MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
I'd like to add .. non-profit does not mean free to end users. There are many good non-profits and there are many terrible ones (highly paid execs, insane amount of money spent on marketing).
* Removing your access to course materials when the class is done, and disallowing access to past versions of the class.
* Pressuring you into joining as many courses as possible, due to fear of missing out. When you visit the site, every course says "Course began ($TODAY-5)" to make you feel like "wow, I got here just in time! I better sign up for everything!".
* Breaking courses into useless 2-minute chunks and constant unhelpful quizzes. I really just want to hear the lecturer speak for 20-30 minutes at a time uninterrupted, especially if I'm listening while doing dishes etc.
* An unsettling UI that feels less like it's about presenting information in a compact and/or digestible way and more like it's tracking my every move and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Everything is a button or clickthrough menu that requires interaction.
Thankfully MIT OpenCourseWare still has plenty of lecture videos / course materials available. But I'm quite afraid for the future.
That's actually one of my favorite things when taking online courses...
I'm frustrated that tools that are meant to be empowering actually prevent people from customizing the course content to suit their own learning style / constraints.
Science and Cooking: A Dialogue | Lecture 1 (2010)
The lectures on YouTube were evening lectures meant to summarize each week of class, but the actual in-person students learned more about the actual chemistry involved, and did guided experiments to test different properties of food. I was hoping the EdX course by the same professors would give me an approximation that experience, but I was really disappointed. Technically there's a lot of good information still there, but the main problems were that the lectures were split into 2-minute chunks and the EdX UI constantly gets in the way of actually absorbing the content. I decided to buy a couple books on the topic instead.
To learn something, you need to watch a lecture, then receive a task, perform the task and provide a result, then receive feedback, and, finally, learn from the feedback.
Harvard video lectures are just another form of TV. They are mostly useless without Harvard.
I disagree. If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. One of the best things about digital courses is that you don’t have to spend an hour zoning out to a professor talking and then spend a day doing exercises, but the two can be intertwined and knowledge can be cemented.
Of course it can be done terribly. But the best online courses I’ve taken have split things up into small chunks with relevant exercises.
Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture when I'm going for a run. Sometimes I like to listen while I'm doing chores. Seems presumptuous to say I'm "not taking the course" when we know that learning styles vary so much between individuals.
YouTube has a ton of lectures, for free, that you can view and/or listen to in this manner.
But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
But it seems like it's really a stretch to say "it's a dark pattern to not implement this feature that covers my use case". If not implementing a desired feature is a "dark pattern", then I'm not really sure I know what constitutes a dark pattern
It baffles me that people expect to take a process optimized for a neurotypical 20-year-old subsidized enough to devote 100% time to study and apply it to everybody else on the planet. I get how physical universities ended up the way they did. But software is infinitely soft and the internet is basically everywhere. Insisting that everybody must learn the same way a bunch of well-off youth did in 1950 is grossly exclusionary and wasteful.
In short, I don't care what the universities are trying to achieve with remote learning. I care what the students succeed in achieving. Let's focus on that.
No one is saying "everyone must learn the same way". They are teaching a specific way, and are under no obligation to ensure that "your" unique needs are met.
I mean, you say yourself there's no single concept of how students learn. So maybe explain how you'd expect them to to do it?
There are all kinds of models out there. Udemy, Coursera, good old recorded lectures on YouTube. Find what works for you and use it.
It won't work for a calculus lecture, but for a lot of topics it works just fine.
They are trying to exclude large swathes of the population?
It is extremely common for people with ADD to focus better when they keep the part of their brain that distracts them busy. In college I folded origami in lectures so that my brain wouldn't go off on tangents that would lead to me tuning out significant sections of the lecture.
Some people combat the tangents by being busy, and some people embrace the tangents (which can be valuable for understanding) by listening to lectures multiple times.
They should cater to those people as opposed to other people for whom bite-sized learning works better? When did we become a society that expects everyone else to cater to our specific needs? No one is being "excluded".
If that's the way you need to learn, fantastic. There are options out there for you. It wasn't that long ago when none of this existed.
I didn't say that. The claim was made that learning in this method is incompatible with taking a college level course. I was demonstrating how that attitude is both blatantly false and exclusionary.
> When did we become a society that expects everyone else to cater to our specific needs?
