Free Online Education Is Now Illegal in Minnesota
slate.com
slate.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4671196
The title of the Slate blogspam piece is even more exaggerated and link-baiting than the title of the Chronicle piece; both titles are factually wrong. Both blog posts overstate the impact of the Minnesota notice to higher education institutions, which has resulted only in a fig-leaf change to Coursera's ToS directed to Minnesota residents, and has had NO effect on Coursera's operation in Minnesota. As noted in my comment on the first thread,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672038
I am a Minnesota resident, I am enrolled in multiple Coursera courses (and two of my children are enrolled in Coursera courses), and I will be speaking to my state legislators about this as a precaution after first speaking to the Minnesota Department of Education about this when business hours begin here. The sun will rise in the east here in Minnesota just like everywhere else today, and all is well with the world. Well, maybe not quite everything is well with the world, as two of the top eleven most active posts on HN just now
http://news.ycombinator.com/active
are both discussions of this very exaggerated story about Minnesota, neither checked with actual on-the-ground reporting on students currently enrolled in Coursera courses in Minnesota.
ONE MORE EDIT: Thanks to the several commenters (at various comment levels in various subthreads) who suggested policy considerations to bring up with the offices of my state senator and state representative today during the campaign season, and to the commenters who pointed to various possible interpretations of the relevant statutes and possible partisan political considerations related to this issue. I'll digest all that after giving blood today, and send an email to the state Office of Higher Education
and to my legislators. Over the weekend, I'll be doing homework in my Coursera courses [smile].
https://www.coursera.org/about/terms
> Notice for Minnesota Users
> Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.
You have stated that this "has had NO effect on Coursera's operation in Minnesota" and "I am a Minnesota resident, I am enrolled in multiple Coursera courses". Your continued enrollment is clearly in violation of the new TOS unless you are taking the classes from outside your state of residence.
First of all, just because someone spends 18 hours a day on a computer does not mean they're a "native netizen." That's not a real thing.
Secondly, you're still in [State/Country of residence] when you're online. Just because someone is checking Twitter in a bathroom in Minnesota does not mean they're no longer subject to laws and regulations in Minnesota.
But it could someday soon seem very quaint and wrongheaded.
The Catholic Church used to claim universal jurisdiction, and some religions still see their laws as perpetually applying to all born to their faith. To the contrary of such claims, richer communities have moved to primarily territorial, largely secular, slightly voluntary (through the ability to choose your residence) sovereign jurisdictional authorities.
This evolution could continue to reach primarily membership/networked, mostly-voluntary, often-overlapping and situationally-contingent sovereign jurisdictional authorities. These might fall back to territorial governance only when the issues involved (property lines, effluents, etc) are themselves territorial.
Educating yourself via the network could be seen as something in a totally non-territorial realm, and thus of no proper interest to territorial authorities. That would leave networked-sovereignty citizens as free to ignore the dictates of overreaching territorial authorities as many today feel free to ignore the Pope or Sharia Law.
"Native netizen" is a real thing because I said it is. An existence proof only requires the existence of a single instance.
Secondly, it's not about the amount of time spent using a computer (18 hours a day?!), but a state of mind. The corner of my mind responsible for identifying locations perceives "online" as a distinct physical location. If you asked me where I'm from, I could say City A, but if you asked me where I grew up, I would say "the Internet." Answering anything else would feel like lying.
The location of one's body is independent of the perceived location of one's mind. When it comes to the Internet, the second is more important.
State law prohibits degree-granting institutions from offering instruction in Minnesota without obtaining permission from the office and paying a registration fee. (The fee can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, plus a $1,200 annual renewal.)
So this amounts to a relatively small money grab for all practical purposes.
Quite possibly the importance of this law should not be overstated, and I agree with you and your children carrying on with your Coursera courses. But apparently you will be doing so in violation of the law.
Should not unjust laws be protested, if perhaps also disobeyed? I would not exactly be afraid to continue using Coursera in Minnesota, but experience has taught me that law enforcement should never be trusted 100% to be reasonable.
That said, you mentioned that you will be speaking with your state legislators -- you are doing as much to fight this as anyone reasonably could, and for that you have my gratitude. If 10,000 other Minnesotans took the same action as you, this would die as it deserves to.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/mar...
Clearly not. According to the article, the law deals specifically with institutions provide education, not individuals soliciting the courses.
