'cargo cult' - they are just copying colleges assuming it will be successful rather than examining what it was that made that work for colleges and how they can adapt it to the MOOC model.
So just from a "course completion" point of view, I'd think it'd be hard to tell the difference between courses I liked, but moved on to topics I didn't like, vs. the ones I just thought weren't any good. But the fact that I stuck with some courses all the way through should at least be good for something.
Certificates/exams/etc. are all used as proxies for demonstrating that in a complex and expensive way.
Perhaps Udacity et. al. need an equivalent to "audit" - sounds like that would work for you.
For MOOCs, there are very few entry requirements so of course you can going to get low completion rate because lots of people are just "window shopping" so to speak.
Filtering for the subset of people committed in a certain way isn't really a proof of a good learning format. And to me, not necessarily the best way to bring education to a wider range of students. Filtering for commitment might be argued that it's effective on some level as an efficient use of teaching resources - but I think that needs deeper examination too.
1) No distracting interruptions from self-absorbed students asking 'questions' [more often than not, really just statements] that would have better have been reserved for after class / office hours
2) Prof / TA doesn't show up drunk and disorganized
3) If you miss something while taking notes, no sweat -- just rewind and listen again! As a copious note-taker, this is huge for me.
4) Flexible class times keep me much more healthy [can get sleep when needed, etc]
5) No travel time, finding a seat, wanting to talk to a girl instead of focus on lecture, etc etc with all the frustrations / inconveniences that are just not there in online courses
I could rattle on a lot more, but ca suffit for now
Clearly there are more effective (and more expensive) ways to get fit, but some people manage on their own with a gym membership and access to /r/fitness or whatever, so it's not exactly ineffective.
Some people manage to get fit on their own without a gym membership or any equipment at all, so it's not exactly effective either.
It seems the only way to “complete” a Coursera course is to pay $50 so the assignments will be graded. At least this is the case for: https://www.coursera.org/learn/battery-management-systems
But then again, except for entry level positions, few hiring managers care about any formal education for IT positions.
From what I can gather, the few certificates that companies care about are RedHat, Cisco, and AWS certs. I’m sure there are a few more that are outside of my area of expertise.
I went through the Microsoft Architect Certification track as a commitment device to force me to study, but I didn’t put it on my resume and never told my employer. But I was trying to transition from a C/C++ bit twiddler to an “Enterprise Developer”.
I have certifications that people well below my skill level were also able to achieve, but I know I can speak to the topics much more authoritatively. It's not a binary signal.
I agree that certain industry certifications are more legitimate than most, although I think continuing education falls in a different but partially overlapping area. Nand2Tetris is the first MOOC I have paid for, because it seemed like a very interesting course that's recognized as legitimate by a substantial portion of people with whom I might enjoy working. Paying is also a good motivator to see it to completion.
Any technology that I’m able to discuss intelligently is usually referenced as part of what I did on a job. I leave off any technology that I know but don’t want to be asked about or come up in a recruiter’s keyword search.
For instance, I don’t mention C/C++ even though I did it for 12 years or PHP.
I want my interviews to be focused on my strong areas and technologies that I want to use- which are usually the ones that I have real world experience with.
Personally I appreciate the opportunity to not be stuck taking on new work that depends entirely on my previous employment. I find that people who pursue interests outside the scope of their day job tend to be good at thinking through problems and maintaining a healthy attitude, so I’m glad to discuss hobbies with people.
Every job has “must have” requirements and “nice haves but be willing to learn”. I focus on jobs that will hire me based on the must haves where I can learn the nice to haves.
A lot of times that means the line between “work” and self study gets blurry. I might be “working” 60 hour weeks but producing 40 hours worth of work product and spending the rest of the time learning. That also means now my resume has work experience with the new-to-me technology/framework. It helps to work for small companies. You get more opportunities to learn and do low priority side projects on the job.
If that opportunity doesn’t avail itself, then do a side project and throw it up on GitHub and then we can discuss it.
I take almost any MOOC as a positive signal that this candidate invests their own time in ongoing professional development, but I have encountered some who apparently learned nothing, maybe got someone else to take the tests or used a braindump site.
Also, if you do a proper technical screen, you should be able to find out whether they are keeping up with technology. In that case, why does it matter if they get it through a MOOC, Pluralsight, YouTube, etc.?
