I'd like to add .. non-profit does not mean free to end users. There are many good non-profits and there are many terrible ones (highly paid execs, insane amount of money spent on marketing).
* Removing your access to course materials when the class is done, and disallowing access to past versions of the class.
* Pressuring you into joining as many courses as possible, due to fear of missing out. When you visit the site, every course says "Course began ($TODAY-5)" to make you feel like "wow, I got here just in time! I better sign up for everything!".
* Breaking courses into useless 2-minute chunks and constant unhelpful quizzes. I really just want to hear the lecturer speak for 20-30 minutes at a time uninterrupted, especially if I'm listening while doing dishes etc.
* An unsettling UI that feels less like it's about presenting information in a compact and/or digestible way and more like it's tracking my every move and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Everything is a button or clickthrough menu that requires interaction.
Thankfully MIT OpenCourseWare still has plenty of lecture videos / course materials available. But I'm quite afraid for the future.
I disagree. If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. One of the best things about digital courses is that you don’t have to spend an hour zoning out to a professor talking and then spend a day doing exercises, but the two can be intertwined and knowledge can be cemented.
Of course it can be done terribly. But the best online courses I’ve taken have split things up into small chunks with relevant exercises.
Science and Cooking: A Dialogue | Lecture 1 (2010)
I don't see any of that in your observations. Moreover, what you attribute to some nefarious purpose is better explained by effective curriculum design. I haven't used edX lately but I worked at Coursera and I can tell you that the people who make that product have a passion to support learning in the world.
* Removing access to course materials: it's a course, not a content library. When you can access it anytime, you're less likely to do the work of learning. You also won't be part of a learning cohort, which is a valuable learning activity.
* Encouraging you to sign up for courses: this is a problem? Wouldn't someone who wants you to learn encourage you to sign up for courses? "Course began ($TODAY - 5)" that would be deceptive. Are you claiming that edX or Coursera does this?
* Breaking courses into chunks and quizzes. How the heck is this deceptive? This design decision is backed by learning science. Listening while doing dishes does not get you the best learning outcomes; it's a university-level course not a podcast.
* "Unsettling UI" "opportunity to pounce" I really don't know what to make of this one.
That's actually one of my favorite things when taking online courses...
If someone does this and they don't absorb the material they..... watch the lecture again in a more focused manner. It really is ok!
In my previous experience this was determined by the instructor(s). Is this no longer the case? (Somehow determined by the platform?)
Hmm, I'd disagree. For example, Analysis 1 is a very desired course for many technical majors. Go look at OpenCourseWare's offerings for Analysis 1, perhaps peruse some of the videos.
Then go look for other desired courses -- missing content is characteristic and not the exception.
Fundamentally though I agree with your summary; I trusted EdX a lot more because it was tightly affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Spun out into an arms-length institution, it seems like it will now be more likely to be driven into the ground by its leadership at some point in the next 100 years because of the lack of enough stabilizing "keel" provided by the affiliation with world-class universities.
Udemy has a very standard pricing model. You pay what you use (=courses), so I don't see any way this can significantly change either way. The teachers are private and not institutions, so it would likely be unprofitable to adopt a "significantly-free" freemium model.
Coursera, Edx and so on apply instead the freemium model, which could be under theoretical threat (eg. reduce availability of free material, introduce ads, etc.). However, I've been using them for a while, and I didn't really experience any impact due to this supposed monetization orientation - the courses are still free, and there's no pressure to pay for them. I actually pay each course.
To be honest, I'm much more annoyed by the terrible, terrible UX of their products. There are also certainly some dark patterns, which I find dishonest, but at the end of the day, courses are free, and one can take them without interruption.
A personal note: I actually find negative the association between well-known institutions and learning platforms. For example, Harward and EdX- the certificates are stamped as HarvadX, which is an intentional disassociation. This is fair, however, customers/students tend to associate prestige with the MOOC, which is misleading. There's a lot of people around who think that MOOC certificate have formal value.