This is much like poker laws that made it illegal for banks to process financial transactions, but never made it illegal for players to participate.
The creation of property rights is an imposition of the dictatorship of the majority. It tells the strong that they cannot use their natural gifts to further their own interests under the penalty of collective force. If the will of the majority dissolves, property rights are meaningless.
I, and millions of people around the world, have been disobeying the draconian drug laws for years and it's getting us nowhere. What advice do you have?
For example, I am about to vote to legalize marijuana in Colorado. I don't know whether it will pass, but you can bet that measure would never have been on the ballot were it not for the decades of data--on the medical and social effects of the drug and its criminalization--provided by people breaking the law.
I think that the changing attitudes are simply due to the old guard dying from old age and disease. When there are sufficiently few people who grew up in the era of hardcore anti-drug propaganda then there will be a policy change.
Aside from that: I wonder what would happen if all the people in the country who are using marijuana at least semi-regularly were to go to some very public place at the same time and light up a joint.
That obviousness surely elevates their response to DH4.
Instead of a posting a glib response, a reasonable thing to do would be to read the wikipedia article on civil disobedience and realize that a single person randomly disobeying a law in public is not how it works.
We are on the internet. Most of these conversations will go nowhere beyond where the people reading them will take them, which is nowhere. I am not interested in writing essay after essay debating things with people who have no power to change them in the first place. This is a waste of time. The internet primarily exists as a form of entertainment. This may be against the spirit of HN but I would argue that HN is against the spirit of the internet. My proof of this is that the vast majority (99%+) of the internet is nothing like HN.
Anyway, to address your point - numerous people take drugs publically at events like music festivals. The result of this action is a lack of arrests and a lack of policy change.
What you would want to do are:
1) Bring the issue to the public. Make sure that it ends up on the evening news more often than not.
2) Dispel most of the myths associated with drugs (e.g. all drug users are out-of-control crazed lunatics on a homicidal rampage to kill you and your kids!).
3) Get more people on-board. If more and more and more people are getting arrested very publicly for using drugs, then at some point, the government will have to do something, because they can't afford to have a significant portion of the population in jail.
These are the end-goals. Mostly to change public perception and to get the majority of the population on your side. Then you want to bring the issue to a head.
It's worth noting the perp is the Office of Higher Education, not the Department of Education: they are separate, cabinet-level bureaucracies. One is not a sub-department of the other.
If you're an employee of the OHE, and you somehow think it's a good idea to go on record defending this silly statute, then you need to be fired. Period. No one at that organization should possibly think applying a decades old statute to a non-degree granting institution is the right thing to do.
Edit: I have contacted the source at the OHE and am waiting for a response. I'm hopeful this was all a misunderstanding, but one can never hope too much for the right outcome when dealing with bureaucracy.
Notice for Minnesota Users
Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.
Previously reported: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/minnesota-gives-cours...
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4671196
From the article's page, commenter Greg Shenaut points out that further reading of MN law would render this political "threat" moot. His comment pasted below:
Bottom line, they should have considered Coursera, since it offers no degrees at all, under their “Private Career Schools” statute (Chapter 141) rather than under their “Private and Public Postsecondary Education Act (136A.61-71)”. The latter act is concerned with (1) degree granting institutions and (2) schools that call themselves universities or colleges as part of their name. Coursera grants no degrees and doesn't call itself anything except “Coursera” (or coursera.org), so it is really bizarre that they decided to regulate it under 136A.61-71.
If they had made the opposite determination, then, under 141.21(10) and 141.35(17), Coursera would probably have been exempted from any need for official approval: “[The Private Career Schools Act] shall not apply to... schools with no physical presence in Minnesota, as determined by the office, engaged exclusively in offering distance instruction that are located in and regulated by other states or jurisdictions”.
EDIT: Hopefully the person who touched this off has been suitably chastened. Given that this is the civil service it's unlikely they'll be fired.
Additionally, said universities are referring to themselves as their traditional name (e.g. "stanford university") and not "coursera."
EDIT after reading the update: I read this as back to square one. Stanford is offering courses via Coursera for free. But Stanford doesn't offer free degrees. Why is that a problem?
MN's opinion seems to be its citizens can't get a degree online from a school outside of MN unless that school is registered with OHE. However, the quoted law speaks to not having a physical presence.
