Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting. I'm hearing a bunch of stuff from colleagues at these universities, and it sounds like it may be a bit rough starting up, especially once it gets to the 2nd semester after these initial offerings.

It took most professors completely by surprise, and it sounds like there may not be bottom-up buy-in (was completely a management decision). In particular, at at least one university, profs are now being told that they may be required to teach a course via Coursera, or at least strongly requested to. And, the universities don't want to budget this as actual teaching, so it's just extra work on top of the normal class load: since Coursera courses aren't credit-hours, they don't give teaching credit. It's supposed to count under "service" or "outreach", I guess, the way serving on committees or reviewing papers or doing a CNN interview does. (This part may vary by university.)

Not sure that's a good recipe for high-quality courses via this method. The advantage of the first few courses is that it was a bottom-up decision by professors who wanted to do it, and devoted significant time to do it right, rather than having it assigned to them by management.

Personally, this is VERY exciting for me. The biggest challenge I have seen with traditional universities getting into "distance learning" is that they are very much focused on delivering a full "classroom" experience rather than tailoring the experience to the medium.

Example: many course videos are of a "live" class and are repeated for every semester regardless of the subject. Next to no re-use of course video is seen from semester to semester. The experience is very much one of time/place-shifting a class experience.

Also, the focus is almost NEVER on interactivity. As a distance student, you're VERY much dependent on your professors willingness to read and answer emails or post in forums.

I was very surprised that MITx had an IRC server set up for the EE class that were offering. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw they had hundreds of people in the channel.

So, from my point of view, the biggest shift we are seeing is a willingness of the brick-and-mortar universities to consider working with a partner that is going to market their professors and university brand to a very wide audience and yet enough of an arms-length away that there is little risk to the "brand" if things go sour. The fact that there are NO for-credit courses is quite conspicuous and you should expect the universities to attempt to maintain an implicit separation between MOOCs (massive open online courses) and their traditional "residential" offerings.

That said, the writing is on the wall: the traditional model doesn't scale and financial pressure is going to push ALL schools towards this model in some fashion or they will simply become irrelevant. As I drive up and down I-95 in the Northeast, one of the things I've noticed is that there are a massive number of traditional schools advertising on billboards. This NEVER used to happen and most universities (IMHO) considered it a sign of desperation to advertise for students as opposed to recruiting.

What we are witnessing is a race developing. Think back to the early days of Yahoo/Altavista/Google. There are going to be some big winners and some also-rans in this fight. I'm betting on it.

Full Disclosure: I earned my bachelor's degree from Harvard via their Extension School and did the majority of my coursework online using their video delivery platform. I graduated in 2009 at 39 after a LONG absence from school to chase my fortune on the Internet. Best decision I ever made.

That said, the writing is on the wall: the traditional model doesn't scale and financial pressure is going to push ALL schools towards this model in some fashion or they will simply become irrelevant.

I don't disagree there are all kinds of problems. But how does this initiative address any of the financial pressures? It does nothing to reduce the cost structure of universities; in fact it increases the cost structure by adding another thing their professors and administrators must do, not instead of but in addition to everything they currently do. And yet, it does not provide any new revenue streams to pay for that. At least, it doesn't unless there is a payment from Coursera to universities as part of this deal that hasn't been announced yet. My guess is that they're hoping to use it as an advertising loss-leader to attract students and prestige. But that would mean doubling down even more on the traditional high-tuition model, because that's what's going to ultimately subsidize the free courses.

Now if they charged for the online courses, I could see that making a difference in the financial picture. Maybe that's the longer-term plan, for-pay online courses with Coursera and the university splitting the proceeds. That would be closer to the Harvard Extension School model you mention.

How much do you pay for Google searches? For Yahoo! email?

The revenue model is going to be something that is roughly similar to the ones we have with any number of "freemium" type services.

My bet is that there is going to be a certification track that complements the online course delivery. I've seen this with industry certifications (JNCIE, CCIE are ones I'm familiar with) and that the cost to get "certified" will be fairly substantial. It'll also require physical presence and some practical demonstration of competence. For math, I'd expect a traditional sit-down exam. For CS, probably some combination of programming exercise and exam. I don't know how this will work for the humanities.

And one other thing considering the cost argument: paying for the production of a video lecture and the hosting of the content for hundreds of thousands is going to be a fraction of the cost of paying even a grad student to give a lecture on-campus.

It reduces the margin cost for each individual student.

How so? You don't get a degree from these online courses.

You don't get a degree now.

Mark my words: in a few years, you'll be able to certify that you passed each course and you'll get some form of certification for passing a sequence of courses. It might not be called "BS in CS from MIT" but it'll be looked at the same way.

Wow, if that's true that's terrible news. The idea that professors would be forced into this.

If it is true however, there is still udacity, which is much more conservative in it's expansion.

I should note that nobody is quite sure what will happen yet, so that may not be the case. A lot of people found out this was even happening the same time HN did! And the agreements were all signed at a very high administrative level (President or Provost level, which is often a political appointment quite out of communication with the day-to-day operations of the university), so it's not clear there is an implementation plan with dean-level or department-head-level administration yet.

We'll see, though. One thing universities are trying to balance is how to get professors to do more "entrepreneurial" kinds of things while staying. As professoring gets to be a little more like a freelance job (bring in your own research funding, teach online courses via a for-profit company, build up a personal "brand"), one question is what keeps the more successful professors at the university, instead of just going independent, the way Sebastian Thrun did. There's a real possibility that some of the launch professors listed in this announcement volunteered precisely because they're contemplating jumping ship to their own online-course startup, and are using this as a route to build name recognition and audience.

What is the general sentiment in the community about endeavors like this? Only anecdotes, but usually when I see an article like this find it's way to Hacker News I'll see a few posts from people describing themselves as part of the academic community discussing the cons of the way these are being rolled out and implemented.

I would say mixed opinions, but considerable skepticism. Some of the skepticism is of how university administration will handle it; there is some suspicion there is no real plan and this is being done for purely "brand" reasons, so the university president can talk about "cutting edge" initiatives. Some of it is of the concept in general. Some of it is that it's a for-profit company, not a nonprofit with clear charitable goals. Worse, it's a for-profit company whose business plan is still unclear, so one doesn't know what their long-term intentions are.

But a lot of people are just undecided, waiting to see how it'll pan out. Probably not a lot of outright enthusiastic professors, except from the relatively small number who are actively looking to either jump to one of these startups themselves (like Sebastian Thrun), or at least co-found one (like Daphne Koller).

The Chronicle of Higher education's occasional guest op-eds are probably a decent representation of the range of opinion. Here are a cautiously positive and a somewhat negative take, respectively:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/07/11/moocs-arent-a-pan...

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/whats-the-matter-with...

My understanding (I used to do some work in distance education) is that one of the reasons Harvard/MIT founded eduX rather than partner with Coursera or Udacity is they were unable to get past the 'for profit' model, and there was some unwillingness to discuss how the 'profit' was going to be made.

I think a lot of the academic scepticism does come from the for-profit - not to say for-profit education can't work, just that it is somewhat new territory for many institutions.

I wonder why they couldn't (or didn't choose to) partner with individual professors on a per-course basis instead of entire institutions whose professors might not all be interested in participating. Is it because individual professors might not have complete autonomy to do so without the permission of the university? Or maybe partnering with an entire university ensures a greater and more recurring supply of courses? Or that the university might help incentivize what is surely a very time-consuming task by having a course replace some other service requirement?

Probably all of the above, although I think Udacity was created as a separate entity because the Prof's had some legal issues with Stanford. So having permission is probably pretty important.

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