I mean, I get that a swarm of developers are brushing up on sites like coursea, Udemy, threehouse or whatever, but I’ve seen a few of those courses, and a lot of the instructors really shouldn’t be teaching anyone. I’m not sure a coursea certificate would be an advantage, because the quality of coursea isn’t recognized, but on the other hand, I really don’t see how it would be a disadvantage either. If it’s all you got, I probably wouldn’t hire you, but if you’ve got a CS degree and a coursea certificate, I really don’t see why that would ever be negative.
A Microsoft or Cisco certificate on the other hand is valuable and will get you a long way though. On the organizational site, prince2 is also really valuable even though the prince2 way of doing pm is somewhat dated.
To show you just how valuable they are, we wouldn’t hire a network engineer who isn’t Cisco certified and we wouldn’t hire anyone for operations who hasn’t completed a bunch of Microsoft and Azure certificates. Unless we absolutely had to, but then we would enroll you in the courses and get you certified.
I’m assuming by “Microsoft Cert” you are referring to operations certs and not developer certs.
10 years ago after staying at one company for 9 years and before that at another for three doing mostly C and C++ with a smattering of VB6, Perl, and JavaScript, I looked at where most of the jobs were in my local market - a major metropolitan area with a lot of Enterprise Java/.Net and web jobs.
I had two offers one for $20K more than I was making as a C++ developer and one as a high entry level .Net developer paying only $7K more (yeah wage compression is real). I took the second offer. I knew in 3 years my options were going to be limited for C jobs.
10 years and 4 additional jobs later and making $70K more, it was the right decision. There are very few jobs making what I make now in my local area for C developers, plenty for “Enterprise” developers/architects.
Going back on topic about certificates, I’m again at the same crossroads. I got to where I am being mostly a backend developer/architect with very little modern front end experience. Also, in my local market, “full stack web developers” are becoming a commodity and make less than I do now.
So along with learning $frontend_framework_of_the_week just to check off the box, I’m working on AWS certs, since they are still marketable and the only way I can make the next jump without going into management is by being an overpriced “implementation consultant”.
Net ops: traditional networking, patching, security groups, manually provisioning resources, web based load balancer, and the kinds of things you do on prem. This part is easily outsourced. Also companies that just do a lift and shift of an on premise mindset usually would be better off with a cheaper VPS solution or even colo.
Devops: CLoudFormation (Infrastructure as Code), Code Deploy, CodePipeline, OpsWork (Chef?). Most of the outsourced labor and honestly most of the AWS support companies don’t have a clue about this.
Development: Databass optimizations with SQL and NoSql data stores (DynamoDB, ElasticSearch), Autoscaling, SQS, SNS, lambda, etc. Again, most outsourced labor don’t have a clue about this either.
Most “AWS Architects” come from a traditional networking background and that’s all they know. They take their knowledge and map it very badly to AWS.
Someone who has done full stack software architecture and knows AWS inside out from a development, devops, and net ops perspective will be competitive.
Just like all other outsourcing, companies keep the “architects” in house or local and outsource the commoditized development.
Straight “AWS Architects” make less than “full stack developers” and wages for both seem to be stagnating in most of the US. Architects/Team Leads are making more but that’s stagnating too. But good “Implementation Consultants” who can combine both are making more. If you can market your consultants as “Cloud transformation consultants” (Yes I died a little saying that) you can make a lot more.
EdX grades exercises for audit students, on every course I’ve done there the free/paid experience is identical, the only difference is whether they issue a “verified certificate” at the end. Often people audit courses and only upgrade to paid once they have a passing grade.
Anyway, I think this might be a sign for the things to come. A lot(!) of edX courses, despite being okay or even good, have very low participation judging by forum activity. I think the course makers at the universities are going to feel more and more pressure from money-counting management about cost/benefit for the institution.
It's sad that to me to see that everyone does their own (often inadequate) little course instead of working together to create something bigger, better. I would like to see platforms like edX and Coursera not as market places like Ebay for lots of still very traditional little courses, but as platforms that encourage jointly working on something better (in addition to the current model, not as total replacement). Of course, 90% of why they don't (can't) do or become that is that those making the courses won/t or can't do it. Everybody works in isolation on their own small course(s).
A ways back I took 1/3 of an MIT OCW course and it was incredibly impactful.
I guess some would say I should have completed it but that can be arbitrary. I got what I felt I needed.
Hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this one needs a housecall from the vet
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/chemistry/atomic-structu...
A couple of other personality types / situations to consider:
1) Some people treat learning the way they treat a workout... procrastination is the path of least resistance. So metrics like course completion % 'gamify' it for them to give them the push they need to keep motivated.
