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.