The value of accessibility and inclusivity in education has long been recognized. Why does online learning get a pass from considering this?
Edit: There is no problem with one person saying "I learn better this way" and someone else saying ”I learn better this other way". The problem is when people say "the way you learn is inferior and not suited to college level material" because that is exclusionary.
It seems, but it isn't. The inflexible way they structure their courses is just a failure to accommodate to different learning styles. And it's okay - they don't need to be everything for everyone - but it's disappointing.
Now this comment by OP (benrbray) and you (wodenokoto) gives me an idea that courses can be designed in a way that the learner can mention how much hands-free time they have to spare now, depending on which the platform can hold off any interactivities / quizzes until then (or something like that), to make the learning process more personalized.
That's something we have in common :). My disagreement spans a few dimensions:
* I've already been through school. An undergraduate and graduate degree already taught me how to learn. I have good habits, and I know how to buckle down and study when needed. For me, I find that having something to do with my hands while listening to a lecture actually helps me stay more focused on the topic. Before and after watching, I like to review the slides, do some reading, and take notes.
* I already have degrees. I'm not looking for extra credential. I'm just looking to learn something new from someone qualified to teach me who can filter out what's important and what's not. It would be nice to have the opportunity to listen without necessarily jumping through all the hoops of a normal college class.
* Sometimes I already have background knowledge that overlaps with the course content. In these cases, it's really frustrating when a course won't let me skip around and focus on the topics that I want to learn. The quickest way to get me to drop an online course is to make me sit through lecture content that I've already learned before somewhere else.
* Different students learn in different ways. You might like that the frequent quiz interruptions hold you accountable. That's great! For me, I don't find it too helpful. Usually the mid-lecture quizzes are simple "are you listening?" questions that don't really test your deep understanding. I'd rather go through a set of exercises all at once after listening to the lecture.
Basically, I see no reason online courses can't be structured to give us more choices about how we want to consume the content!
And for new content, I never watch lectures with other things. I never did. And I still find 2-4 minutes videos annoying as hell.
The one-size-fits-most nature of online education goes against the "customize your education at scale to learn" which was an earlier anticipated advantage about MOOCs. Specifically, adaptive learning and being able to accommodate a variety of learning behaviors and styles. "Learn at your own pace, in your own way, on your own time but still within bounds to the rest of the class" kind of thing.
I remember when Stanford launched online CS courses in the mid 2010s, that it was thought they'd have the best of both worlds and their in-person, offline course offerings wouldn't be affected. (Diluted down to the lowest common denominator of student, which now included online learners who weren't Stanford students per se.) Well, over time, turns out double duty-ing course material for online and the "regular" classes crept into all education for instructors. Which meant the courses with online equivalents became easier across the board. Thus, the target audience for everything shifted.
Again, with acknowledged intentionality, I don't really have an issue with this (which you could crassly summarize as "dumbing down" the course offerings for convenience's sake) -- except that from my vantage point it was an unforeseen consequence of part of the online and MOOC push.
Obviously, I benefited from online courses in my mid 20s and so I look at their rise with nostalgia and through a rosier lens than many. However, I also can't help but think that they ended up being not quite what was promised at the outset, which was better targeting in addition to expanded educational access around the world. Especially for students who thought they'd signed up for the more challenging materials and didn't want to be part of a grand new experiment.
Interesting that MIT OpenCourseWare will outlast edX, which for a few years truly did look like it was the future of university level education and beyond.
I actually see MIT's OCW as different from MOOCs in this regard, since that was intended as "here's the material we teach, use it at your leisure" (e.g., feel free to wash dishes in the middle...), whereas edX/Coursera/etc. were (as I see it) intended as "here's a 'college-equivalent' course you can take remotely; we need to assume you'll treat it similarly and in return we think it'd give you similar understanding of the material as a college student would get in a classroom".
> Sometimes I already have background knowledge that overlaps with the course content.
I used to think like you, all the time. "Oh, I already know this." and while I'm sitting there being all smug and self-satisfied that I'm the smartest person in the room I realized:
* The content is good for a refresher. "Background" knowledge is just that, you're admitting you want to hear an expert speak on a subject yet want to throw out what they have to say because you "already know it from before this class".