2) In the business world, think of the times someone has said 'I'm not trained in that' (or something along those lines, often to try to get out of doing something) and the boss says 'well, go get trained in that.' Course completion is a thing that can be shown to said boss to 'prove' they learned something. While self-learners would tend to keep their mouths shut about not knowing it and say 'sure, no problem' and then go find whatever training materials were needed to learn said thing.
Sure, there are countless massively popular channels with garbage pop content, but that may be due to the "general" nature of the content. The broad audience keeps it at the top of the most watched lists.
I think if you aggregate all the technical content, the "long tail" might be more numerous than the hump of the curve.
There are channels about programming, woodworking, plumbing, HVAC, construction, 3d printing, PC building, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, knitting, photography, cinematography,graphic design ... it just goes on and on. Sure, most of those channels may only have a hundred thousand or fewer subscribers (with some exceptions in the millions) but I wouldn't doubt that in aggregate they surpass junk like moviemojo and cat videos in time watched.
Youtube is an amazing phenomenon that I think doesn't get enough credit because of all the junk on there, but the fact that I can search for how to remove the abs module on a 2007 BMW 750li and get multiple videos showing how to do it just blows me away and definitely makes it a lot easier to get things done.
One of the garbage things about YT, though, is that the third thing on that video's "watch next" list will be some dude telling you that ABS part of a global conspiracy to get mind-controlling computers into every car.
I prefer those with 4-7 minutes minutes per video. I've noticed that many long videos can be much shorter with minimal editing to remove unnecessary pauses, uhmms...
Though I think most of the online courses I've taken have delivered exceptional value, as you say, the "one-take-and-done" editing style is ubiquitous and leaves one to sit through a lot of ummmming, digression, and jabbering.
[Come to think of it, so did most of my courses at university!]
For YouTube playlists, the same. However, for one-off youtube tutorial videos, I do long videos as well.
The worst is when they start each and every 3.5 minute video with a ten second introduction, for those who already forgot what course they are in and what they just heard last only three minutes ago.
When I see things like this, or the doctor that I saw yesterday (who didn't know me) immediately switching to a "baby talk" style (for all conversations with her patients, I later observed) I wonder what kind of people (students, patients) they have to deal with in their jobs that they switch to by default assuming the worst.
I made a career transition to software development and the resource that had the most impact, by far, in my learning was freeCodeCamp.
At the time FCC had only 3 certificates (now is 6 I guess), but I only completed the first one - Frontend.
I noticed this about all those "machine learning courses" that are getting posted here. Facebook and Google basically hand them out for free, hundreds of hours worth of quality learning material. Top universities let you watch all their lectures online. So what's the catch? Why aren't we all machine learning experts already? Because it's hard to muster the energy unless you commit to earning a degree by, yes, studying for exams. Turns out that's actually thousands of hours of work so the "convenience" part of online courses kinda starts to fade.
I definitely noticed that the quality difference between a good university and a bad one is often about how much they value "education" beyond just being an "exam machine". Presenting facts from the point of view of someone new to them, presenting methods of how to deal with edge cases and traps, taking one-on-one tutoring sessions seriously.
But yea, the end result is getting confirmation for having passed a bunch of exams.
MOOCs for purely pedagogical reasons are sometimes hard to find in ML, not only for the aforementioned reasons, but creating a MOOC is simply resource intensive. It follows that many of the producers that truly value education are actual universities. Hybrid models like Coursera and Udacity are still trying to figure out how to get out of the red.
All of this to say that I'm still very grateful for content creators who go beyond simple framework tutorials.
Even though the concept of an MOOC has been around for quite some time now, it's only recently that their curricula at the course level is actually consistently on par with what would be seen in a good university environment (think like "Top 50" University).
There's also the problem of knowing what you don't know. If an expert in the field is educating you they will give you a full picture of the field and what's important in it. But if you're self taught you can miss entire areas and never realize their importance from reading academic sources.
I'm not against self teaching or MOOCs at all. I just think they need more structure and require more commitment to be as useful as university is to society. They're a bit too casual, requiring much more self drive which is harder than just setting deadlines and exams.
I wish there were more courses breaking down the algorithms in the latest research papers and actually implementing the models .
I did a few calculus questions and noticed two aspects which I think could be improved:
1) the multiple-choice question format makes questions easier than they appear. I solved a differential-equation question by differentiating all 4 possible solutions, I would have been unable to solve it otherwise.
2) Most questions require combining several pieces of knowledge to arrive at a solution, but the Elo rating only keeps track of a score for the type of question. If you mess up a chain-rule question by misremembering the derivative of the inverse cosecant function, then you should get more questions about the inverse cosecant function rather than the chain rule, and vice versa.