EDX's IRS Form 990 for 2020 shows five executive making over $800k [1]
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
For what it does, the codebase is extremely sprawling, with layers upon layers of abandoned architectural directions. A lot of code for not a ton of functionality, and very basic functionality at that.
Of course that all is secondary to the actual success it has found, and good for the the project for making it happen. But, if this move ends up being a catalyst for investing in alternatives, that will not make me sad.
A lot of the work at nonprofits is challenging and demanding. Everybody deserves good compensation. But as with large for-profit companies, it's often only executives who get that. Take a look at CEO compensation over the decades. It has risen massively compared with worker pay: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
Maybe CEOs have gotten 940% better at CEOing in the last 40 years. But I think the more likely answer is executives have gotten much better at skimming a larger slice of pie.
One could argue that if investors want to grossly overpay for-profit execs, that's between the investors and the execs. But that's definitely not true in not for profits, which get all sorts of legal and social leeway because they're in theory doing good for society.
So yes, it's fair to argue that having very highly paid executives in a non-profit is terrible. Does that mean execs who are in it for the money will stick with fleecing investors? Probably. But I'd say that's better for the nonprofits, as then they're likely to end up with people who are there for the mission.
As for marketing, spending lots of money on marketing isn't bad as long as it's working.
People need to quit judging non-profits just by looking at 2 numbers without understanding the entire scope. This is a huge issue for non-profits.
I know of non-profits that have been forced to setup multiple entities. One for "public" where they can say 100% of donations go to the cause & one for people who understand running a business where they can get private donations that help pay people salaries, building expenses & everything else.
Anyone know of a good way to reach a good investigative reporter?
So our choices are: (1) Cut salaries and tenures or (2) Scale up
Option (1) is a political third rail. Option (2) comes in many shades of grey: all in with someone like coursera, literally operating at 8x scale relative to traditional endowments, or lightweight (either roll your own or with select niche vendors), say 2x. By fiat, the closer the new medium to the old, the better the early results. Faculty CAN become entirely proficient and effective educators leveraging new technologies at 5c+ scale—but only if their’s a will.
And, in order for the latter to exist, unfortunately it must be accompanied by a strictly positive remuneration, ie it cannot be free.
This isn’t the utopia that MOOCs first promised, but rather the political realities higher Ed finds itself in. For these reasons, I myself have begun paying for professional tutelage when I encounter a pencil of mine in need of sharpening. Despite a career’s worth of mastering the practice of learning, my capabilities (and will?) were insufficient to glean more than the most elementary basics upon enrolling in MOOCs, however I came to learn that I benefited tremendously from personalized feedback in my learning, something AI is still some ways from delivering!
I don't understand how not-for-profit orgs are supposed to succeed when they are constantly hampered by being expected to pay theirbwmployees low wages and not market themselves or spread the word because if they spend too much money doing these things then they are suddenly "bad" organizations. If not-for-profits are not allowed to compete in the market with for-profit organizations by offering competitive wages and utilizing competitive marketing budgets, then it's no wonder that charity is generally so ineffective. I suspect that the average armchair marketing executive might not be a good judge of what an "appropriate" marketing budget is.
Honestly, what I think is missing is a good destination. What is edX trying to be?
Produce as many courses at as minimum cost as possible. Enroll as many people as possible without regards for completion percentage. Create an economy where random people are incentivised to create courses and then the course quality tanks.
I wish this turns out differently.
Even Udemy and Coursera have become commericialised with edX the last major standing.
e.g. Did you show up 30% of the time? yer a graduate!
I'm fairly certain we've been watching that mission creep in all corners of education, higher and otherwise, over the past couple of decades.
I saved all certificates I ever got from edX and from Coursera as PDFs to remember which courses I took. They actually look quite fancy.
- Example certificate that was free at the time: https://i.imgur.com/XFX05gx.png
- The course was part of a series, which these days is available here: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science#co...
