Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online | Hacker News Reader

Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online

chronicle.com

47 pointsilamont32 comments

Colleges are selling degrees, not courses. Putting “I watched a lecture on OCW” in your CV won’t get you anywhere [0], that’s why colleges are not the least bit threatened by it. (Those videos could be a source of additional income but colleges luckily decided against that, probably because the market for course videos with a price but without a degree is rather small.)

[0] Even if watching the lecture online would have the same effect as attending it in person it still wouldn’t get you anywhere. Anybody can (and indeed should) claim they watched an online lecture, it’s simple game theory. Degrees provide verifiable proof, at least to some extent.

Edit: Oh, by the way, a startup could start administering tests and awarding degrees based on free online course material. It could theoretically provide similar proof like a real degree at a much lower price. That could be a threatening scenario for colleges but it is also unlikely because the barriers are enormous. Degrees are worthless without reputation (and the startup would have no reputation), there are probably considerable legal problems with this idea and colleges would probably start pulling their free videos pretty quickly.

...And degrees are essentially ways of reducing the responsibility of a manager to make a hiring decision. It's the same concept as the CIO who chooses IBM because he can't get fired for it.

A parable through a former co-worker who went to SVA for design and got a few AIGA awards:

I asked him, what made SVA special, since you could get everything you needed to train online. All of his professors wrote blogs and published books on the subject. Were the people there just better?

No, he said, it was the fact that the professors there took the time to teach a course that was timely and relevant, and worked with each individual student to further their goals, while also recognizing their individual talents. They wouldn’t lead someone down the wrong path. Furthermore, in this atmosphere of work, everyone strove harder.

So, I’d say these materials are just the base building blocks you could find anywhere. Sure, they’re top shelf, but the real benefit of MIT is the campus itself. An auto-diadect would have no problem parsing any materials, but somebody with that type of intellectual tenacity probably doesn’t need a degree except for professional licensing. Everybody else still needs the professor, which this doesn’t provide. It’s like Apple open-sourcing Darwin, WebKit and LLVM, but keeping all the important UI stuff proprietary.

Apple didn't open source LLVM. It started independently of Apple. Same with WebKit; it was KHTML.

Playing semantics isn't important. Webkit is a fork of KHTML and Apple (and now Google) did most of the work to get it where it is today. LLVM was a research project whose author went to Apple to turn it into an actual product. Clang, meanwhile, was indeed developed and open sourced by Apple.

They are giving away the open-source version, but for technical support you have to buy a license.

Or a more generalized version is "Give away your ideas, sell the system."

The reason is simple; a recorded video of a lecture is very different than a "college course". You typically don't have access to the instructor, class discussion, assignments, and evaluation of your work.

This kind of namespace pollution is a significant problem in online education; it's hindering adoption of online learning because students don't understand what's meant by "online class". Most people think it's something like MIT OpenCourseWare or iTunes U, which have interesting content, but aren't what any reasonable person would characterize as a "class".

It seems like a lot more of these resources will become available. More people will move to learning exclusively online. Classes that meet in person will begin to supplement with online discussion and material. How do you think the packaging could change to create more learning or collaboration?

No need to guess because so many colleges and businesses are doing online learning successfully today -- it looks a lot like the Web.

Online learning isn't waiting for some technological innovation -- it's a matter of connecting people who want to learn with other people who can help them get to where they want to go.

> The reason is simple; a recorded video of a lecture is very different than a "college course". You typically don't have access to the instructor, class discussion, assignments, and evaluation of your work.

Doesn't seem like a big deal. Most professors never have visitors during their office hours, most discussions I've attended have approximately zero unprompted participation. Also, OCW at least often has assignments. So really what you're missing is tests- not a $30,000 a year problem.

You never asked a single question during any of your college courses? Really.

The cynic in me says that elite colleges understand that the largest value they add is the prestige you obtain from having one on your CV.

That is what they are selling, not education - so there's really no contradiction in giving the education away for free.

Yup. When MIT released their courses, I eagerly checked them out, hoping to see what I missed at my big state school. Turns out I missed nothing. The courses were in many cases less rigorous than the ones I took. They were utterly unremarkable. Yet everyone I know who actually went to MIT loves the place. The magic just isn't in he courses you take.

I'll give them more than prestige, but academic superiority? No way.

A big part of it is that the people at MIT are rigorously prescreened, and many courses/tests are graded on a curve, with the cutoff for an A being .5-1 std. deviation above the mean score in many classes. By competing with basically only above-average people, it means that it's relatively harder to get good grades than at many schools, even if the material is the same.

But yeah, another big benefit is just being able to interact with so many great people.

I don't know. I've never been asked what my grades were in any professional situation. Ever. Not in engineering, not in business (post MBA), and certainly not as an entrepreneur. And I didn't have the luxury of going to a school where there was an excuse for my lackluster GPA. I think they're selling two things:

1. prestige 2. community

Really? Every job I applied to out of school (software) asked for my GPA, and many of the internships (quantitative finance) for my SATs. Of course it becomes less important a few years out, so I hope you're not talking about that.

Those answer explain HOW they can afford to put them online - not why they should.

The answer is Brand Recognition. MIT isn't competing with the places people would have gone to if they couldn't read this stuff online - it's competing with Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, Dartmouth. It could outbid them for better teachers, it could hire famous noble prize winners, it could publish important scientific papers.

Or it could associate MIT with computer science lectures in the minds of potential students, future hirers of future students and the world in general.