That said, changing those two things would require a lot of work, so I understand why it is the way it is.
What you get from MOOCs is directly proportional to how seriously you approach them. Yes, MOOCs do less handholding (aka: forcing adults to behave like adults) than traditional university courses.
But they are also 100x cheaper and easier to access. If you approach them the right way you can get way more. I do still believe that for your 1st degree a traditional university is still the right choice, but there's no reason to return to university after graduation.
It's interesting how much this varies globally. In the UK I had zero hand-holding for my undergraduate degree. In the last two years of high school there would be constant reminders that this would be coming. You'd turn up to lectures, occasionally have coursework that at most counted for 30% of the overall course. There was very limited access to the lecturer outside of the lectures, and occasionally their grad students would help with labs. Most of that was by design, but there was the ability for faculty to get by with minimal effort and not face consequences.
For some courses, I wish I had had access to the level of hand holding that seems to exist in the US at the undergraduate level. Overall, I think that the experience of being left to my devices has worked out better in the long-run, even if my results at the undergraduate level could have been better.
Your experience mirrors mine in Finland. You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams. No one cared whether you attended the lectures or the exercise sessions, you were simply expected to be able to apply the material by the end of the course.
However it depended heavily on faculty or even field. I think the humanists had to attend many of their lectures, while the exact sciences didn't have such requirements (although the physics department also insisted on handing in exercises; profs probably got tired of grading people trying their luck).
I felt I was lucky for the freedom I was granted, although I too felt I would have liked more face to face teaching for some courses (it also allowed for making poor decisions regarding priorities, though I have no regrets).
I think other students had the same sentiments, and difficult courses began having more free-form sessions in addition to lectures and exercises. I feel this is a pretty good compromise of sorts, as it allows for different styles of learning, and you could even hold a day job while studying, or live out of city etc. as you're not forced to be physically present.
> You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams
And aside from a few exceptions, this is exactly how I approached my studies. I'd show up on day 1, the day of each midterm, and the last day of class before the final exam.
I didn’t show up at all, as the class notes were available online and all assignments were online submission (on a VAX, of all things in 1999). When I arrived at the midterm, the professor called the UPD, as he had never seen me before.
I also did what you did in my years at school and I regret it deeply. Noone would take on welding without being next to an experienced welder, why is this any different with other subjects? I now wish I had been smarter and spent more time with my professors outside of the class to learn by watching them work on problems and work with them.
Creating mountains for people to climb isn't always the best approach. By creating a series of small foothills, learners can pick and choose which tasks they need experience on and I believe this also leads to better skill retention.
"War and Peace" is not a book you can study as a single short task. Breaking it down doesn't work because every class assumes you have read it recently and done the previous class - we would end up with thousands of people who complete just one or two classes and very few who complete the entire sequence. If completion is the goal we would still fail. Maybe you can call some units optional, but the value requires you to complete most of the sequence.
We don't read war and peace in one sitting either, we read part of a chapter. Likewise working through materials can be done in smaller pieces while part of a larger whole.
The monolith structure of a course that can't be broken down is the challenge.
Flipping the classroom means having concise entry points to all the lessons which a learner can more broadly dip into.
When you are taking a course to expand your abilities, you learn voluntarily.
I find learning via projects is the fastest and most useful. I am unsure if I will take courses ever again.
For instance, I’m not going to learn the intricacies of Rust to scratch an itch if I see that there are no jobs for it.
Does that make me mercenary and show a lack of “passion”? Probably.
Are there nothing you do out of passion? I'm sure there is. You got any hobbies? I'm sure you learn about that voluntarily.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy development and learning more about software development/architecture, but I focus that on what’s marketable.
Plenty of learning involved with that. Spending time with you wife means constantly learning about her, and about you and her in tandem. Exercising means constantly learning about your body and the exercises you do, and the combination of those parts. Of course, it is possible to spend time with someone as well as exercising without learning anything, but it seems you a voluntarily involved in both, so my guess is that you are not resisting learning but are instead voluntarily learning :)
I also learn mostly through projects but I think sometimes it's good to take a dedicated class to expand my horizon further than the immediate need or just into a completely new area.
For every project I do, I will have many shitty project follow alongs from MOOC's
Its far more efficient I learn the big picture in the shallowest way possible, than deep dive into a project
Learning by necessity means you get the happy path to work.
It's not uncommon for curriculum to be out of touch with what has
Life is not linear. Why are traditional education and MOOCs linear and monolothic? Career paths are no longer linear, but so much education continues to be linear.
