Comment by andrewem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewem | Hacker News Reader

My wife also wanted to take that Introductory Human Physiology course. She's a freelance medical translator, so improving her knowledge of that subject matter will have a direct positive impact on her career. She's not among the people who Daphne Koller said "never really intended to seriously take the class in the first place" - she bought the suggested books ahead of time, marked it all down on her calendar, and planned out time to work on it.

What she found was that the course was way more difficult than the description suggested, and proved to be well above what she could understand with her current background. She watched the first video and found that it was going to take way more time than the course description predicted, because she would have to try to fill in a tremendous amount of background knowledge that the teachers presumed. On the plus side, from the course forums she found about resources (videos, etc.) that were more at her current level, and has been working through these.

The comments made elsewhere about the synchronous model for these courses is probably right for her case - she had to wait a number of weeks in order to find out it wasn't the right class for her. This is what you expect when you're in college, at which point you either drop the class and maybe find a different one to take, or tough it out in a class that's not as interesting or useful as you'd hoped. I hope online courses can do better than this.

> What she found was that the course was way more difficult than the description suggested, and proved to be well above what she could understand with her current background. She watched the first video and found that it was going to take way more time than the course description predicted, because she would have to try to fill in a tremendous amount of background knowledge that the teachers presumed.

It's quite possible that this is a function of having so little open content out there right now. I can imagine a future where the background your wife needed would be easy to get from the platform itself, so that the profs' demanding teaching could serve audiences both with and without that background. Right now many of these courses must feel like skyhooks but once they're embedded in a web of knowledge (an earlier commenter called these 'nodes') they'll be more accessible i think.

There's still a huge problem of collecting and sequencing these nodes and I think many students will need direct contact with instructors of some sort to do this.

I agree with your points, and thanks for putting them so clearly. The traditional solution for this is to have each university course specify its prerequisite courses, and for students to talk to the professor before the class starts if they're not sure it's appropriate. The latter happened to my friends and I much more during freshman year, when we weren't sure how our high school classes would prepare us, though it didn't always work perfectly - I knew lots of people who re-took calculus or a low-level foreign language class after having had it in high school, and found it way too easy.

Maybe in 5 or 10 years there will be enough online courses available that it would be clear that the Duke physiology class is harder, and some other class would be a good prerequisite to it. Or maybe there will be smaller modules that would fill in gaps for students who were close to ready for the class, or maybe it'll all be in smaller modules that you'll assemble into a coherent whole based on your current knowledge.

An additional possibility would be measuring the background knowledge students have and are comfortable with so it can be better matched up with each course.

The thing is, all of these speculations bear empirical confirmation. We have to see what works best in the wild and there will be a coevolution of student behavior, teaching strategies, and companies in the space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com