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Comment by beoberha | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned.

Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

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Learning has changed dramatically. There are incredible YouTube channels on every subject. Open courses are offered by top Universities for free.

What hasn't changed is credentialism. Because knowledge is free, everyone can claim to have it. So the value of a credential has gone up. An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.

You can learn anything for free now. Proving you've learned it is still heavily gate kept.

> An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.

Most people are not autodidacts, so this would be a common perception even without the credentialism.

Pretty much. I feel that most people fall in the category of "it would be nice to have these skills", but they aren't necessarily willing to pay the sacrifice in time and investment for it. Same applies for school really, yeah it would nice if I got an A for algorithmic game theory, and maybe the concepts are kinda interesting from a general level, but the nitty gritty is way too complex and painful for me to put beyond in what's required for a B. A big draw of college admissions is to filter out those not passionate.

Learning without passion is the elephant in the room, and I feel once we can solve that then we can look at a real revolution. Although perhaps for the gulf between the passionate and the unpassionate, we may not be that interested in solving it.

The quality, accessibility and style of how educational material and instruction has a hand here.

This seems to put much on any given individual having some necessary bit set which isn’t really how people work.

I think the Duolingo approach has proven pretty successful, breaking things down into very small pieces with lots of encouragement and practice. Certainly it's a challenge to apply it to other subject areas, especially if you're trying to teach software that the student has to open up separately and use, but it's not impossible. It just takes an enormous amount of work structuring and optimizing the questions, UX and learning sequence.

There was sort of a naive belief that both credentialism and motivation could be solved if the material were out there. And, by and large, that wasn't true especially among the people who needed them the most.

There's a huge amount of material out there for people who want it. But it's most applicable to people who already have credentials in some form.

There have been huge changes, and where you do not need the credentials, or can get credentials separately from the courses, it has changed dramatically.

I have one a number of online courses, watched lectures that are put on Youtube, used material from university courses from their websites, and more. Some work related, some just for fun.

I do not think everyone has caught up with the changes, and the benefits for general education.

It is not just for adult, professional or university level education either. There has is a lot available for school level (to be clear in the British sense - primary school, secondary school/high school) education.

Schools have not (yet, I hope) changed although what some did during lockdown showed what could be done, but home educators have (at least to an extent): online courses, remote tuition, online materials are a huge advance on textbooks plus local classes or tutors. For example my daughter is doing an online course for history GCSE (UK exam taken at 16 in schools, roughly high school diploma level AFAIK), has a remote tutor for classical civilisation GCSE (and help with latin revision though she self taught that). The supervision for the observations for astronomy GCSE was done remotely too.

There is a lot of potential to do things differently, but change takes time. Systems have a lot of inertia in them.

I actually got my break in tech through a program Accenture ran called the Veteran Technology Training Program. It was essentially a partnership with Udacity where they sponsored veterans through a 12 week Java course. At the conclusion of the training, they ran me through a series of interviews and extended a job offer. I ended up doing systems analysis work for them, which was a nice introduction to the field, especially considering my military occupation was infantry--not exactly tech-adjacent. After a few years of programming in my spare time and building up a portfolio, I got an opportunity at another company to do web dev, which I've been doing since.

I think it's pretty cool to see this acquisition happen. I can't speak for what Udacity has become since 2015 (when I went through the course), but it definitely benefited me.

Awesome! I’ll eat crow for my opening comment. I had no idea something like that existed.

Peter Norvig’s udacity class was probably the thing that made me employable when I was just getting started. Udacity in general was an amazing resource around 2012-14(+?) because it was very high quality and free. They had courses that would get you through an interview but also a decent amount that went deeper. I will always have good memories of them.

Same here!

I liked Steve Huffman’s web dev 101 class and was also a code reviewer at Udacity shortly after

>> there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned

Why do you feel that belief has changed? I have used Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, OReilly Safari, and Udemy. All are great and each excels in different areas. Many have removed their all-access passes in the past year, but they all cost almost nothing compared to the alternatives. I could only have hoped for such awesome platforms existing when I was in high school or college.

For a sufficiently motivated learner, they are like rocket fuel for the mind. Their flexibility makes them great even for busy professionals.

They may be good resources but the energy in the air during that time was that they could challenge universities. It is clear with passed time that they didn't, and will not.

Yeah, challenging university system was there. But it turned out really very very few people were motivated enough to finish the whole course to level of completing certificate which were quite cheap.

Most people enrolled to audit tons of courses, caught a few lectures, got bored and moved on.

As with anything that is now present in abundance due to internet curation becomes the key and that is either not cheap or not available in general.

I seriously "took" a few mostly not too challenging MOOCs early on. But, once the novelty wore off, I take a few things on LinkedIn through my company from time to time and go to a few conferences but I find it's hard without a concrete objective of some sort to really go deep on a topic.

True. I also took few computer related and many non-career oriented courses in social science/ history etc. It was fun and then life got busy.

> but I find it's hard without a concrete objective of some sort to really go deep on a topic.

I think this is key. With gazillion courses out there I don't know what is my end goal while randomly choosing interesting courses.

Further, work has become increasingly crappier where no matter what problem to be solved just plan to shove all stuff in Microservice/Kafka/Gitlab/Kubernetes meat grinder. And I remain unmotivated to take any course on these topics.

I completed the CompSci X-Series of MITx on edX, and Software Engineering for IaaS, from BerkeleyX. They were so awesome that I can only think they phased them out because it was such a bargain. Practically, the courses allowed me to change career and to be well positioned.

Well, you're probably at least sortof right. Once the bloom went off the MOOC rose, edX got sold off to an EdTech company. In general, universities decided that shoveling money and effort into the MOOC pit didn't do a lot to further their mission. MIT mostly continues OCW as sort of a sideline. I don't know how many resources actually go into it at this point.

Schools and colleges work because they enforce discipline first and foremost, and learning only secondarily. With online programs, if there is no discipline inherent in the student, which is the vast majority of people, there is no paradigm shift. Certainly, the best students will naturally learn, from any source, but that has been true historically.

Sounds sad, but I’ve subscribed to the belief that your degree doesn’t prove your knowledge. It proves you can go through certain obstacles, dedicate a few years of your life to something specific, which can be a redeemable factor during hiring. Basically an easy initial filtering method. Obviously there are an enormous number of exceptions, especially for specialized degrees.

Online education services will always have a hard time convincing the worth of their degrees to others. If people are taking those courses to just broaden their knowledge or learn something new, that’s great, I support that. But as a replacement for a degree from a physical university? Doubt it.

I learned a lot about cryptography in Stanford Cryptography I and II courses, and about machine learning in Andrew Ng course (but it was years ago so it's kind of useless now)

I then tried to learn compilers on something Standford has called LaGunita or whatever and it was closed while I was studying it (and it never worked properly). But I wouldn't finish that course anyway, compilers are hard.

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