The Triple Failure of 2U, EdX, and Axim
classcentral.com
classcentral.com
- Due to the nature of MOOC, the assignments are largely either multiple-choice questions or programming assignments that merely asked students to fill in some blanks in some functions (there are a few exceptions of course). What a descent US university does really well is challenging students with tough yet insightful and inspiring assignments. That's how students learn deeply and retain the knowledge, at least for me. Merely listening to lectures and ticking off a few ABCDs hardly helps real learning.
- Lack of feedback. A university course assigns TAs, gives tutorials and office hours, grades assignments with detailed feedbacks, and it is so much easier to form study groups and have high bandwidth discussions. MOOCs try their best to offer such help, but they don't work as well or at least not as conveniently.
- Many courses are watered down. For instance, Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera is far less rigorous than that (229? I forgot) offered in Stanford? The course is great for students to gain some intuition, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for one to build solid ML foundations.
What's even worse is that almost none of the MOOCs used the strengths from online classes. There are other ways to learn than a hour-long video of a person talking to a webcam.
It's funny how a big part of Andrew Ng's classes is waiting for him to write text with mouse as if he were using the world's worst whiteboard; he could have prepared properly-drawn figures in advance.
This, when they draw with a mouse, even after tons of lectures, it always looks like shit. The good ones use tablets and change colors and thicknesses and such as they go.
That being said, one way to achieve this is to play things backward or occlude detail while you get to the final creation.
My personal experience actually showed otherwise. It was more effective for me to learn if instructors write on a whiteboard to gradually develop what they teach. I guess that's because when an instructors writes a whiteboards, students will know exactly what she focuses on all the time, and the writing speed matches the speed of understanding. In contrast, a professor in my university was a big shot on operating systems. He used well prepared slides and he talked fluently, yet I got lost in almost every class.
It had vidoes and then a REPL would drop down and you would continue writing your program, test it against test cases and then a new video would go on for a few minutes explaining the theory for the next step.
I can see why not many try and do this. It obviously took a lot of work, both technically and pedagogically to set up the course and problems.
Then I took a Columbia ML graduate course IRL: it was like being hit by a train.
What grad class did you take?
Another great online course that I recently took is this one on parallel computing [1]. It's not on Coursera/EdX but uses a custom platform, and I would say it goes beyond "fill in the blanks", the assignments are really challenging and have a lot of depth.
Compared to 5-10 years ago the trend is unfortunately definitely downwards though. A lot of great courses are archived and far fewer are being added than there were in the past.
A successful MOOC in my mind isn't one that will have some credits for an online certification for programming or nursing that can transfer to a Real school. A successful MOOC is one where I can take a course on Ulysses or Semantics or Mathematics or Plato or whatever just like I could in a real undergrad, but without the same financial and time constraints. I want to be able to spend $5000 taking classes that I find interesting, and accidentally have an English degree Or spend $5000 and really focus and get my degree in X.
I think part of the tricky thing is that this is what HR/employer/MBA-type cultures increasingly see a degree as. So why not just go right to that?
I don't agree with this perspective, to be clear, but if you look at it from a certain viewpoint it's not too difficult to see why there would be pressure to approach with that tack. You might even go a step further and argue that if these things are failing as the article states, it might say something about the viability of that hyperspecialized perspective on degrees. Or maybe not.
If you just want to take a class, there are plenty of MOOCs that give the lectures, exercises, and tests out for free.
Another reason is that different universities may emphasize different things as part of the curriculum. Lets say a philosophy degree at harvard emphasizes Greek philosophers, but a philosophy degree at UT emphasizes post modern philosophers. Taking a class at one doesn't transfer to another. Mixing classes at different universities simply doesn't work because you weren't educated at the university so why should you get a degree from that university?
The way I see it is that if you just want to get educated the resources are out there, but if you want degree, you gotta go to school.
But receiving lectures and coursework equivalent / comparable to those received by regular students, such that would realistically prepare you to passing the same kind of exam (given adequate study effort from you), would be actually useful. Useful even if you don't take the exam and don't receive credits / papers. Study is not for costly signaling alone.
What certifying body would administer the exam? A university that would miss out on $30,000 to $200,000+ on a student attending classes? A government institution influenced by politics that would likely end up creating inadequate testing leading to irrelevant examinations disregarded by most employers or anyone of substance?