* The content often provides context. Just like the "Previously on..." segment of TV shows that will recap specific plot points so the viewer understands the events of the new episode they're about to watch, discussing what you term "prior knowledge" will help contextualize the new content that you don't understand properly.
> Basically, I see no reason online courses can't be structured to give us more choices about how we want to consume the content!
OK, but that's not edX/Corsera's job lol
They don't have to cater to every single whim of every type of education personality. It's all well and fine that you, a multiple degree holder, would love to skip around content that you find boring/tedious/whatever while saying you want "someone qualified to teach me who can filter out what's important and what's not".
Like it or not, these websites are just simply not aimed at you, a large-brained Multiple Degree Holder. They're aimed at people who are behind you in education.
Relatively mindless tasks to occupy my hands frees up my brain to focus. If I'm not doing dishes, I'm doodling or playing with a coin or, or...
Strong disagree - as you point out in the next sentence, slightly distracted is the standard model of consumption for in person.
It sounds like you assume everyone suffers ADHD and that's no the cause, not everybody learns the same way and the dish washing strategy always worked for me in college.
I picked this up from Mortimer J. Adler's "How to Read a Book". There's lots of other techniques discussed in it, but the idea of "skim the content first to know what's coming up, so you have an idea of what each chapter (or lecture) is building towards" improved my retention massively and works well for things that aren't just books.
Hmm, I'd disagree. For example, Analysis 1 is a very desired course for many technical majors. Go look at OpenCourseWare's offerings for Analysis 1, perhaps peruse some of the videos.
Then go look for other desired courses -- missing content is characteristic and not the exception.
As for OCW it is missing a lot of content that you can find if you look at the class page on stellar for prev semesters, for whatever reasons they're not allowed on there but you can still find full lectures (until they lockdown that access too)
I don't see any of that in your observations. Moreover, what you attribute to some nefarious purpose is better explained by effective curriculum design. I haven't used edX lately but I worked at Coursera and I can tell you that the people who make that product have a passion to support learning in the world.
* Removing access to course materials: it's a course, not a content library. When you can access it anytime, you're less likely to do the work of learning. You also won't be part of a learning cohort, which is a valuable learning activity.
* Encouraging you to sign up for courses: this is a problem? Wouldn't someone who wants you to learn encourage you to sign up for courses? "Course began ($TODAY - 5)" that would be deceptive. Are you claiming that edX or Coursera does this?
* Breaking courses into chunks and quizzes. How the heck is this deceptive? This design decision is backed by learning science. Listening while doing dishes does not get you the best learning outcomes; it's a university-level course not a podcast.
* "Unsettling UI" "opportunity to pounce" I really don't know what to make of this one.
Uh huh.
Similar to the false inventory scarcity trick "only 1 left at this price!"
Note to MIT and Harvard: when you start adopting the deceptive sales tricks of used-car salesmen and dubious infomercials, you're probably doing it wrong.
* Removing access to course materials is horrible! I use old courses and books for reference all the time. When you can access the course any time, you refresh your learning. That's the key to long term retention.
* FOMO to force people to work at your pace rather than their pace is just as terrible. We know that students working at their pace, with encouragement, is what really works. Pushing people into courses when they aren't ready is terrible.
* Constant quizzes are a lazy version of what we know works, which is engagement like https://icampus.mit.edu/projects/teal/ Yes, quizzes are part of it, but a small part, the focus is on making courses interactive with meaningful work instead of boring 1-out-of-n choices. Making such courses is hard, so they take the easy and boring way out.
* If users find the UI unsettling, like it's too focused on tracking and too little on actual learning, that's a legitimate and important complaint. Education is not about getting arbitrarily high scores on some random online quizzes. You want people to actually learn something for the long run.
It really looks like edX and Coursera are taking the exam-driven horrors that are being inflicted on K-12 students all the time and translating them to the web. This is no way to teach. And you can see that with their extremely poor retention rates.
I don't doubt that there are people working at EdX / Coursera with a passion for education. I just think maybe these companies are moving in a direction that is at odds with the goal of providing free education, everywhere, to everyone, at any stage in their life.
I enrolled in some of the earliest MOOCs. Sebastian Thrun's original ai-class.com which now redirects to Udacity. I took the first iteration of Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning" on Coursera, as well as Geoffrey Hinton's original NNML course. Back then, everything was open. Course materials were shared freely, and the archives were available for years after the course concluded. There was an autograder for coding assignments that didn't get in your way too much.
