Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Most of the press release is about funding and bureaucracy, as evidenced by the number of name drops and shout outs and culminating in which old school administrator will be granted the honor of being the first president of the new initiative, and going straight for brand name of "MIT+Harvard". Reads like a press release out of the 1890s, the last gasp of a struggling and suddenly irrelevant brick and mortar fabulously costly institute of a bygone era.

Conspicuously missing are any specific details about the operation or value other than its brand name and the instantly heavy bureaucracy. It's likely this because they have no specific details yet and the negotiations to date have been about who gets the biggest seats on the board, what compensation packages they can negotiate and who will win the most prestigious titles and positions in behind the scenes political wrangling.

As far as the software that runs it, the old canard of making it open source and having other people build it is just tossed out as if that is a magical solution to design.

Nothing about this smells agile. It smells very industrial and slow. Compare to Udacity and Coursera who each are happily running dozens of classes to hundreds of thousands of students each, responding quickly to feedback, and demonstrating clearly they are up to the modern speed of doing things.

This is pretty silly criticism, considering the 3 month delays Coursera had this spring.

Coursera's delays were because it is much more closely affiliated with Stanford than Udacity is. In the fall they didn't really have the Coursera name settled upon yet and the certificate printouts they sent to people who completed the courses had Stanford's name on them.

Discussions involving university reputations are always going to be long and dragged out. Udacity avoided them by having a clear separation between the website and the institutions of its instructors from the outset. Coursera acquired that separation over time.

Harvard and MIT's reputations are most of what separate them from FullSail and the University of Phoenix. It is important that they protect them. It is encouraging that more universities are following Stanford into this space.

Courses with broadcast lectures and server-based practice/homework/exams will need the (hu)manpower that universities currently command in order to grow quickly.

> In the fall the certificate printouts they sent had Stanford's name on them.

The certificates they sent had a paragraph disclaimer at the end pointing out that the certificate had nothing at all to do with Stanford. This was the only mention of Stanford. This clause was only added because Stanford legal requested it since the classes were taught by the Stanford professors who set up the system, of their own initiative and definitely not something initiated from the bureaucratic side of the institution. Your post suggests that the certificates indicated they were granted or approved or validated in some way by Stanford. This is not the case at all, it is the opposite. I recommend you track down one of these certificates and examine it to your satisfaction.

As far as Coursera, it didn't exist in Fall. It was created in response to Stanford lawyers and bureaucrats going apeshit and shutting the venture down once they saw what a threat it was since the classes were as good as what they were charging for. This caused several of their best professors to resign and leave Stanford.

Stanford is about their reputation, which comes from their top notch professors. With professors leaving, the reputation is worth less than before.

Stanford intentionally isolated themselves from this venture and tried to punish those who pursued it. This shows how committed their administration and legal staff are to the future of education. Not at all, in direct conflict to their most progressive and talented professors.

The future clearly belongs the rogues who are leaving the inefficient and ineffective old system behind to join the ground level grass roots work of modernizing education. This is something that institutions are showing themselves incapable of doing, and it scares them. They won't go down easily. They will fight this, attack the new paradigms, and try their damnedest to retain an economy based on buggy whips that supports their institutional power, wealth and obsolete practices. Many on the forefront such as Salman Khan do not have any teaching credentials or background, and that is how it must be for the old practices do not work.

>This caused several of their best professors to resign and leave Stanford.

Just to clarify, this was one professor, Sebastian Thrun. The Coursera professors still teach at Stanford. In fact, the Coursera effort has been to integrate on-campus and off-campus efforts from the beginning.

The off-campus students of the DB, ML, and AI classes were given access to interactive lectures, exercises, and exams which was revolutionary. For their part, the on-campus students were freed from the lecture problem all other college students face. When you attend most college lectures, you might as well be watching a video (to most professors chagrin).

Despite professors' pleading, in 2012 the best way to get lectures to students AND have an interactive experience is to separate the lectures out entirely and then simply have interactive "lab-ish" sessions when on-campus students are in class. This is what they did in the DB, ML, and AI classes, the Stanford students for their money enjoyed more intimate professor access, and these extra learning modules. On top of that, it must have been a big relief to be a part of a class run that way. At other schools, if a professor has videos from previous years or even slides posted online, many kids just don't go, there isn't much point.

>Your post suggests that the certificates indicated they were granted or approved or validated in some way by Stanford.

My point was that the relationship with the Stanford name was strained and it created legalistic issues. It seems like we're in agreement about that.

>As far as Coursera, it didn't exist in Fall. It was created in response to Stanford lawyers and bureaucrats going apeshit and shutting the venture down once they saw what a threat it was since the classes were as good as what they were charging for.

This is confused. Coursera didn't announce it's presence until very recently. It's existed as a stealth-mode startup for a while.

The named president of this venture is teaching the first class in it right now, with over 100,000 initial signups and on software developed in house.

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