The only reason why exams work for trades is because it is very well defined what a plumber needs to know. Even for software engineers, certificates are useless for most because what engineers need to know is rather abstract or highly dependent from job to job
It might be the "same", but there will be people that judge them for getting the cheap one.
that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation.
Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.
Obvious follow up: Are there state universities using these techniques to drive down costs and be more flexible?
Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.
Florida is weirdly enough a good example as the sunshine state scholars program provides a reasonably approachable way for any student in the state to enter high school with the intent on going to university and graduate with the criteria to get 50%, 75%, or 100% tuition and fees covered under the sunshine state scholars program.
Then you have states like Virginia who have some of the fastest rising costs of attendance in the country and where cost of attendance at state schools (which are generally supposed to be cheaper) actually ends up being comparable or even more than cost of attendance at private universities.
Some flagship state schools (example [0]) offer free tuition for lower income students providing they maintain a certain GPA.
But middle class families have a hard time as they are usually above the threshold for aid, and yet tuition (and housing) is a huge financial burden.
This will make a huge difference in the market for degrees.
The ecampus tuition (~13K/year) is still substantial compared to the in-person tuition for out-of-state students (~38K/year), and nearly identical to the in-person tuition for in-state students (~14K/year) [2].
[1] https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/news/2023-ecampus-enrollment... [2] https://financialaid.oregonstate.edu/cost-attendance
That's one big reason for sure.
The other, I suspect (and I'm sure there are more), is that it's also rather difficult to provide the same level of quality of courses to the masses than say select few undergrads.
Some of the best courses I took in my uni (T20) were the upper level electives where it was taught by the professors who cared about the topic, had interesting teaching materials/presentation, readily available support resources (TA's/office hours/department support), and so on.
Also keep in mind - Georgia Tech's program is a master's degree - and these programs don't affront the same level of prestige and opportunities in the same way the other programs do (BS/BA, PhD, MBA, MD, JD).
I agree
> master's degree - and these programs don't affront the same level of prestige and opportunities in the same way the other programs do (BS/BA, PhD, MBA, MD, JD).
I'd throw MBA in there too (unless from the top dozen biz schools, Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Booth, Kellogg, Sloan, Haas etc.)
Huh? Many selective universities already make their educations free for many undergraduates.
The MOOCs charged money because they failed to solicit donations.
> Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%.
This is true.
> Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State)
The thing is, the best state institutions are operated like there are small elite academies within a larger, public body.
yes, but not their _degrees_, which is what I said. Sure, Harvard can give all of its classes online away for free, why? Because the actual value you get from attending Harvard is not the education. When you go to get a job, company X doesn't care that you "took some classes at Harvard", they do care that you "graduated from Harvard".
A lot of similar fun is occurring as the all the student body that isn't trust fund babies really wants to study topics that will pay well, which in many universities, might not even have a lot of political weight, or even their own dean. See all the universities where you can end up taking CS classes in 8 different unrelated departments, but where they really, really don't want to admit that 50%+ of the student body is programming, as building a proper umbrella for this, which then has so many students, takes a lot of power away from incumbents.
The cheapest part to scale is the educational material and lectures, but that's always been the case, even before MOOCs. It has been possible for more than a century to go a library for free and get access to more educational material than one person could read in a several lifetimes. What has never been cheap are teachers who care, and I don't think that MOOCs can technologically innovate so much so that they reduce the cost of a teacher that cares.
Well over 90% of the searches on their site are for tech-related topics. And most of the remainder are probably for business.
You can fantasize about a USA where people want to read Plato and accidentally get English degrees. I also think that would be great. In our current reality, only the trust-fund kids, who already know they never need to work, will want to pay for that. (I mean, their dad or grandpa is the one paying.)
Its a captialsm valuation nothing more.
What are we as humans if we don't have the resources to educate and learn and be curious?
I really hope the current AI and Robot wave will lead us all to a more 'free' society
Focus on automatisation and we don't have a production issue.
Its a man made problem, not some kind of magic rule.
If we live in a world where human effort has no marginal utility, we also live in a world where human life has no value. If we don't, you're in a world where you're competing with other humans for some set of resources. Regardless of whether you believe that you are competing with them, others are competing with you.