Slowly, more and more roadblocks were put in place.
What was your experience like at Coursera? Did you get a chance to see how decisions about the UI and structure of courses were made? Did you get a sense of how much the marketing / business side of things interfered with the education side?
> better explained by effective curriculum design.
For who? Maybe these sites have created a product that works well for a certain niche of people, and they've hyper-optimized for that. Great. But that's not really the dream we all had for it ten years ago.
Like I said in a sibling comment: I've already been through school, and already know my own learning process. I find that the practices Coursera / EdX actively get in the way of my learning.
> darkpatterns.org which coined the term
Language changes. Most people include in their meaning of "dark pattern" things like "artificially restricting you from performing actions that the website is fully capable of performing, with dubious or justification or malicious intent".
I don't think EdX is malicious, just that their reasons for restricting usage of course materials are dubious, and conflict with their stated mission.
> Removing access to course materials: it's a course, not a content library.
Why can't it be a content library? I learn a lot at libraries!
> When you can access it anytime, you're less likely to do the work of learning.
This structure helps some people, sure. But some people like me are not full-time students. Some weeks I have lots of time to dig in, other weeks I don't have time to even watch a lecture. Moreover, I'm learning for myself, not for credentials, so why should I care what a website thinks of my progress?
> "Course began ($TODAY - 5)" that would be deceptive. Are you claiming that edX or Coursera does this?
I don't have definitive proof, but every time I visit the EdX or Coursera sites it just so happens that the exact course I was searching for started within a week of the current date. Maybe I'm being paranoid.
> "Unsettling UI" "opportunity to pounce" I really don't know what to make of this one.
This was mostly a joke :)
> Breaking courses into chunks and quizzes. How the heck is this deceptive? This design decision is backed by learning science. Listening while doing dishes does not get you the best learning outcomes; it's a university-level course not a podcast.
Again, I'm not a student. I trust my own learning process, which is impeded by constant quizzes. I'm doing this to broaden my knowledge. I don't have time to enroll in a college class, but I have time to listen to a few lectures when doing dishes, and read a couple book chapters per week.
Coursera and others are technically capable of opening up their service to this use case -- it doesn't cost them anything -- so why not do it?
In a certain sense, online education is thriving! There are tons of video lectures on YouTube available for free and I can easily pirate any textbook I want to with a quick Google search. It's just that Coursera / EdX / etc don't really fit into that for me. I really wish they did.
lol, no one will take your points seriously with your clear bias. Coursera is utter shit and it is sad to see edX go down the same path. I guess because the people at Coursera are passionate it means the business does not have a desire to make money as much as a bank and thus the original OP's points are not valid.
If someone does this and they don't absorb the material they..... watch the lecture again in a more focused manner. It really is ok!
In my previous experience this was determined by the instructor(s). Is this no longer the case? (Somehow determined by the platform?)
Udemy has a very standard pricing model. You pay what you use (=courses), so I don't see any way this can significantly change either way. The teachers are private and not institutions, so it would likely be unprofitable to adopt a "significantly-free" freemium model.
Coursera, Edx and so on apply instead the freemium model, which could be under theoretical threat (eg. reduce availability of free material, introduce ads, etc.). However, I've been using them for a while, and I didn't really experience any impact due to this supposed monetization orientation - the courses are still free, and there's no pressure to pay for them. I actually pay each course.
To be honest, I'm much more annoyed by the terrible, terrible UX of their products. There are also certainly some dark patterns, which I find dishonest, but at the end of the day, courses are free, and one can take them without interruption.
A personal note: I actually find negative the association between well-known institutions and learning platforms. For example, Harward and EdX- the certificates are stamped as HarvadX, which is an intentional disassociation. This is fair, however, customers/students tend to associate prestige with the MOOC, which is misleading. There's a lot of people around who think that MOOC certificate have formal value.
For what it's worth, the ratio of English language seems to be higher for the programming MOOCs than it is for most the other subject areas.
Fundamentally though I agree with your summary; I trusted EdX a lot more because it was tightly affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Spun out into an arms-length institution, it seems like it will now be more likely to be driven into the ground by its leadership at some point in the next 100 years because of the lack of enough stabilizing "keel" provided by the affiliation with world-class universities.