Oxford published the "Oxford English Dictionary" more than a century ago - rather than keeping the secrets of what words meant for it's students - and 150 years later it's still paying off in selling English language courses in China.

Education is as much about content as it is about the social experience. Putting videos of the lectures online is a great way of distributing content, but just like books, it is not enough. The experience of going to a class with other people and collaborate on projects together has not yet been fully replicated online. There are some nice initial attempts at doing that such as openstudy.com, curiousreef.com and to some extent scratch.mit.edu (disclaimer: I created that website). It might be that we will always feel the need of face-to-face interaction for our learning experiences, but you could imagine a nice combination of meetup.com + some online social space + content. As for reputation, I think things like this (http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-technical-recruit...) point out future directions.

The examinations are what you're really paying for. You can sit through as many hours of lectures as you like, but you can't prove to others or yourself that you actually understand it until you've sat and passed a set of examinations on the material.

I'd be interested to know whether there's anyone out there successfully teaching themselves stuff from these online lectures. I've tried watching a few on various occasions, but all I learned was something I used to know as an undergrad but have forgotten: lectures are generally pretty damn boring.

I wonder whether a recorded lecture is actually a better way to learn something than a book. I suspect that the best possible lecture is better than the best possible book, but the average book is better than the average lecture.

Why can't you construct or find your own examinations? They are, after all, just a set of questions. In fact, even in school, this is the way I learned... You write down questions, put the materials (far) away and work on it until you get an answer in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm with you on the lectures. I did actually learn a few things, but like actual schooling, I don't think you get much from just sitting and watching -- you have to work through it.

I think the combination of the written materials, an explanation (lecture or just another more casually written piece) and most importantly application of the knowledge is how one learns (or how I best learn). You can do that outside of a schooling setting.

Assuming your goal is not to be an academic, I think formal schooling is good for (a) the formal degree (b) access to resources you may not have access to normally and perhaps (c) access to a real human who knows their stuff -- assuming they are interested in talking with you -- which is not a forgone conclusion in a lot of schools.

I don't think it is or was ever necessary to learn a topic you want to learn, however -- it even become and expert in it.

You can find your own examination, it's called the GRE. You could self-study and then prove its effectiveness with the GRE.

I am learning things with moderate success. I double-majored in econ and physics, but want to add CS principles to my toolkit. I've been using open course material to do so, and I've found it very valuable.

It isn't so much the lectures--they are useful, but only as valuable as a real lecture (utility varies with your learning style). It is the rest of the support material that makes sharing this stuff so valuable for independent learners.

An example from iTunes U: Berkeley's CS61A has webcasts, but nearly the entire course is online. You have the textbook (SICP, available free online), and can download the lecture notes, homeworks, labs, old exams, and scheme libraries from the course website. You have most of the course (except the most valuable parts: office hours, discussion section, and no TA in your lab).

But the value is in the structure of the material: learn this, build this, learn this, now build this, learn this, do this project. It slows you down, necessary because you can probably read much faster than you can 'do.' When just reading a textbook, it is too easy to burn through it and not force yourself to practice the material. With the course materials, you have a reason to pace yourself, test yourself, and have discrete goals to work toward.

note: There are freenode channels (#sicp, #scheme), and StackOverflow that may give you help that approximates office hours.

Don't forget about, User Groups, Mailing lists and Coding Dojos.

I think that the college experience includes a lot of interaction and feedback that you can't get by reading lecture notes or watching videos online. You do problem sets and write research papers and then get back comments on your individual performance. You take tests and can see what you got right and what you got wrong. You do lab experiments using equipment that's not available to you at home. If you study a foreign language, you get critiqued on your pronunciation.

I think online courseware is a fantastic resource, and I'm very happy it's out there, but using it is nowhere near the same as attending a university in real life.

Most of us probably go to these sites and browse for interesting Computer Science/Engineering courses which can be useful but, what do people think about the value of this for other subjects?

I checked out Open Yale Courses after reading this article and while I was interested in courses such as "Listening to Music" and "Death", I didn't see much practical value in them nor would I have the patience to sit through 20+ of these lectures in my free time.

The word "edu-tainment" seems very fitting.

Because the people producing the materials are being heavily supported by external grants that more-than cover the costs of producing the materials and putting them online.

Many government grants in the education field are targeted at institutions of higher education and it is very difficult if not impossible to get one if you are not at least affiliated with a university. This is the major reason the only meaningful innovation in education is happening in the adult-education market.

I think you're confusing the research wing and the education wing of the modern research university.

Research grants are given to professors/staff to fund specific projects, which are separate from/in addition to their everyday teaching responsibilities at the university.

Now, I'm not saying the two funding pools don't ever mix, but they're not the same.

Not at all... MIT OpenCourseWare was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Open Yale was supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Google supported Colombia's Digital Knowledge Ventures program (along with VC partners who planned on selling the branding), and even AllLearn started with $12 million in funding (source unclear).

And those are just the larger projects mentioned in the article. With Fathom and AllLearn, the projects folded as soon as the funding ran out.

A degree is more than the sum of course materials for the same reason that Y Combinator is greater than the sum of all Tuesday night dinner talks. Experienced mentors, inspiring peers and the stamp of approval act as multipliers on the knowledge gained through the program.

I believe, in the long run it is added value to their brand. To be able to charge a lot of money for a degree, it might help to be featured in ITunes ;) In my opinion, it's very similar to how TED makes their talks public.

Why not? I mean, you don't go to elite college to learn stuff anyway.

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