I think competition is perhaps one of the most basic rules of reality.
As long as things cost something, and a course costs something to create and deliver, the question of valuation in some way is valid. It's not a capitalist issue, it's an allocation of resources issue, which is something universal as long as resources are limited.
Where it works, the free market is great because it transparently shows how people actually value something. That is, it shows how we actually are and what we actually want, not what would be nice in some utopian world.
I went to university in France when it was both free (still basically is) with no selection for entry and the amount of waste was huge for no benefit to anyone... well except for official stats because "I'm not unemployed, I'm a student"...
How? Surely people/families in Germany/Austria, some of the richest countries in the world, can afford to pay something towards education costs... And in fact they do through their taxes, which are needed to pay for this "free" university. [obviously poor families can benefit from bursaries so this is not a relevant argument]
The waste is students picking courses just to do something or just because they are vaguely interested in them (and then they get all the benefits afforded to students, including housing subsidies). And then they give up, or they fail, or once they graduate they realise that it gets them exactly 0 job. So huge waste of resources and time and, as mentioned, sometimes a way to hide youth unemployment.
rich country doesn't mean rich people. we have high taxes and lower average wages. high rent in cities. in vienna, more than 60% of people live in subsidized housing. none of them could ever afford to pay for university.
and if more than 60% of students need financial support, all we are doing is adding expensive bureaucracy. might as well just make it free instead.
Every time similar topics are discussed it's odd to read some comments because they give the impression that people in the richest countries in the world have no disposable income (they can't pay for healthcare, they can't pay for higher education, they can't pay for public transport, etc). Of course there are poor people, but the majority have plenty of disposable income (that's what a rich country means).
> "in vienna, more than 60% of people live in subsidized housing"
This does not mean that this is a necessity it shows some issues with the housing market and housing policy, not that people are "poor". In fact, if the majority of people in a rich European city get housing subsidies it seems quite clear that this has nothing to do with poverty and not being able to afford it, but is a policy/market disfunction issue.
To go back to France, in France every student gets housing subsidies. This does not mean that they need it, it's just that the choice of policy has been to dish out subsidies without consideration of need.
the majority have plenty of disposable income (that's what a rich country means)
no, it doesn't.
rich country means a high GDP, but we put most of that into public infrastructure, public healthcare (so, yes, we can all pay for healthcare because everyone has insurance) and public transport, and we don't need to pay for education. if education were taken out of the mix then those with lower income would be excluded.
not true. there is also the gesamtschule which delays the decision to make the abitur until you are in 10th grade.
40% of students in germany qualify for university (and another 10% for fachhochschule). that is much higher than the university admission rates in the US.
Again, that's just as bad as paying for education. At least with money you can work or take a loan and chose the path you want even at age 20 or 25, you're not locked in by a choice that was made when you were a teenager. Yes, I know you also have to get good grades in the US or Canada, but at least here in Canada you can basically almost always go back to university, take a few perp courses and be eligible to apply even for medecine.
the abitur i got from the gesamtschule is just as good as the abitur someone got from a gymnasium. if i want to get into medicine or some other highly popular field all i need is good grades in the last 3 years of school.
a 10th grader is 16 years old because first grade starts at 6 years.
those 10th graders that don't continue school go into an apprenticeship, of which there are many choices available. germany has 12 years of compulsory education (9 or 10 years of school and 3 years of either school or professional education)
and no, that is not the same as paying for education.
loans are way harder to get in germany as the banks are much more conservative. getting a loan for school would be practically impossible.
And I guess that makes sense for Germany. Where I live, loans are basically guaranteed and almost free for students especially if you are graduating in a degree with good job prospects. This allowed my dad to basically switch paths entirely when he was like 40, as it paid for his entire spendings during his degree and he could do it easily in north America. It was basically impossible for him to do something similar in France.
i don't know if switching schools became easier or harder, but today i would only send my children to a gesamtschule where it was certain that they would not be under undue pressure in order to be able to continue after 10th grade. in my opinion the three-tiered system might as well be abolished because evaluating 9 year old children whether they might be capable of passing the abitur some 9 years later is absolutely dumb and misguided, and forcing them to switch schools will also hurt their socialization as they lose touch with some friends and have to find new ones.