Here's an index of the relevant statutes (scroll down to the 'MINNESOTA PRIVATE AND OUT-OF-STATE PUBLIC POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION ACT' section): https://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/statutes/?id=136A
>Subd. 4.Statement required; religious nature. Any degree awarded upon completion of a religiously exempt program shall include descriptive language to make the religious nature of the award clear.
If true, it's still strange to me that school with a non-free graduate degree in liturgical studies would be exempt, but an online school offering free courses in science, business, history, etc. would not be exempt.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_(Bill_of_Rights)
[2] consumer protection law and religious organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantwell_v._Connecticut
Actually that's a good thing.
If you give lawmakers the power to block things like coursera you do not have to wonder that the get lobbied to use it.
Its not a for-profit problem its a political power problem.
True. The only why we could get around this is if people only cared for the soiety and not themselfs. This concept was called "New Socalist Man" in the economic debates of the 1920 - 1950 but the simple true is that it is a utopian concept.
> Also lobbing takes money and it only pays if you're making a profit.
Lobbying has a return on investment like any other thing a company can do. The diffrence is that the profit that falls out of lobbying does not come from bigger costumer sadisfaction or rising demand, it comes from state privlages or less competition.
Cutting out the middleman! I guess government is inefficient.
Instead, we have Ma Bell, Part II. I don't see how an evil corporation could have brought about such a situation without the enthusiastic assistance of the state.
BINGO! Give yummyfajitas a cookie. Government inhibits competition and innovation more than it helps.
The first order of business in designing a democracy is figuring out how to mitigate the tyranny of the majority. Read the Federalist Papers. I wrote this a couple days ago: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4658896
To answer your question, the answer is "Everyone." The problem is that while this is technically true already (that's what consent of the governed is), the purpose of democracy is to make it explicit and transparent so that it can be criticized and reacted to.
If only the US were a democracy instead of a representative republic! But, given the standard human condition, we still coalesce into tribes. Be it based on race, religion, hometown, shared career, you name it, we form blocs. These blocs then either innately or in response to other blocs seek to gain power (heck, that's what political science _is_, the study of acquisition of power, and it's far from a solved question). So the fairy dust solution of "everyone" being the minority represented doesn't really hold true in the real world.
Thus, given these constraints, I conclude a for-profit-society is more transparent and navigable than a profit-for-society. If one were to assume that everyone else lived a profit-for-society life, then one defector would be able to manipulate the entire society to their personal aims. Though I strive to live my personal life to a more noble ideal, I cannot assume everyone else will.
Your proposal is akin to the ideal anarcho-capitalists* have, in that states compete. As I understand the philosophy, judicial systems and police forces are private and distinct. Law is common-law, meaning it's not case based, but rather takes into account the accuser, accused, and the situation. The will of the court is then implemented via by a hired police force. The issue is then when courts and police merge horizontally and vertically. You then have a _de_ _facto_ state. It's unavoidable, and the answer is "Well, you obviously can't have a society where people are like that." This answer ignores the strategic human element. One cannot even call this behavior immoral, as it likely comes about with noble intentions.
Anyway, just some thoughts. I salute your goals.
*EDIT: anarcho-capitalists (ancaps), not socio-anarchists.
That doesn't follow, though. This is just as much fairy dust as the notion of everyone having a fair and equal say into "the agenda": not everyone is motivated by profit. You can pretend that they are and model them to be such, but you're inevitably incorrect.
Now, you could force them to be for-profit. But if you could do that, you could also force them to be profit-for-society. Why do the former rather than the latter?
> If one were to assume that everyone else lived a profit-for-society life, then one defector would be able to manipulate the entire society to their personal aims.
This is the problem of the demagogue, or "why direct democracy doesn't work". My ideas are an outgrowth of a proposal for education reform precisely because this is the most necessary step. The most effective countermeasure to the demagogue that we know of is a two-pronged response: (1) information saturation, such that any lies or half-truths are easily exposed and (2) critical thinking, such that the demagogue finds zirself useful only for thought leadership, but not thought determination.
And while you might imagine that #1 is being reached by the Internet, and I agree that it has made significant leaps and strides in the right direction, it is not remotely enough. The Internet does not reach enough people, and of the people it reaches, we have filter bubbles and echo chambers.
> Your proposal is akin to the ideal anarcho-capitalists* have, in that states compete.
Absolutely not. Please don't read in things I didn't say. I am not a Social Darwinist, and I'd prefer not to be lumped in with those who are. The paragraphs I wrote in my vision only outline legislative mechanisms; they do not consider changes in the judiciary or in the execution of law.