- Here is an R-Markdown document I created for another of the courses in that series, which used peer assessment where we had to evaluate each others results: https://rpubs.com/Noseshine/74191
At the start everything was free, including all these exercises, all the assessments, and even the certificates. I knew it would not last and used the opportunity, over three years of heavy course taking, over 50 completed courses. I did not have much to spend at the time, I could definitely not have spend the current amounts.
I took over a dozen courses on Coursera alone, medicine and statistics, it was good. I just checked my (long unused) login just now, they only list two courses under completed and "forgot" the other well over a dozen others. Good thing I saved those completion certificates, although there probably is little use in remembering what courses I took - either I remember what I learned or I don't.
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Just for fun, this was one of my favorite courses, great professor too, great content: https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience Don't know if it still is as complete, at the time it was almost 25 hours of videos alone, never mind all the reading and all the tests and exercises. It wasn't complicated though, you just had to invest the time but not nearly as much brain as for other "STEM sciency" courses.
There are companies trying to battle the problems that come with a single bottom line, like Guild Education.
I agree with another commenter in that I had hoped it would persist since 1) education is ostensibly the business of Harvard and MIT and 2) Their pockets are deep enough to think long-term.
I will admit that I haven't used it much in the past few years. Had been getting turned off by the credential chasing and access disappearing after some time.
Tough to see an excellent path forward from here. I've never heard of this 2U firm.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
It's worth reading the article - there is much more that's not being addressed on HN.
[1] https://nptel.ac.in/noc/noc_course.html [2] https://nptel.ac.in/course.html [3] https://swayam.gov.in/explorer
An example that readily comes to mind are the courses on manufacturing processes offered by both MITx and NPTEL. The MITx course was clearly a class apart - you actually got to see the processes in question and how they were applied in the real world factories. When speaking about how a product was made, the lecturer actually bothered to bring samples of those products, sometimes dismantled them, and showed us how they could have been put together. I only audited this a few months ago, and to this day I remember the concepts vividly.
On the other hand, in the videos I watched, the NPTEL course lecturer simply read out from powerpoint slides, which he prepared from a standard textbook. You were better off reading the textbook directly than watching the video alternating between the slides and the lecturer's face. It was a very uninspiring, depressing experience.
It's basically Indian OCW.
"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
With that in mind, it seems that Open edX development will be under a new non-profit held by MIT and Harvard. I hope this new non-profit will be less at odds with itself in respect to maintaining openness while creating profitable pay2play courses.
The same is not generally true of Harvard courses (with a few exceptions like cs50), which hide all materials behind paywalls.
A complete tangent, but its somewhat amusing that this idiom remains popular when the literal gold standard itself is no longer generally considered a figurative gold standard of anything.
One of the determining feature of edX is it is backed by MIT. And that's also the reason why I trust the platform to give out information.
I don't want to be machine learnt on the Internet.
The idea of a public company, a public benefit company, a university, a nonprofit, and 800 million dollars changing hands in this complicated of a transaction seems incongruous.
Doing MOOCs was good business for Harvard/MIT like 10-15 years ago when designing and delivering MOOCs constituted "thought leadership". Now, MOOCs are ubiquitous and AI teachers are the hotness.
While that org is led by Harvard and MIT, the institutions are not getting the money. Which begs the question - why didn't the edX organization just sell off the IP to 2U? would have been much cleaner.
"MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
Coursera has something similar called MasterTrack; there's not a generic cross-platform name for it, though if it is successful for multiple platforms and graduate institutions that will probably change over time.
The $800M will be used to line the pockets of privileged MIT professors. It will be as effective at closing equity gaps as supply-side (trickle-down) economics. 60% will go to overhead, which will fund faculty clubs and yachts. From there, a ton will go into generous salaries and benefits packages. And so on down the line.
I am willing to bet that this will be equivalent to giving maybe $10M to an HBCU, in terms of benefits to the poor.
I think it can even be deemed benefocial as follows:
If they manage to increase offering, enrollment and completion by say 3x, a big chunk of those students may be coming from paid physical colleges, which means huge savings in education dollars overall.
