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Comment by RickJWagner | Hacker News Reader

MOOCs seem like the answer to so many questions about higher learning. I hope they revolutionize American education, and soon.

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MOOCs as they are currently structured really only serve the most motivated students. When I was a young person, I needed the structure, culture and environment to succeed as a student in tertiary education. If I had been trying to do my college courses from home, or outside of an environment full of my fellow students, I would never have done them with the degree of seriousness they would have deserved, and I would have learned way less.

But they don’t answer the question of the role schools play in social development. There is also the question of how to effectively test students outside a supervised exam - online makes cheating plenty easier. And last is how to replace classroom labs which require special equipment. These are not impossible tasks for MOOCs to account for but all that I think these courses have only shown compelling methods of providing instruction and information on-demand and the ability to replay this instruction. School is a lot more than that.

Social development can also occur online, then go face-to-face when desired. Look at the social bonds people form in online games.

You can visit a university for a supervised exam at the end of a course. Exam sessions held even twice a year would allow people studying at different paces plan their time.

But you don't need to sit in the lecture halls. You can study where, when, and as much as it fits your life. (I stopped visiting most lectures after the sophomore year; I got an MD w/ honorable mentions nevertheless. I just studied more efficiently by myself.)

This system will likely result in your having many diplomas, for each significant course, and maybe a grand diploma for having a set of course diplomas and e.g. doing a master's work. But you can mix and match much more easily, and manage your time more flexibly.

The only losing side would be athletes. They'd have to find a different way to organize into minor leagues.

You're desscribing a very loosely defined and optimistic view of how things can and will play out. This is like the equivalent of seeing the early stages of bitcoin and deciding we should all ditch all current forms of money for cryptocurrency. I could list out a bunch of ways in which the system "can" work if I felt so optimistic about the idea of the technology just like this, but any points I would make based on my intuition and desires would be put in serious doubt in light of how cryptocurrencies have played out in reality thus far.

> MOOCs seem like the answer to so many questions about higher learning. I hope they revolutionize American education, and soon.

Both higher and secondary should be revolutionized with MOOCs, not as replacements for traditional schooling by themselves, but as an enabling technology for flipped classrooms with no in-person lecture where all in-person contact time is high-value interaction.

I think there is value in flipped classrooms, but they do have an impact on the classroom experience. Did you see this NYT article from last week?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley...

That doesn't seem to be using a flipped classroom model to maximize value of in-person contact time by moving static lecture out of classroom time; that seems to be replacing much of the school-hours direct contact time with online solo learning.

When I've read about flipped classroom, a lot of the instruction is described as teachers working closely with students, given the importance of individualized instruction. However, that does also result in a lot of solo learning.

If the teacher is working with 25 students for a 50 minute class, that's 2 minutes of individualized instruction per student. Even with the students working with the teacher in groups, you're going to have a lot of students working alone when they're not working in the teacher's group.

Anecdotal but I did linear algebra at a local CC in a "flipped" classroom. We were expected to watch lectures (youtube videos from a MIT or whatever) outside of class and then class was supposed to be a discussion of the homework, which we also had to do out of class and was provided no class time prior to it being due to discuss, in class. There was no real teaching on behalf of the professor. I can't just interject a video when I have a question about the subject matter. I'd either have to wait it out and see if it was answered later, rewind and watch again, or find another video explaining the same concept. All of a sudden an hour long video became an hour and a half to two hour endeavor. Just absolutely time consuming. It came off as lazy by the teacher. To be fair was like his first or second semester doing it but I didn't care to take the class again. Some of the smartest guys I knew we absolutely frustrated with it also. We all gave him bad reviews. Learning should be interactive. This was not. My friend group would basically meet up and teach ourselves the concepts. It was way harder than it should have been.

I'd rather MOOC's be used to supplement a traditional lecture. I know I used the hell out of Khan Academy during Calc 1-3 which were all traditional lectures.

Hmm. With a video, you can pause it and go google for details.

Asking a professor is likely more efficient. It's still not as easy — you need to break his/her flow, and the professor must have enough spare time to answer.

Also, when you do more yourself you pay less; it can be important.

From my experience, going through harder parts of a textbook with a motivated friend or two works best.

The sort of questions I have when trying to do this sort of thing are often not well answered by search engines, as they often of the form "huh? I didn't follow how the last thing you said comes from (or is otherwise related to) the things that came before."

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