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Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

So here's a question how are they going to prevent people from sharing the online courses? Like is there anything that stops someone from sharing or restreaming their classes?

I mean given what the value of a Harvard education is considered I would think there would be a lot of people interested in getting access to these courses.

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I think most people would say the value of a Harvard education is in the name on your degree, not the content of the courses.

That said, there's a quote from Good Will Hunting that seems appropriate here: "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

Most of the value is the friends you make and the informal relationships you develop with professors and other people at the university. For someone who already has friends to talk about academic things with, and who doesn't need the structure of a curriculum, Will is right.

Harvard already provides many of their courses for free on EdX[0], so anyone who wants to access them already can. The lectures themselves are only a small part of the value of a Harvard education, so they don't seem concerned about "piracy" of their courses.

[0] https://www.edx.org/school/harvardx

They're not free. That was a lie. Right now, most edX courses have switched to models where homework (the key value of the courses) is paid.

A lot of people supported edX with time and money, including much of the early team and course contributors, based on this lie. Coursera was at least honest about it.

Aside from that, most Harvard online courses have amazing production value (fully staffed video teams), and preciously little learning value. That's reflected in the hiring too. How many Harvard professors care about teaching-and-learning, much less online.

I predict ASU, SNHU, Georgia Tech, and other schools which try to do online well will eventually eat Harvard's lunch unless something changes. With "eventually" being 50-100 years, since that's how long university reputations last :)

That's lots of time for even a Harvard to change.

What we really need is online courses from Reed, Davidson, Amherst, and similar.

They’ll have had an entire summer to improve online course work; I expect last spring’s online semester was, at best, scattershot.

Somewhat related, Amherst is bringing back 60% of students; Reed wants all back, but is limiting to one student per dorm room (and is encouraging nearby apartments for others.)

Bottom line, it seems the small liberal arts schools (less than 5,000 students or so) are bringing students back. The big unis (Harvard, Stanford, Cal), not so much.

I don't think edX was deliberately misleading people about the "free education" aspect. They are a non-profit, and I think they genuinely wanted to open up education to people around the world. They tried that for over 5 years, only charging for verified certificates. The switch to charging for full course content happened after many years of trying to compete with Coursera (and to a lesser extent, Udacity).

All the execs make for-profit salaries, and profits flow back as investments of the MIT/Harvard endowments. They qualify as a not-for-profit on paper, but they're no different than any other investment of the MIT/Harvard endowments.

Virtually everyone at edX who was mission-driven left in the great purge of 2017 (or was it 16? or 18? I might be off by a year). More than a third of the organization, including the author of the platform, left around that time.

The CEO walked around, publicly announcing he'd switch to paid models as soon as Coursera did. If that's not an attempt at market collusion, I don't know what is.

Whether intentional or not, it's a pretty frustrating experience to not able to do all the course work, and for many courses you can't even pay to do it. bec they're archived the course that's it. You get just the partial class.

Additionally despite being an online platform that ostensibly allows you to work on your own schedule, they still cut off access after some arbitrarily predetermined amount of time and there's nothing you can do to extend it. Again, for many courses, you can't even pay bec they're archived. the only way to finish the course to create a new account.

I was listening to a Radiolab the other day talking about college in the time of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, colleges like ASU, SNHU and Georgia Tech, who already had online degree programs set up saw their enrollment rise in the time of the pandemic, while other schools were scrambling and dipping into their rainy day funds, worrying about sports boosters and admissions. They were piece mealing together online classes, with poor security and having to charge more for classes to cover the costs and the lost revenue from the loss of sports.

I don't think it matters if people share.

Half the value of attending at least if not more is the famous name on your resume. Everyone knows it's extremely hard to get into. It's not hard to point to famous people in tech from there like Bill Gates, but Harvard on your c.v. is vastly more important if you aren't an engineer.

MIT has been doing that with a big chunk of its courses for years and yet the value of its degrees have yet to depreciate. The value is in 1. the people you meet there and 2. the value of "MIT" on a piece of paper. The same is true for other elite institutions.

It wouldn't matter if the courses are shared. Anybody in the world can now get access to the very highest tier of educational materials from sites like MIT OpenCourseWare. Universities sell credentials.

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