I'm more scared of the world "for society's profit."
It is not mere about depriving people from their right to free information access, it is an attempt to deprive people from their right to grow up, to improve their lives, to learn how they have been cheated and by whom.
For example, to learn that not just those finance guys, but the whole economic science has no clue about what's going on with the economy, except that it is very broken.)
Enter negative rights. For instance, a right to protect yourself and your property against aggression. You can't take mine, I can't take yours. Now we do not always need anyone else to resolve any conflict between us. (We may ask a judge for help, but it is not required.)
In this case the problem is not with a right to education. Minnesota state violates negative rights of the educator and a student to do what they want with themselves (provided they do not aggress upon property of others).
If you think in terms of negative rights you will see solution to many difficult problems. But if you continue thinking in terms of positive rights, you will get more arbitrary judgements and more aggression.
I think, as a human born in the U.S. I have a divine right to erect a structure to sleep in and keep the snow off so I don't die. But that right disappeared long ago.
Since the property-owning class (private and government) took that right away from me, they now have an obligation to provide me some things.
Or would you prefer armed revolution where I take back my right to establish reasonable shelter?
Now if you stand on a justly owned property (like my house), then you play by the rules of the owner or go away.
If you stand on unjustly owned property (like a forest protected by the state), then you may use part of it as your own provided you do not alter objective properties of this forest that were enjoyed by everybody prior to you. E.g. if you noticeably alter the air quality by cutting it down, prior users of the air may ask you for compensation.
Also, it's a losing strategy to talk about somebody's obligations. If somebody has robbed you, he must 1) compensate what's stolen 2) be punished. He is not obliged to provide you with social security, free speech and fast internet.
The fact that you think Mitt Romney owning property is "just ownership" while the children of, say, a non-citizen Native American who came back across the Mexican border in the 90s to his ancestral lands in San Diego county are "just non-property owners" is absurd.
Provided you agree on the definition of property, which is by itself very disputed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?_r=...
“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.
Me: Yes, it was.
When they revise their standards they change a lot of things. Here is the actual change they made. This is found on page 25 of the list of changes to High School Social Studies:
BEFORE:
> explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Thomas Jefferson, and William Blackstone on political revolutions from 1750 to the present;
AFTER:
> explain the political philosophies of individuals such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Thomas Jefferson, and William Blackstone;
and this is from page 42
BEFORE:
> analyze the contributions of the political philosophies of the Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison on the development of the U.S. government;
AFTER:
> identify the contributions of the political philosophies of the Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Jay, George Mason, Roger Sherman, and James Wilson, on the development of the U.S. government;
These are the actual changes. When attacking this change one should be aware of what they are. To comment on this without knowing what the changes were, such as the NYT did in their article, is simply ignorant. Unfortunately the quality of their reporting has gone down considerably in recent years and fact checking is clearly not done on many articles. The claim that Jefferson is "being removed from textbooks" is absolutely incorrect and thus a poor example to continue using in criticizing Texas.
Texas and California ensure that the majority of textbooks are just bland, period.
Those are big dog, major-population states that adopt textbooks at the state level (most states make textbook decisions at the school district level, others do use state-level adoption, but don't have enough population to have much market clout).
To sell well, a K-12 text has to a) not offend Texas and b) not offend California. Good luck with that.
Whatever government agency the schools in minnesota have an influence over.
I'm assuming this was legislation passed in order to prevent people creating bogus for-profit universities.
But coursera doesn't charge money or offer accredited qualifications.
So how would this differ from any other educational site, like say stackoverflow?
Does it hinge around the fact that it is unofficially associated with certain existing universities like Stanford etc by using their logos and lecturers?
P.S. The ML class Andrew Ng is teaching on Coursera is phenomenal by the way.
If you are intending to try to smear Democrats, you are doing a spectacularly poor job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Pogemiller
Party aside, him being a 30-year career politician is noteworthy in itself.
I can't even begin to wrap my head around this.
Additionally, while a private resident of Minnesota can happily continue using Coursera (at least for now) without consequence, this could have an impact on Minnesota public schools. If I were a Minnesota public school teacher, I would now be very reluctant to use Coursera in my classroom. All it takes is one student to tell Mommy and Daddy that they got assigned homework from an "illegal website," and there could be a shitstorm. (I realize that Coursera isn't really targeted at school-age kids, but what if it had been Khan Academy?)