the system should be replaced with a highschool like system that allows everyone a chance at passing the abitur, and only those that specifically opt to learn a trade instead should be able to leave school earlier, and even those should be offered a short path to an abitur test if they complete their apprenticeship.
on the other hand there is no problem entering university in germany at 40. it's free, so what should stop you? i actually did become a student again at age 30 for a short time. noone suggested that that would be wrong.
getting a loan for that is an entirely different matter. conservative thinking and ageism suggests that nobody has good job prospects starting a new career at that age. but you can do it if you get a part time job (actually, if you switch your current job to part time, which is something you are allowed to do by law in germany) and then use the remaining time to study. if classes are still structured the way they were in my time then you can study at your own pace. it may take a bit longer, but then i also expect that at 40 you are more driven to focus on getting stuff done so i don't think part time study will double the time you need to complete your studies.
You can get Bafoeg (financial support which you get for free) if you have a job degree and go to the BOS to get your university degree that way.
the point is: does charging for university and then giving financial support to those who need it really change anything other than causing more bureaucracy and risking that some people can't go because they don't qualify for financial support yet shy away from the expense?
reducing taxes so that people have more money so they can afford paid education is not going to lead to more students but less.
The same thing happens in Germany but in an even more vicious way. You are basically triaged before high school and can only manage to switch with tons of bureaucracy and difficulty. It's gotten better but it's still very much 'your path is set and is almost impossible to change after high school' for most people.
We use capitalism to control resources etc. but only thanks to controled capitalism / politics we are keeping pure capitalsim under control (like minimum wage, labor laws etc.).
We could create a new system. A system which determines how many resources we as society can produce on one side and want we need + want on the other side. Than we optimize our system for this.
Which would mean we would get rid of everything we don't need and optimize everything we can.
We don't need thousends of different companies doing simliar things just different with their own overhead. Capitalism needs this to control itself.
I don't see what's naive there. On the contrary this is absolute realism. And furthermore this goes hand in hand with individual liberty. Alternatives have been tried, and they failed...
The other point, as made in the "EdTech doesn't scale" post the other day, is that Edutainment is one of the only really scalable ways to do EdTech profitably, and that favours consumption, not growth or testing (because for learning to be effective, it more or less has to be quite hard). At least, to remember most of the content, not just highlights.
I started taking notes, started cutting down on low-quality infotainment/edutainment (for example while I know folks at SciShow work a lot on their content, put a lot of effort into producing scientifically correct stuff, but it's just not deep enough, it's too fast), and in general try to watch/listen to multiple videos that touch the same topics. (Because many complex things require multiple passes to comprehend anyway, and getting different viewpoints, different presentation helps a lot with that.)
That's my personal experience, and that's also the theory nowadays.
I mean, it's not worse than watching reality TV or sports or something. Maybe better - maybe consuming edutainment will inspire you to follow through and apply it.
However the question is increasingly whether simply the cognitive load of feedback is the reason for this is coming up.
i.e. does the Testing effect reduce in efficacy when you apply it to every waking hour, every course? does it just benefit when you study one course?
There are clear links that subjects where students have a stake in the result (i.e. it is mandatory for college) lead to higher attendance and final grades, regardless of study method.
Lots of the predominant psychology applies only to motivated students or those in mandatory courses.. so basically, we can't know the state for free willed learning/edutainment.
For STEM things, I think it's usually of the same quality, and I prefer videos, so it's easier choice.
Same with Plato. You can read Plato on your own, you can listen to many more hours of free lectures on Plato, usually from better quality speakers, than you'd ever get at a university, you can join groups of people who want to discuss Plato's philosophy. These people will actually be individuals interested in the topic, not bored university classmates who spend half the time talking about other things because of their disinterest. This is all for free.
Even discounting the cost, university education trails far behind other forms of learning. Once the cost is factored in, the only appeal ends up being the credentials and the four year summer camp environment.
That's why when I see MOOCs brought up these days in the wild, it's usually from people who are taking them for credentials. Once credentials are taken away, MOOCs and universities just don't have a ton to offer for a motivated learner. It would be good if credentials and education were decoupled (for instance, like with the CFA), but there doesn't appear to be much of a push for that.
the problem with standardized tests however is that they lead to more schools just teaching for the test and not actually helping the students learn. it's tricky. depending on the subject or field. though i suppose papers and dissertations can be judged on their own merits. but other tests are trickier to do in a way that they can't just be passed by memorizing test knowledge.