The pace of innovation adoption in education is very slow, partially due to the lack of technological abilities of leadership and management in education. There is often little vision, and where there might be, there is fear.
MOOCs do not represent all, or the best forms of online learning. They represent the best of what non technical educators came up with.
MOOC structures are clearly late 90's/early 2000's, I know because I worked on a platform to deliver high school education. Little has changed. Education has moved forward very little, the devices, connectivity, and videos have gotten sexier, but it's too often more of the same.
If anything, MOOCs are a concoction of academia working to deliver traditional lectures digitally, but not using the digital medium as well as it could be.
MOOCs have a place in the world still to be effective, it's just not a gold standard or a silver bullet.
70% of learning is informal and outside of the classroom. MOOCs generally do not address this well.
Self-directed learning is going to be a real thing, because it already is. We search constantly for answers on mobile, to construct new abilities.
Academic Institutions are losing a lot of money and it's estimated at least 1/3rd will close in the next 10 years. Many simply cannot keep up with the rate of change in today's world of disruption in a few years. Most existing curriculum is for positions that don't change often.
A completion percentage is a poor metric because it does not measure comprehension and competencies/skills.
The current options are abysmal, sadly.
Still I'm starting to feel optimistic for the first time in a long time.
There is a horizon on the future, finally thanks to the convergence of more accessible connectivity, devices and capabilites of digital experiences in the next 2 years.
For services and apps to emerge, to make things less abysmal? I don’t see what you are hopeful for, what the given things would change.
Today most places are creating content a 20 year old way. It can't keep up with today's pace or depth of ongoing changes, or how quickly education content is needed on new topics in the future.
Is it that what you mean with „new capabilities of digital experiences“ and „creating content a 20 year old way“? Or do you talk about the formats they are created in?
Many, many of the MOOCs I’ve ever done were free or a nominal cost ($5-20).
When you’re attending a class at a university or even a local community college you’ve put in a lot of initial work to just get into the class (applying, transcripts, student portal straight out of 1977 that makes MSDOS look pretty) compounded that at minimum you’re paying $300 for a 3 credit class before any book fees.
There’s tremendous more skin in the game for those classes than a MOOC so it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
I remember when signing up for classes at my uni circa 2002, the easiest way was to call into the scheduling system. The man speaking to you from the automated system was a professor who had died years earlier.
So I'll one-up your old student portal by saying that to sign up for classes at my university, I had to communicate with the dead. :)
I'm not an expert on education, but logically, I'm thinking that effectiveness relies on an end result in the first place. That is, can you measure the effectiveness of MOOCs when the course(s) where not completed to begin with. That's like me saying that traditional in-classroom classes were in-effective because I dropped out of college. I would wager that measuring something such as hiring rate after course completion would provide a better metric.
Edit: Including the source article in question
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/08/researchers-e...
E.g. They were trying to see whether they save money that way.
This is thinly veiled marketing for their services.
Personally, I greatly prefer it. The first statement "Learners Need to Attend to Succeed" is sort of double edged; my first try at college, I didn't attend class for a variety of reasons (mostly depression), and I know well enough that if I were required to go to a physical classroom while working full time, there's no chance I'd actually show up. By allowing me to work at home when it's most convenient for me, I actually do the assigned reading and homework.
Also, the line "Learners Need Access to Expertise" strikes me as a bit strange; do people have problems finding experts on stuff? For my online school, I can bother the professor for help whenever I need it, but I also don't have too much trouble finding someone smarter than me on IRC.
I’ve spent the last two years self educating myself (in addition to working on something). I’ve never felt so intellectually engaged and just idk alive? All the hard shit that you might struggle with becomes trivial if you spend a little more time on it.
I believe the best way is to offer options for all people. (Not going into the proven-debunked-proven-debunked learning styles rabbit hole here).
I've tried both a Bachelors and Masters by correspondence and performed dismally in both. I had due dates, I was financially invested but I just couldn't get engaged with the materials. The Blackboard BBS was not even close to a community of my peers and lecturers. (Seriously Blackboard fix that).
I'm now 2 years into a 4 year part time MBA at a university that I attend on campus. I am engaged because I go to classes & I discuss things with both tutors, lecturers & peers, my lecturer is a person and not doing my best and then showing up to class is disrespectful and frankly embarrassing. I have gone from not even submitting some assignments because <insert excuse about life/work/busy> to a GPA that isn't perfect but is closer than I ever expected.
I've also not finished a number of Coursera, PluralSight, Lynda and Linux Academy courses, but I've got value from them.