A lot of the work at nonprofits is challenging and demanding. Everybody deserves good compensation. But as with large for-profit companies, it's often only executives who get that. Take a look at CEO compensation over the decades. It has risen massively compared with worker pay: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
Maybe CEOs have gotten 940% better at CEOing in the last 40 years. But I think the more likely answer is executives have gotten much better at skimming a larger slice of pie.
One could argue that if investors want to grossly overpay for-profit execs, that's between the investors and the execs. But that's definitely not true in not for profits, which get all sorts of legal and social leeway because they're in theory doing good for society.
So yes, it's fair to argue that having very highly paid executives in a non-profit is terrible. Does that mean execs who are in it for the money will stick with fleecing investors? Probably. But I'd say that's better for the nonprofits, as then they're likely to end up with people who are there for the mission.
One popular trending reason is that boards ask an outside firm what an average CEO makes at a similar size company. Then they decide to pay them slightly above average if they like them. Over 40 years this tends to sky rocket the salary of CEOs to where everyone wants an MBA just so they can get paid crazy amounts of work compared to what they put.
Of course the salary of the CEO doesn't even tell the whole story when you bring in tax perks of shares vs W-2 wages. Plus the CEO will probably get many other company "perks".
I agree that executives are paid too much, but I don't expect a Soup Kitchen to be posting on social media about how they are fighting against discrimination of purple elephantfolk in Norway.
I also think it's hilarious that "don't overpay executives and instead spend the money on the good you're supposed to be doing" is an "extreme ethical standard". How did the Overton Window get moved all the way to the basement?
Very few people at non-profits are "overpaid" when compared to salaries at a similar for profit company. Non-profits also have less tools available to pay their employees, such as stocks.
As for marketing, spending lots of money on marketing isn't bad as long as it's working.
People need to quit judging non-profits just by looking at 2 numbers without understanding the entire scope. This is a huge issue for non-profits.
I know of non-profits that have been forced to setup multiple entities. One for "public" where they can say 100% of donations go to the cause & one for people who understand running a business where they can get private donations that help pay people salaries, building expenses & everything else.
Anyone know of a good way to reach a good investigative reporter?
There isn't much of a story here. Of the top 10 officers listed on page 7 of the 990, only two—Anant and Adam—work directly for edX. The directors are MIT or Harvard employees.
This transfer values edX, Inc. at $800M. Would anyone be complaining if the board and execs of a for-profit near-unicorn made $500K-$1M per year? I highly doubt it.
Did he seem honest? Did he seem to care about the not-for-profit mission? Did the employees respect him? Or did he seem like a sleazy used car salesman?
If Anant were a highly-skilled, qualified executive acting in the interests of edX, I might have no problem with a high salary. Did Anant seem like that to you?
Did the teaching-and-learning on edX advance or regress since the MITx days? The focus on equity? The technology platform?
Did edX lead to major research breakthroughs? Did it impact the developing world?
And for that matter, how many URMs worked there? Were there leaders who had any knowledge of how less affluent people lived or who to build a platform for them?
Part of the reason lower compensation packages make sense is that people who care about initiatives like edX usually don't do it for the money. Paying Anant a megabuck a year exactly selected for the type of executive who worked his butt off to maximizes quarterly bonuses, rather than mission or long-term.
MIT and Harvard's top asset is in brand equity. Did you feel like the $800M -- let's call it $400M each -- which will in effect add 1% to Harvard's endowment and 2% to MIT's -- is worth the reputation hit?
For what it does, the codebase is extremely sprawling, with layers upon layers of abandoned architectural directions. A lot of code for not a ton of functionality, and very basic functionality at that.
Of course that all is secondary to the actual success it has found, and good for the the project for making it happen. But, if this move ends up being a catalyst for investing in alternatives, that will not make me sad.
Honestly, what I think is missing is a good destination. What is edX trying to be?
EDX's IRS Form 990 for 2020 shows five executive making over $800k [1]
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
I don't understand how not-for-profit orgs are supposed to succeed when they are constantly hampered by being expected to pay theirbwmployees low wages and not market themselves or spread the word because if they spend too much money doing these things then they are suddenly "bad" organizations. If not-for-profits are not allowed to compete in the market with for-profit organizations by offering competitive wages and utilizing competitive marketing budgets, then it's no wonder that charity is generally so ineffective. I suspect that the average armchair marketing executive might not be a good judge of what an "appropriate" marketing budget is.