It's better to work on improving transparent standards for credentials than to have tens of thousands of different standards that no one pays attention to and hoping that they're adequate, despite having no clue if that's actually the case.
I don't want to destroy all universities (like Trump or DeSantis do). But it IS true that the higher-education system needs a big revamp, and that the necessary change is unlikely to come from within, because the people (tenured faculty) who currently hold all the power have a strong interest in not rocking the boat.
But the few times I started a Udemy course, every single one was terrible, once I got past the first 20% or so. And contrary to their advertising, they did not allow me to return the course, because I had "completed too much" or something. IIRC I was around the 30-35% mark.
Totally different from Coursera, which can be hit and miss, but best stuff is very good.
Have you had a different experience? Which courses did you complete that were good?
TLDR: Udemy - cheap, and you get what you pay for.
I remember being both Neil Cummings and Max Schwarzmueller courses to be good, but I did them some time ago and when I was never to web development.
There was a Python course offered by three profs at Rice University that was A+.
Similar for Dan Ariely's Behavioral Economics class - of course, maybe it was all lies (now it turns out), but entertaining nevertheless.
Andrew Ng's course is quite math-heavy (I haven't done it), but it gets rave reviews.
So many Coursera tech/CS courses are offered by profs at elite universities - there's no way they could be the kind of crap that is standard on Udemy.
What Coursera lacks (compared to the university experience) is personal interaction with a real professor, group projects with smart and focused classmates, and personalized feedback.
I think the market spoke. There are still universities that also offer online degrees, but generally on their own platform, with live streaming - not in own-paced, pre-recorded MOOCs.
And you might want to check this out: https://truthofyoga.com/p/knowledge. Not affiliated with it. Would like to do it but can't justify almost 2000 Euro for this course. For you on the other hand it is maybe even too cheap. The guy is teaching at Oxford. Take a look at it.
It is my understanding that that's how most of the universities are now also run.
Granted, I haven't set foot in an university in almost two decades now, so maybe my view is skewed from I what I've read online and based on the not so numerous interactions I've had with people who attend university.
In order for there to be a 1% there must necessarily be a 99%. The percentages are fixed; they always will be. Acceptance rates (public, reported) tend towards the filtering rate (implicit, hidden) as the college educated in the broader population tends towards 1.
Look at the endowments of these institutions. They are comparable in magnitude to elite hedge funds and VCs.
Of course they do top research and learning as well -- but only because they must. Under the old system, which worked simple, you'd be selected for an Ivy based on your blood relations and receive no education at all (for a recent example of this, Brett Kavanaugh: Supreme Court Justice).
I guess it is an improvement on the old system that these places offer a "world-class education" ** to at least some of their students; and that some of their students are pleased to receive it.
** whatever that means. My degree isn't printed on vellum Ivy league stationary, only the coarse public Ivy stuff (public Ivy: isn't that an interesting turn of phrase?); but I received the finest education of my academic career from a California community college. My classmates were navy veterans, part time auto mechanics, and young single parents.
In fact, Harvard and MIT invested $30M each and sold EdX for $800M to 2U: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-06-29-2u-buys-edx-for-800m...
So, likely, Harvard and MIT made some money.
It's 2U who lost the money. It's the public that suffered from the loss of EdX.
<sarcasm>As hedge funds with schools attached, they are doing extremely well.</sarcasm>
When a company (in education!) that makes lots of noise about diversity obviously favors hiring white people, it's noteworthy.
If we were in some brown-majority country where white people were excluded from money and power, yes, that would be noteworthy. Call it out! The US, despite what Trump tells his MAGA followers, is not that country.
You know, without you saying another word, I feel like I know them, down to being able to describe their clothes, haircuts and of course powerpoint decks. It's like some bad business school archetype that just re-appears by itself in nature.
I retired last year from teaching full-time at a conventional university. All of my teaching was in-person until the last few years, which were online because of the pandemic. My impression, after I got used to the new format, was that online is fine for small discussion-based seminars but that it is harder to keep students engaged in larger classes, especially students who are new to university study.