Kudos to brainstation for trying to build a better platform. In the meantime I'm working like crazy to finish my MBA before my uni follows too many others into the world of online classes.
Might be worth even if you had to pay a fee for it and take tests to set it up. Or maybe interstitial ads could handle the testing.
Learning would be constant but not require a big time commitment. It's integrated into your leisure activities. Nor would it be easy to set aside.
For example, in my spare time I've been taking music production and gamedev courses. In both cases, the courses are still at your own pace, but they provide official ways to contact the instructors and they respond within 24 hours, and they also provide either a discord/slack channel or a facebook group for sharing/pairing/asking questions with other students.
While I'm typically the 10% completion type of student the article mentions, I've found both provided forms of communication to be very helpful in keeping me motivated to work through the courses. When I get stuck on a concept I can take a break and reach out to the instructors, and I find the ability to share and see others music/games gives me some inspiration to continue learning and working.
Is it great content? Does it inspire my curiosity? Is it memorable? Does it teach me things I can apply? Does it add layers of needless complexity? Is it an exercise in abstract curriculum box-ticking? Is it an ideology in wrapping paper?
I think the gap between 100% and the actual MOOC completion rate also represents the gap between our ideal of education was and what it actually is. Without all the academic window dressing, most people just learn the parts they want. The pedagogs doth protest too much, methinks.
Bingo! Although the completion rate was low—single digit—more students completed the the first 6.002x offering on edX than have completed the course at MIT in the entire history the course has been offered. As others have mentioned, the completion rate will always be low for numerous reasons. However, if you compare the raw number of students completing the courses, and the costs paid by students, MOOCs come out ahead.
Online learning is cost-effective though. You can effectively specialize in anything computer-science based for less than $100 with all the free content / cheap MOOC's available. Or you could attend a live seminar / webinar etc where you can work with other people, etc. But this comes at a significantly higher cost at a faster learning rate.
Why not take the best of both worlds? It all boils down to the best value for the buck
1) Learn things online at your own pace, 2x speed, playback as necessary.
2) Take the extraordinate amount of money you would have spent elsewhere, use a fraction of the cost with hackhands / make your own ad-agency for hiring upwork specialists in issues you have. This scales indefinitely, now you always have an expert on hand and consequently, form a long term business relationship with. There's no roadblocks anymore.
3) You get on demand help onpar with in-house training / tutoring, assuming its a popular topic. For example, learning nodejs /react. There's tons of qualified tutors that will charge $1/minute from india/europe with hackhands and/or similar.
4) There's always forums and or Q/A on MOOC's who have had similar issues to you. Assuming its a popular course. Stackoverflow / reddit / etc is always available too
5) Techmeetups and my city's dev channel has lots of great people. Also, techtalks to explore different topics
Learning on your own effectively does require a small investment paying for tutors, but its significantly cheaper and arguably sometimes even more efficient than learning through a program.
I know exactly what I'm getting everytime, from the comforts of my own workarea. No wasted time driving, 2x playback speed, triple monitor setup/mechanical keyboard, on-demand tutoring within 5 minutes, etc. I don't have to worry about the instructor being subpar compared to what I can find online.
We focus on assignments - programming & software engineering assignments eat far too much time to get top marks and still attend classes. When I finish assignments, I binge watch lectures and write notes like a madman.
But yeah, I really doubt the attendance studies.
That being said, as others have pointed out attendance likely increases skin in the game and results in more work in general. Another improvement across the general population is the social aspect of class, forming study groups or informal support structures, as well as increased attachment to material by being part of a group in general.
While as professional I much prefer MOOCs (even if I don’t finish them) I don’t think I would have gotten through my college curriculum without that social context. Just too many distractions. In fact, the most common reason for people failing out of my program was over use of video games and other media (drug and alcohol abuse got you placed into a rehab cycle with possibility of return). Being wanting to keep up with my known peers definitely motivated me to work more and consume material better
That doesn't disprove the claim that it's possible to lecture in a way that students do benefit from turning up.
Not that this particular study is necessarily convincing -- but your anecdote has no value in determining if it is or isn't.
_That said_, I suspect that this effect is almost entirely attributable to lurking variables such as discipline and interest. A lot of students with poor attendance are either students with poor work habits, or ones don't care about the course. Both of those tend to produce poor grades. The study cited addressed study habits, and maybe touched on interest a little, but It's hard for me to say exactly how well they adjusted for those since it's paywalled.
Yeah sure you can say "learners need this environment, this attendance, etc" but you're falling into the trap of what we have right now -- we think we know what's best for people to learn.
