The Ed-Tech Bubble
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There’s an education bubble, and there’s a tech bubble - but the ed-tech bubble isn’t fleshing out either.
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So? I failed to ascertain from the article why this is supposed to be some kind of problem.
Also, as far as I can see, quite a few people do find some reason to stay in, and fight for their grade. I've taken several online courses:
• The Norvig/Thrun AI class at Stanford
• Thrun's robot car class at Udacity
• Evans' applied cryptography class at Udacity
• Jackson and Shoham's game theory class at Coursera
• Ng's machine learning class at Coursera
• Abu-Mostafa's learning from data class at Caltech
At most of these, the forums were full of people who evidently found a reason to stay in. Whenever there was any ambiguity in a question, there would be spirited discussion and vigorous arguments from those who thought that the ambiguity had cost them a point.
There did tend to be more of this on Udacity courses than on Coursera courses. I think it because the Udacity forums are based on a Stack Exchange clone, whereas the Coursera forums are more like traditional forums.
On the other hand, the Caltech learning from data course had some good forum action, and its forums are quite plain and simple, so I don't think forum software explains the difference between Udacity and Coursera. Part of it might be that Abu-Mostafa frequently answers questions on the forum, whereas at Coursera I didn't see the professors on the forums much--only TAs.
If you need some kind of threat looming over you in order to motivate you to stick with a course and no such threat is available, why take that course? Go take some course in a subject that actually interests you enough that learning more about it is sufficient motivation.
My point is that its important to factor motivation into product conception and design. Sure, we could all read wikipedia and articles all day (i mean, we do) - but having measurable "buckets" for our choices make them easier to explain. Hence the entertainment or resume-builder formulas I laid out, which appear to fit your motivational measurements.
There are TONS of different companies doing some really interested stuff in ed-tech. Not only are there lots of ed-tech companies that aren't online learning companies, there are a lot of online learning companies that DON'T rely on a student's intrinsic motivation: e.g. anything in the K12 space - there are a lot of K12 schools that are beginning to incorporate online learning into their curriculum, and then there's plenty of extrinsic (e.g. grade-based) motivation to do well and perform.
I think my #1 takeaway from this is that the author isn't the target market for most of these ed-tech companies. They're not trying to get people to take these classes for fun, no more than colleges want people to take classes for fun.
Great point about incorporating behavior though - technology that molds and aids existent behavior is always needed!
Expecting future education to work like a traditional lecture class (just online) is far too limiting, IMO. To name just one alternative among many, consider sites like StackOverflow. Educational? Absolutely. Fits the traditional model where there's a smart guy standing at the front of the room (real or virtual) and shoveling the same knowledge into every student's brain at the same time? Not in the slightest.
There's probably going to be a continuing role for courses and course-like entities, but those shouldn't be the only thing we work on (and I would argue that they shouldn't even be the primary things we're working on). The lecture model was developed to deal with a set of constraints that are largely irrelevant in an online environment.
The one course I found truly useful was Stanford's iOS course (it really is one of the best iTunes U courses available). Other than that, I'm much more likely to watch a single lecture (think TED or Stanford's lecture series on YouTube) than a whole course.