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Comment by fernly | Hacker News Reader

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores).

The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference.

The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional social component. If they were viewed this way, a different business model might emerge.

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> saved for future reference

I wish that was possible with Coursera. I often need way more time then the structured course time. I don't interact with people on the forums so I don't care about that but locking me out of the videos means I don't get to see a lot of things I would like too.

I know for me, one of the things I found very helpful about college vs just reading stuff in books, is that the social obligation to learn made it harder to be lazy and keep blowing off a topic. Perhaps Coursera is trying to replicate this w/ its "everyone together, limited availability" model.

There's a python script to download them. https://github.com/dgorissen/coursera-dl

If you start a Coursera course and don't finish it, you usually have persistent access to the course videos.

Not true for all courses (on Coursera), most of them will stop letting you access the videos after about 1 month from the course completion.

However, you can download the videos once the course is finished.

It's definitely not my experience that "most" Coursera courses do this.

Of my 12 completed classes, only one does not allow access to the videos. Some of these classes are 2 years old. The one that doesn't have the old videos sent out an email saying they were removing them when they re-ran the class with new videos a year later.

The old model of education is a cathedral, and DIY is the bazaar, and each approach has its weaknesses.

MOOC is about as silly as "horseless carriage". The old model of education similar to a mathematical proof, with technical lemmas built up progressively until there is a macroscopically interesting result. That has a lot of value. Linear algebra is useful in so many fields, and learning it when you have the time, because you have to, gets it out of the way so you can progress to the fields you actually care about (machine learning, signal processing, physical sciences).

I think the new model will be graph-based and open like Wikipedia, but it will have to be aggressively curated for correctness, quality, and coherence. In 10 years, one should be able to take a query like "I want to be employable as a data scientist in 3 years" and turn that into a spanning tree of the relevant subgraph.

There'll also be a need for an offline/online hybrid approach like Meetup.com and dating sites-- some interaction offline, some in person-- and that part of it won't fulfill the dream of squashing geographic inequality. Perhaps education will be the first killer app for true "Metaverse" technology (but it won't be the last or biggest).

> In 10 years, one should be able to take a query like "I want to be employable as a data scientist in 3 years" and turn that into a spanning tree of the relevant subgraph.

You should also be able to invert that, by saying, "I've found all these subjects interesting; what might I be employable as?"

This seems like the kind of thing a recruiting company ought to start working on now. You'd be able to spot likely recruits really early on, brick-and-mortar or MOOC or whatever.

I think the motivation component also needs to be figured out. There's a huge amount of motivation in keeping up with a real world course, not falling behind your peers, and getting your money's worth.

MOOC's can't really provide that. I've toyed with doing a startup in this regard. Perhaps something like gympact but targetted at MOOC's. I.e., you pledge a certain amount of money that you'll finish a course and lose it if you don't.

Even better if you pledge with a group of people and the whole group loses their money unless the whole group finishes. That way you could harness some major peer pressure.

The part of this discussion that gets swept aside in all the high-minded posturing about education is that most people see coursework as a chore, as something they have to do to get the piece of paper they want.

As such, the unspoken "secret" about college courses is that most people do the least they feel they have to do. The majority of students are simply marking time.

That's deadly in a MOOC because, well, there's no consequence to failing. The least you have to do is... nothing. Combine that with the fact that there's no tangible reward in the way that there is with a degree from a college and you get a lot of people doing nothing.

People, as a group, really aren't interested in learning any more than the bare minimum they need to get what they want. That's what MOOCs are really up against.

As long as there's not honest discussion about that, MOOCs are going to have a hard time of it. High-minded idealistic the-people-want-to-learn approaches ignore reality.

You have described the root of the problem.

I would imagine most people doing these courses are looking to either improve their work or get into new work. If all the major companies started to somehow make these MOOC courses similar to requiring a degree, the completion rate would likely skyrocket overnight. If there was a way for a company to say "if you have done these MOOC courses we will give you preferential treatment in your job application", it may make a big difference.

I also think the approach that Udacity is now taking could be very effective. Instead of going on offsite training for a week, employees can be rewarded for taking and completing a MOOC course over the span of 6-9 months.

My reply, which had to wait because of childish moderation ("submitting too fast"):

https://gist.github.com/michaelochurch/8339582

That sounds true. I'm sorry you had to post elsewhere :-(

Any feedback on my startup idea? Or do you think there might be better ways to fix MOOC's?

I've had the pleasure of co-organizing a lunchtime Meetup at my work for folks taking Andrew Ng's most recent Machine Learning class on Coursera.

Having taken a few MMOC's over the past couple of years, the addition of a Meetup was, for me at least, a key motivator to keep me involved in the class. Based on others in the group, I think they feel the same.

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