And while true for many people they definitely WILL learn with established practices, not everyone will learn as well as they could.
Most of the people I see making that argument are "education experts" who are extremely arrogant. My prediction is they made these arguments because they feel threatened by the potential that MOOCs have. If MOOCs become very high quality then there is the very real threat that people will start asking if the preference for physical classroom time still has value.
This reeks of selection bias and conflating correlation with causation to me. The abstract of the linked study does not seem to draw causal conclusions.
I can only imagine doing this for things like a math-light "intro to neural networks" (my only completed MOOC and more of an tensorflow-tutorial) or "Accounting for dummies".
EDIT: What I want to say: to me, it feels nearly impossible to learn the stuff I learned in my more challenging lectures completely on my own with online-videos.
[1] this feels weird as a ML-dude
In the case of software related tasks, it's learning skills, competencies, and building software, which is on the computer.
Digital learning is not happening, because current implementations have been anchored in the past (recording lectures) instead of creating meaningful digital experiences. Educators generally don't have the technology skills to create meaningful digital learning experiences.
The technologists that can create meaningful digital learning experiences are often not in the decision making capacity that they could be.
What I wanted to say is that I can't see how you could learn (without being exceptionally dedicated) challenging topics. Things you normally go to university for. Things where you constantly have to do difficult exercises, where you find yourself wanting to quit, but you have to keep pushing yourself through it. In the end, it's fun. But the path you have to travel to get there is not (always).
You say you can't see how it can be done without being exceptionally dedicated; I don't know what counts as "exceptional dedication", but I feel there's a context missing here. Is it expected (not necessarily by you - but are you seeing this expectation in other people) that it's possible to learn large amounts of difficult material without putting the time and effort in?
In germany, if you study at a university, you are completely on your own. Nobody is forcing you to do anything and you can push your exams into the next semester until they kick you out for studying too long. So, there are some similarities to online-lectures.
I think I have found my strategy for "getting good" at stuff:
1. I need to be motivated: I am currently motivated that I want to understand how machine-learning really works and can be improved. Getting exposed to research is super fun and currently the reason why I am doing all this. What's a good notion of generalization? What's representation-learning? etc. We have a very active community here and I get to know many people from the industry, academia etc. and through my research-assistant student-job I learn how they work on stuff.
2. Don't do it alone & and have a regular schedule: Solving hard problem-sets together is one of the most-rewarding things I have ever done in my life. I even try to do proofs from papers with others in my free time! But also: train with old tests together, do the problem-sets together etc. There are a lot of groups quickly forming during lectores or before tests that I can just join. I don't need to do everything together, but meeting one or two times a week is an immense boost to my dedication and everything is just way more rewarding. I had a few lectures where I was completely on my own and it was way harder to develop the drive I usually had.
I don't think I can really replicate this for online-courses. I'll adress the points from above:
1. A university is a place where there's always something interesting. So many people studying interesting things. When I started CS, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. The intellectual stimulus is better than I have thought it would be. An online CS-course would probably have also thought me about the topics, but I don't think you get to know any research groups and their topics. I don't think this is a fundamental problem with MOOC, because the situation can be different. But at this point in my life, it was quit important.
2. I think this is the deal-breaker. Reflecting on my life, I don't really do that much completely on my own. Most of my hobbies are not something I do alone. I also don't live alone (and I don't think I ever want to). Doing stuff in a team is just a real Value-Multiplicator (this probably reads weird, but I think it captures best what I mean) for me. It's not that things are not fun to do alone ("=" 1fun), but they are way more fun to do in a team ("=" xfun for some x > 1). I don't know whether organizing local study-groups for an online-course is really the same experience, especially if you're taking just a few courses.
Because we are in the real world, there are always exceptions to the rule. For example, I can program alone without any problems. I could probably program for days without anyone bothering me. It's not that it's inherently more fun, i really don't know why. I always get interesting ideas when I am alone and I like to develope them (before speaking with friends about them). I also like to read, but I haven't done this in a while. Some things are not that fun to do in a group.
I want add that I have already completed one and finished 30% to 70% of a few other online-lecture (some where not really interesting after a while, others I didn't have time anymore). So I am not speaking about the entire concept.
I think I am not alone, because this is a very common pattern at my university.
EDIT: after thinking about it: I really think that some things just don't make that much fun alone. And that includes a lot of things I do in university.
Maybe it's not what our degree makes of us, but what we make of our degree/education.
University is where I learned to teach myself bececause my brilliant highly rated Comp Sci profs and program couldn't teach or communicate the best.