So our choices are: (1) Cut salaries and tenures or (2) Scale up
Option (1) is a political third rail. Option (2) comes in many shades of grey: all in with someone like coursera, literally operating at 8x scale relative to traditional endowments, or lightweight (either roll your own or with select niche vendors), say 2x. By fiat, the closer the new medium to the old, the better the early results. Faculty CAN become entirely proficient and effective educators leveraging new technologies at 5c+ scale—but only if their’s a will.
And, in order for the latter to exist, unfortunately it must be accompanied by a strictly positive remuneration, ie it cannot be free.
This isn’t the utopia that MOOCs first promised, but rather the political realities higher Ed finds itself in. For these reasons, I myself have begun paying for professional tutelage when I encounter a pencil of mine in need of sharpening. Despite a career’s worth of mastering the practice of learning, my capabilities (and will?) were insufficient to glean more than the most elementary basics upon enrolling in MOOCs, however I came to learn that I benefited tremendously from personalized feedback in my learning, something AI is still some ways from delivering!
Produce as many courses at as minimum cost as possible. Enroll as many people as possible without regards for completion percentage. Create an economy where random people are incentivised to create courses and then the course quality tanks.
I wish this turns out differently.
Even Udemy and Coursera have become commericialised with edX the last major standing.
I saved all certificates I ever got from edX and from Coursera as PDFs to remember which courses I took. They actually look quite fancy.
- Example certificate that was free at the time: https://i.imgur.com/XFX05gx.png
- The course was part of a series, which these days is available here: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science#co...
- Here is an R-Markdown document I created for another of the courses in that series, which used peer assessment where we had to evaluate each others results: https://rpubs.com/Noseshine/74191
At the start everything was free, including all these exercises, all the assessments, and even the certificates. I knew it would not last and used the opportunity, over three years of heavy course taking, over 50 completed courses. I did not have much to spend at the time, I could definitely not have spend the current amounts.
I took over a dozen courses on Coursera alone, medicine and statistics, it was good. I just checked my (long unused) login just now, they only list two courses under completed and "forgot" the other well over a dozen others. Good thing I saved those completion certificates, although there probably is little use in remembering what courses I took - either I remember what I learned or I don't.
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Just for fun, this was one of my favorite courses, great professor too, great content: https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience Don't know if it still is as complete, at the time it was almost 25 hours of videos alone, never mind all the reading and all the tests and exercises. It wasn't complicated though, you just had to invest the time but not nearly as much brain as for other "STEM sciency" courses.
e.g. Did you show up 30% of the time? yer a graduate!
That seems to fly in the face of "who you know is more important that what you know" conventional wisdom.
There are companies trying to battle the problems that come with a single bottom line, like Guild Education.
There's a common belief on Hacker News which verges on mental illness, that the best solution to any problem is free market capitalism. This belief is false because free market capitalism doesn't solve problems when the customer isn't the person with the problem.
The problem in this case is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's hard to get money without an education, and it's hard to get an education without money.
For-profit education cannot solve the problem, because for-profit education is the problem. If the customer is the student, then that means people without money can't be students. If you start letting people without money be students, then the customer is someone else, and the customer's incentives will always be misaligned with the student's interests in some ways. There simply isn't a way to fix this which makes any sense and still includes for-profit education.
Have you seen school that only gets paid after you start working (and based on a percentage of your salary), for example: https://www.holbertonschool.com I like the concept in that these school are somehow "investing" in the student: they only get as successful as the student is.
No regionally accepted credential means don't invest your money at all, ever, no matter what they promise. You go to a plumbing trade school they give you a regionally accepted credential so you can work, never trust these outfits they end up costing the same as a state school so just go to the state school and get your credentials.
If you want to take 2 years off to teach yourself watch MIT free lectures and contribute the entire time to open source software. There you get people auditing your code, experience working as a 'team' or whatever. Nobody takes $85k from you.
This is reflected in what Holberton offers: if I'm understanding correctly, they offer 7 different kinds of computer programming and 0 different kinds of pre-med, elementary education, psychology, etc. While nobody would argue that these aren't necessary components of our society, they don't fit Holberton's business model--a student with an elementary ed degree doesn't walk out of Holberton and start making close to six figures with which to pay Holberton back.