It seems pretty clear from reading the article that Minnesota isn't stopping anybody from taking online courses.
But to be officially recognized in Minnesota requires that the entity providing the education is registered as an educational entity in Minnesota. I'm pretty sure most states have laws like this. Here's why: I know nothing about biology, but without laws like this, there would be nothing stopping me from offering classes on biology.
In this case it's obvious Coursera is legit, but in a lot of cases it may not be so obvious.
What if you did know something about biology, and furthermore you were a really good teacher, and you wanted to post YouTube videos to spread the knowledge for free (like Salman Khan). If the law said you had be registered as an educational institution, you'd first have to navigate the bureaucracy, probably pay some outrageous fees, and you'd probably end up being rejected because you're doing things in a new and innovative way which the law didn't account for. Would you go through all that and try to fight it just to give away some YouTube videos for free?
Probably not, and that would deprive the public of a new opportunity to learn. That wouldn't serve the public interest.
Minnesota isn't trying to stop Coursera's innovation.
They just need to certify they're teaching legitimate stuff before they can claim to be an educational institution in Minnesota.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If I wanted to teach people, it seems reasonable to prove that I know the subject I'm teaching.
Wait a second, is this a certified political opinion that I'm replying to? Do you have your Internet politics license? I don't want to be cheated arguing with a low-quality commenter.
Also, it's nice to think that everybody would play nice, but without laws like this there are assholes who would teach people crap. Laws like this don't exist because somebody decided to make an arbitrary law out of nowhere. Apparently it was a big enough problem that the majority of people in Minnesota thought there should be a law...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/19/minnesota...
Written instructions are not that uncommon.
Based on feedback below, I have added my two bits to this conversation
Even supposedly conservative countries are opening up their elite curriculums like this NPTEL effort in India to disseminate the IIT curricula for free on YouTube: http://nptel.iitm.ac.in
Placed in context, this bit of news seems particularly galling!
================
I'm going to try this line again, particularly since tvtropes says: "On its way to becoming a Forgotten Trope, a Seen It All Suicide occurs when a cartoon character, having seen some outrageous sight, proclaims "Now I've seen everything!" and promptly produces a pistol and shoots himself on the spot."
Wat?[0] >>> Now I've seen everything! !Bang! <<< [1]
[0] That "Wat" feeling. Cf., https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeenItAllSuicide
EDIT II: [This last line removed/redacted based on feedback from below]
Comments don't need to be completely void of humour, but a comment that is only intended to be a joke isn't appreciated on Hacker News. I'm writing this as a courtesy as you are new here, and no-one has explained your mistake in your other low-value comments.
However I merely pointed out that this whole thing is wildly OTT by quoting an old meme.
Other than this what else can someone add in matter like these? It would be presumptuous (in my World view at least) to mouth opinions on how the World ought to be run when it is very clear to me that most of these things are like random chance set into motion where things become apparent only in hindsight. One example of this is the Joshua Bell experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell#Washington_Post_exp...
Thanks again for pointing this.
With no snark intended, it boils down to: "If you have nothing to add, don't."
1. >> even if I find the post or conversation interesting
The "interesting" bit is important. There have been (less popular) threads where I have noticed funny for funny's sake comments being left alone. A trending topic is a dangerous topic for comments where your comments will be read by more people who are likely to feel that it does or does not add much "value".
2. >> "If you have nothing to add, don't."
I don't think that sentiment can be expressed any differently, snark or not. :) You could have been more blunt too. I think that point's very valid within the HN subculture.
Irony is, both these takeaways are something that one picks up "after the fact", which in itself is ironic.
Ciao.
Or we could downmod it because the only thing less funny than an old meme is an old meme that the teller felt the need to pre-emptively explain?
Or... how about downmodding because saying that people would only do so "because they didn't get it immediately" implies that you think they're slow-witted? Insulting your audience is never a good way to get a warm reception.
>> Insulting your audience is never a good way to get a warm reception.
I wasn't insulting anyone. I was going by my own comment's previous reception. A downvote, and nothing else to say why so. You may have a point that I assumed the worst (about people not getting it), but neither does downvote w/o even a cursory explanation.
It is not as if we dropped out of our mothers and learnt to navigate the World A-class, from day-one.
Edit: I appreciate your trying to point out HN culture to me, but it could always be done without excessive snark (IMHO).