How about this: You can't afford to pause your entire life to do a 4 year degree.
But it's usually not as challenging as going to a university for a full-time study.
The difference to full-time university degrees is that they are (usually) not research-focused. So you just learn, for example, business management, but they don't try to teach you how to do research, read and understand papers. It's a big difference. You mostly don't need much math if you don't want to do research.
But I've always wondered...is there a differentiation in america between universities and other higher-education institutions?
MOOCS too often penalize you for not doing their exercises that don't always provide that much value and don't credit you for exploring other concepts further.
Additionally, when you have questions, office hours, message forums, Slack channels, and external sources (youtube, other courses, blog articles) are good sources.
Ultimately, it just comes down to how much the student wants to learn the material and MOOC's are just another helpful tool to do so.
Four things physical classroom teacher-led course offer which is often missed in an online course are:
1. well formulated Lesson Plans
2. Regular Homework assignments with Timelines and Deadlines
3. Periodic testing & grading
4. Peer students who are a huge source of motivation and inspiration
Online courses may offer some of the above in one form or another, but not nearly as effective as Classroom lead course as pointed in the article.
> Of course, another time-honored source of extrinsic motivation are deadlines.
> Course timelines and deadlines hold students accountable, spurring them to produce, keep up, and complete their work. In the ‘learn at your own pace’ model, timelines and deadlines are negotiable, at best, non-existent, at worst.
People who keep on attending classes simply have higher perseverance to anything they do and perseverance is the most important trait determining person success in life.
Maybe even let studebs choose their own MOOCs from a list so that their education is mostly based in interest and is self guided?
I think solutions could be created to solve the "lack of motivation" issue.
MOOCs need to evolve. Many are just using the same pattern (Video/Question) that has been around since 2001. It's ridiculous, especially when creating video content is expensive, let alone updating it quickly enough across a plethora of topics.
MOOCs, or a better solution must support 30% of learning that occurs inside a classroom, and 70% of the informal learning that occurs outside the classroom for the same student.
Very few systems are paying attention to how students are actually learning today in academic environments - it's pretty interesting how large the disconnect is.
Today... I can do whatever the hell I want 247 (effectively nothing compared to what's possible under stricter circumstances). We could talk about self discipline or whatever but that's a whole other objective too, so why not just focus on root issue. Command of choices.
If for example my credit card were charged $100 every day I slide on a target? The specific implementation is obviously up for grabs but the context has been stated.
I am a career changer who moved from admin roles to software development. This part of my life started in 2014, when I decided to make the change. My first instinct was to get a degree, since I had never got one before, so I started an evening presential course with a local university. During the course, I often noticed that I wasn't taking much in from the lectures, so I'd come in on weekends and do my study then. I'd still attend classes, as I was always afraid I'd miss something important for the exams, but this turned out to be rarely the case. In my last year, I was already so frustrated with spending 3 hours in class each night after a day at my full time job, that I decided to completely skip my lectures altogether. Surprisingly, these were the modules where I had the best performance.
There's a lot of correlation here, but in my case I'd say that what motivated me were not the classes themselves, but the deadlines. I tried online at-your-own-pace classes before in my previous career (accounting), and they did not work at all. It was very hard to keep myself motivated. Again, the correlation here does not necessarily indicate causality -- it could be argued that the lack of motivation came from the fact that I didn't like the subject. But I still believe that what works best for my case is to have a deadline, and learning resources other than presential lectures.
TL;DR: career changer who tried learn-at-your-own-pace resources for previous career path and wasn't successful. Then tried presential lectures + self study for CS career, was moderately successful. Best results were obtained with self study + externally imposed deadlines.
- No-one to guide you if you misunderstand a big concept. You are just left with a lot of reading around
- Time. This is why so many contractors are accused of learning on the clients time - because there is so little of your own time.
Good MOOCs have tests to ensure that doesn't happen. This is in fact how you solve this problem in all large courses, even those taking place in actual physical universities.
> Time.
That doesn't make any sense. MOOCs require minimal time investment, and are the most flexible.
Are you saying that being forced to attend at more restrictive times would somehow increase one's time supply?
That's partly true, but I've found that stackoverflow is actually full of people who are (surprisingly) happy to explain things and check your work when you get confused.
That said, for particularly difficult concepts (in spaces that I am not an expert), I've found that having a friend or mentor that I have a personal relationship to be more effective in helping me understand in way that makes sense to me. This is mainly because said person has a better feel for the types of explanations that make sense to me than what would be a more useful answer to a more anonymous person.