There's nothing wrong with having a more focused school, of course, but realize that the way Holberton is getting around the chicken-and-egg problem I'm talking about is by picking a field of education where there isn't a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't need a degree to work in computer programming. And in fact, you don't need to take classes at Holberton: I know two different programs that will pay you to learn computer programming, instead of you paying. This has done exactly nothing to solve the problem I'm talking about: it just avoids it.
I'm fairly certain we've been watching that mission creep in all corners of education, higher and otherwise, over the past couple of decades.
I agree with another commenter in that I had hoped it would persist since 1) education is ostensibly the business of Harvard and MIT and 2) Their pockets are deep enough to think long-term.
I will admit that I haven't used it much in the past few years. Had been getting turned off by the credential chasing and access disappearing after some time.
Tough to see an excellent path forward from here. I've never heard of this 2U firm.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
It's worth reading the article - there is much more that's not being addressed on HN.
[1] https://nptel.ac.in/noc/noc_course.html [2] https://nptel.ac.in/course.html [3] https://swayam.gov.in/explorer
An example that readily comes to mind are the courses on manufacturing processes offered by both MITx and NPTEL. The MITx course was clearly a class apart - you actually got to see the processes in question and how they were applied in the real world factories. When speaking about how a product was made, the lecturer actually bothered to bring samples of those products, sometimes dismantled them, and showed us how they could have been put together. I only audited this a few months ago, and to this day I remember the concepts vividly.
On the other hand, in the videos I watched, the NPTEL course lecturer simply read out from powerpoint slides, which he prepared from a standard textbook. You were better off reading the textbook directly than watching the video alternating between the slides and the lecturer's face. It was a very uninspiring, depressing experience.
It's basically Indian OCW.
"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
With that in mind, it seems that Open edX development will be under a new non-profit held by MIT and Harvard. I hope this new non-profit will be less at odds with itself in respect to maintaining openness while creating profitable pay2play courses.
The same is not generally true of Harvard courses (with a few exceptions like cs50), which hide all materials behind paywalls.
A complete tangent, but its somewhat amusing that this idiom remains popular when the literal gold standard itself is no longer generally considered a figurative gold standard of anything.
One of the determining feature of edX is it is backed by MIT. And that's also the reason why I trust the platform to give out information.
I don't want to be machine learnt on the Internet.
The idea of a public company, a public benefit company, a university, a nonprofit, and 800 million dollars changing hands in this complicated of a transaction seems incongruous.
Doing MOOCs was good business for Harvard/MIT like 10-15 years ago when designing and delivering MOOCs constituted "thought leadership". Now, MOOCs are ubiquitous and AI teachers are the hotness.
While that org is led by Harvard and MIT, the institutions are not getting the money. Which begs the question - why didn't the edX organization just sell off the IP to 2U? would have been much cleaner.
"MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
1. Complete the micromasters courses at your speed.
2. Get a passing grade in a proctored exam.
3. Get accepted to a masters program with 1/2 of your credits taken care of.
4. Finish the masters degree on-campus.
I can see this being great "marketing" for the university too though -- once you got the "micromasters", the only way to get half your credits toward a degree is to go to the same university that gave you the micromasters (if you can get accepted, they took your money for the micromasters without promising that) -- they've kind of locked you in.
Coursera has something similar called MasterTrack; there's not a generic cross-platform name for it, though if it is successful for multiple platforms and graduate institutions that will probably change over time.
The $800M will be used to line the pockets of privileged MIT professors. It will be as effective at closing equity gaps as supply-side (trickle-down) economics. 60% will go to overhead, which will fund faculty clubs and yachts. From there, a ton will go into generous salaries and benefits packages. And so on down the line.
I am willing to bet that this will be equivalent to giving maybe $10M to an HBCU, in terms of benefits to the poor.
I think it can even be deemed benefocial as follows:
If they manage to increase offering, enrollment and completion by say 3x, a big chunk of those students may be coming from paid physical colleges, which means huge savings in education dollars overall.
I guess my point is, losing nonprofit edX to paid education is not a negative if on the whole it chips away at students paying full sticker price and lowers the overall avg cost of education.
