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Comment by piyushpr134 | Hacker News Reader

Universities are not going anywhere MOOC are a dead end

Dead end for what? Quality recordings of real lectures have been amazing for self improvement. I've never gone into it expecting a meaningful certificate, just meaning for me living my life.

You're probably in the small minority at least when it comes to forking over material dollars. Most people spending money, at least beyond trade paperback range, are probably looking for something that has at least a plausible connection to real income.

If that was true, no music teacher selling independent lessons would be able to survive.

It's not clear to me that independent tutors are generally getting rich. But there clearly are activities that benefit from individual training. I imagine music is one of those. But that mostly probably falls into the luxury goods category.

"Getting rich" is a substantial movement of the goalposts. The point is that people are spending money outside the trade paperback range on education, either for themselves or for their children (I've seen quite a wide distribution while in the waiting room), that has nothing to do with income.

Turns out that an online certificate isn't worth anything when layoffs happen and the market is oversaturated with people who have real degrees. MOOCs have their place, but it's a very narrow set of disciplines.

I work at a university and half of the coursework seems worse than the good MOOCs. Esp. the more practical ones.

(Might be a problem of that university, still ...)

It's probably not a uni specific issue. I went to a top EU uni, and there absolutely were courses that could've just been an ~~email~~ video. Admitedly not everything was bad, but the quality of education isn't as high as it should be.

We have a lot more students in university, and a lot more professors. Inevitably this means converging on "average."

More students _per course_ than a MOOC cohort? -- doubt. If you add up all courses of a while discipline, edu portals still serve way more students.

In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers?

I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.

Well, I work at a university too. At least in biomedicine, every MOOC is extremely shallow. The most advanced MOOC is an introductory-level when compared to the university courses.

I wouldn't be so tough on the online certificates. The key value I get out of Coursera is an unbeatable "time to knowledge" and some proof it was me who attended the course through the id verification. Compare that to traditional in-person education, where you are bound to fixed course dates, long approval timelines etc. Until you get feedback from HR that you are eligible for a course/training, i've probably already completed it via my Coursera complete subscription.

I'm not sure offline certificates mean a whole lot when layoffs matter either.

But MOOCs and other purely online options just didn't result in any meaningful certification especially outside of a connection to established universities. And, given that, people/companies weren't interested in paying significant bucks for them.

It was probably a useful experiment. Just not a very successful one. And once the experiment faltered, schools/professors became less interested in putting money and energy into it.

All the evidence is that most of the students/potential students who weren't already motivated to pursuing independent learning didn't really connect to all this online material.

Just wait until you find out that real degrees also aren't worth anything anymore

It's not a question whether they are or not worth something. It's just that it's a much more meaningful differentiator when there's an overabundance of talent. CVs are going to be filtered based on something. And people with no degree are going to have a much more difficult time getting through the automated screening. That will come as a surprise to people who were promised they'll get a job by paying $1000 for a "nano-degree".

My alma mater (University of Nottingham UK) has just stopped all music and modern language teaching, which (for a very popular, respected, large campus institution) seems a bad sign for universities generally.

And that's with all the foreign student bonanza money. My inlaws live in Notts and all they see getting built is student blocks. Imagine what'll happen when the next government drastically limits student visas.

Honestly years out of college, I really want to refresh my engineering education, and perhaps get academically rigorous education on topics I missed out on back then.

While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.

> While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.

That's what Udemy was from the start. If you want depth, it was always Coursera.

https://www.coursera.org/browse/physical-science-and-enginee...

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