I really liked the potential of online at first—it was exciting to lead meaningful academic discussions among students located in several countries—but as time passed I started to wonder about how well it can really work for university education.
The EdX brand was amazing. It’s sad what it’s become.
I don’t know too much about classcentral but I hope that the blog post was written in the interest of seeing MOOCs thrive.
https://www.youtube.com/@lecturesbywalterlewin.they9259/vide...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWnfJ0-xXRE&list=PLyQSN7X0ro...
What they bought had little resemblance to what they thought they were buying. They got fleeced by MIT and Harvard. Wasn't the first and won't be the last.
There's a sucker born every minute
As a member of the Open edX technical oversight committee, and a long time core contributor, I’d like to comment on the future of Open edX — the open source project. I’m not an employee of Axim or 2U though, so I can’t say anything about their plans.
As OP explained, Axim is the only “cash-rich entity” to have emerged after the edX acquisition. They retained control of the open source Open edX project, and are now in charge of its maintenance and improvement. That is with the support of many open source contributors, of course.
For those who don’t know, Open edX is the piece of software on which runs edX.org, but also MITx and many other open online learning platforms around the world. It’s a big software project that has managed to carve a niche in a complex ecosystem.
The analysis that Axim is mostly a grant-giving organisation is very far from the reality. Yes, Axim is allocating part of its endowment to grants, though I don’t have much insight into this aspect of their mission. What I do know, is that Axim is also investing a very substantial amount of time and money in the development of the open source project, and that is no trivial feat. You can make your own opinion by checking the project activity on GitHub and the Open edX forum.
To put things simply, the open source project is undergoing an important transition where we have fewer dedicated engineers (because of the layoffs at 2U) but much better project management and focus (because the project roadmap is no longer dictated by edX). There’s also a lot of internal debate of where the project should be headed, strategically speaking (I have my own opinion, which you can find elsewhere). None of this would be possible without Axim and its financial independence.
This transition is long and complicated, and it’s not one we can accelerate just by throwing money at it. Also, I like to think of education as a complex ecosystem that improves in incremental steps. AI and personalised learning might play a role in that process, but they are most certainly not a panacea. It would be meaningless to invest these $735 million in such a narrow scope. Instead, it makes much more sense to to build a stable foundation for the future of open online learning.
In a nutshell: don’t give up on Open edX just yet, the best things are yet to come :)
Although it's just a platform, you'd need to create your own courses.
How do you sell a non-profit?
Or, more specifically, how do you purchase to gain control?
Board members aren't supposed to sell board seats or do anything for self enrichment
I like that non profits can be asset stripped, I just wouldn’t call the thing sold to be a non-profit
Consequently, when the non-profit in question has something valuable (like market share or branding), there are some misaligned incentives.
Funneling nonprofit money into private pockets is like an art at MIT. How many professors are millionaires? How many would be without MIT?
non profit salaries of board members can be extremely high, the aggregate reporting on this is poor despite the public filings, as the filings say the same things in wildly different ways
I think the weirdest meme in the non profit world is how many act poor, or actually are undercompensated, but the answer to why is “its a non profit soo….” as opposed to “the board chooses to underpay me soo…”
additionally, many things can be done with assets. even if a non profit does not directly buy a board member’s investments, it can use its funds to pump that investment. for example, buy 2 houses on the board member’s block at inflated prices, so the board member can sell their own house at a huge profit. can do the same with anything especially illiquid things like art with small float. can do it with small stocks that are easy to pump too. can do it with crypto that wont be scrutinized for pumping. as long as the transactions aren't directly to the restricted party it meets all regulations.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/digital-... - They put $80M into edX and got back $800M.
Some would call it a failure to uphold that mission, even if it was good for their bank balance.
A nonprofit built something, sold it for a lot more than it cost to create it, and now has the cash which it is legally required to spend furthering its mission. This seems generally reasonable to me, though of course Axim may end up spending its millions poorly.
I could have thought of selling some assets, I didn’t think of selling even the name of the non profit and just renaming the old one
It is funny that the original one now has cash that it doesnt spend after years of high churn, I’ll check out its non profit tax filings
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/2/23/climaco-harvard...
I fear that shifting to a TikTok style education is just another lead towards an Idiocracy.
What are your thoughts on that?
Sounds like it was incredibly successful.