I guess my point is, losing nonprofit edX to paid education is not a negative if on the whole it chips away at students paying full sticker price and lowers the overall avg cost of education.
With that in mind, of course it’s pumping out bad devs, just like every other boot camp. I wish it were different but that’s what happens. What’s worse is they charge over $10K for the pleasure.
Hell of a lot easier to increase someone's React knowledge than it is to, like, fix how they interact with people.
Squeezing every single drop of money from every single brick of the university : great work, MBAs . Slow clap
Like: online courses... or... What about the white elephant in the room? The cost of social events and Ivy League athletes/sports.
I don't have anything against those, but if I were in a position of power in one academic entity, I'd definitely make sure sports is not a cost center, as it is today for many.
I now understand how to self-learn difficult subjects with textbooks and online lectures but I really appreciated MITx's commitment to making rigorous courses freely available.
It's also pointed out in the article that MIT & Harvard will be investing money into a new non-profit to explore the "next generation" of online learning, which is literally the opposite of "[refocusing] on in-person education", as you hypothesize.
That's fine and all but it's forcing the university model they know into an online format and it doesn't work so great for the audience that wants to take online courses imho.
The value proposition on it's Micro Masters course was that you could use it for credit at full universities. The problem is it was extremely unlikely one would get the opportunity to use it at MIT, and the rest of the partners were universities that I had never even heard of before. Not necessarily places I'd probably want to go to further my studies.
For the math & physics classes, the deadlines are 3 weeks after being assigned, whereas when you take the class in person, there's a strict 1 week deadline.
Part of the advantage of taking an online class, as opposed to self study, is the motivating factor of deadlines. I have a lot of textbooks I've started reading, then said "I'll get back to this" and never have.
Another advantage of class over just textbook is discussions with classmates and TAs. Having a schedule helps with that too, since there are others working on the same material at the same time.
[EDIT] Reference added, because today's youth are apparently not well-versed in the classics:
On the other hand, distance learning makes a huge impact on mature learners. Whether they need to "reskill" to improve their job prospects, or simply cannot attend a university in person because they juggle many adult responsibilities, innovations and improvements in distance learning is extremely important to them and is beneficial to society. I also think this group is often ignored/pushed to the side in these debates.
2U is one of the biggest for-profit higher education companies and seemingly one of the most successful ones, often partnering with other colleges and universities.
I am suspicious of any of the for-profits being able to sustain a business. Most end up failing because, as it ends up, education is not very profitable if done correctly.
Blackboard has been around a long time and seems to do okay. Instructure (makers of Canvas) has done very well. Both sell Learning Management Systems (LMSes), not educational content itself. Big textbook publishers, like Pearson, have been managing incorporating online educational materials.
But yeah, don't expect a unicorn to come around and "disrupt" education.
The easiest way to get a bright-eyed SV entrepreneur to try to take something on is to tell them, "That industry is non-disruptable."
> Nearly 10% of the students have paid for a certificate. I do not know how much server hosting costs, but given the cost of a certificate being several tens of Euros, I wouldn't be surprised if this covered costs (though I'm not aware if the uni gets a cut).
> Apparently the main issue with Coursera (which is why our uni chose edX) was over copyright - edX material remains owned by the creating uni and not edX itself. I wonder how this will be impacted by this change.
It's not like Harvard and MIT don't have enough money already, so it's curious why they need obscenely more.
I think that this is a terrible decision and regret it, but there's not much surprise: this monetisation of their reputation is kind of the business of modern universities.
What a terrible loss.
My personal experience with EdX over the years is mixed. I audited a few EdX courses (CS50, Linear Algebra) and generally enjoyed the quality and pace of the courses, but was never compelled to purchase a verified certificate since these were more for leisure. I recall hitting up against the paywall and losing access to the exams. Although, I understand the need to monetize, it was a bit demoralizing.
Overall, I feel EdX helped define massively open online education and I hope they continue to support this mission in the future.
edX was overmonetized. If you want to see corruption on a grander scale, see where this $800M goes.