With that in mind, of course it’s pumping out bad devs, just like every other boot camp. I wish it were different but that’s what happens. What’s worse is they charge over $10K for the pleasure.
Hell of a lot easier to increase someone's React knowledge than it is to, like, fix how they interact with people.
Which one? What was comp like for these new hires?
Squeezing every single drop of money from every single brick of the university : great work, MBAs . Slow clap
Like: online courses... or... What about the white elephant in the room? The cost of social events and Ivy League athletes/sports.
I don't have anything against those, but if I were in a position of power in one academic entity, I'd definitely make sure sports is not a cost center, as it is today for many.
Usually this extra cost is not explicit, though, as nowadays most students have to get a loan to attend university. This wasn't always the case.
I now understand how to self-learn difficult subjects with textbooks and online lectures but I really appreciated MITx's commitment to making rigorous courses freely available.
It's also pointed out in the article that MIT & Harvard will be investing money into a new non-profit to explore the "next generation" of online learning, which is literally the opposite of "[refocusing] on in-person education", as you hypothesize.
That's fine and all but it's forcing the university model they know into an online format and it doesn't work so great for the audience that wants to take online courses imho.
The value proposition on it's Micro Masters course was that you could use it for credit at full universities. The problem is it was extremely unlikely one would get the opportunity to use it at MIT, and the rest of the partners were universities that I had never even heard of before. Not necessarily places I'd probably want to go to further my studies.
For the math & physics classes, the deadlines are 3 weeks after being assigned, whereas when you take the class in person, there's a strict 1 week deadline.
Part of the advantage of taking an online class, as opposed to self study, is the motivating factor of deadlines. I have a lot of textbooks I've started reading, then said "I'll get back to this" and never have.
Another advantage of class over just textbook is discussions with classmates and TAs. Having a schedule helps with that too, since there are others working on the same material at the same time.
Personally I have a study friend and we motivate each other. But we don't necessarily move as fast as MIT's deadlines because we are professionals with deadlines that take priority. So it's completely lost on me which is frustrating because the material is great!
[EDIT] Reference added, because today's youth are apparently not well-versed in the classics:
On the other hand, distance learning makes a huge impact on mature learners. Whether they need to "reskill" to improve their job prospects, or simply cannot attend a university in person because they juggle many adult responsibilities, innovations and improvements in distance learning is extremely important to them and is beneficial to society. I also think this group is often ignored/pushed to the side in these debates.
2U is one of the biggest for-profit higher education companies and seemingly one of the most successful ones, often partnering with other colleges and universities.
I am suspicious of any of the for-profits being able to sustain a business. Most end up failing because, as it ends up, education is not very profitable if done correctly.
Blackboard has been around a long time and seems to do okay. Instructure (makers of Canvas) has done very well. Both sell Learning Management Systems (LMSes), not educational content itself. Big textbook publishers, like Pearson, have been managing incorporating online educational materials.
But yeah, don't expect a unicorn to come around and "disrupt" education.
The easiest way to get a bright-eyed SV entrepreneur to try to take something on is to tell them, "That industry is non-disruptable."
If anybody figures out how to do this, they could make a lot of profit.
> Nearly 10% of the students have paid for a certificate. I do not know how much server hosting costs, but given the cost of a certificate being several tens of Euros, I wouldn't be surprised if this covered costs (though I'm not aware if the uni gets a cut).
> Apparently the main issue with Coursera (which is why our uni chose edX) was over copyright - edX material remains owned by the creating uni and not edX itself. I wonder how this will be impacted by this change.
I think that this is a terrible decision and regret it, but there's not much surprise: this monetisation of their reputation is kind of the business of modern universities.
It's not like Harvard and MIT don't have enough money already, so it's curious why they need obscenely more.
What a terrible loss.
My personal experience with EdX over the years is mixed. I audited a few EdX courses (CS50, Linear Algebra) and generally enjoyed the quality and pace of the courses, but was never compelled to purchase a verified certificate since these were more for leisure. I recall hitting up against the paywall and losing access to the exams. Although, I understand the need to monetize, it was a bit demoralizing.
Overall, I feel EdX helped define massively open online education and I hope they continue to support this mission in the future.
edX was overmonetized. If you want to see corruption on a grander scale, see where this $800M goes.