Ultimately, education is 2nd only to defense as an industry. Relative to the hype (and to what I think the potential is), computers and the internet haven't impacted the industry much. At least, at first glance. At second glance, I think you'll find huge changes in how people learn things informally. I don't even mean doing online courses on the side. I mean blogs and PDFs and stackoverflow.

If you can program, bake or pick locks, there's a good chance you learned online. Online learning has also been supporting the "we don't train employees" norms of the modern knowledge economy. The internet is a huge part of how people learn, it just isn't a big part of education. This is one of the reasons I think there is a lot of potential for major disruptions.

If you try tackling credentials in a college-like way, this risks leaning into old paradigms and not really changing much. You'll never complete with Harvard on prestige, but you can probably compete on everything else (from social aspects to educational ones) with enough determination.

Idk what the answers are for udacity, but overall I think the best approach is meandering discovery rather than point-and-row. Taking steps back is part of that.

Udacity does a Masters of Science of CS with Georgia Tech for 7k. I hear most of the courses there are high quality and very rigorous... Perhaps they only need to apply that philosophy to smaller modules instead of a 12-course MS.

I am currently enrolled in that program. The program is great (I still don't believe it is so cheap). But it is not because of Udacity. It is great thanks to Piazza, professors, TAs, remote office hours, projects, students, Canvas, Slack groups, OMSCS subreddit, GaTech HPC clusters, remote labs, software licenses, student perks, and various other internal GaTech services. Udacity is just a small tool there to present a list of videos. Not a lot of professors use it for anything else. Hell, on Piazza for most courses you can even find a YouTube playlist because the Udacity web and mobile apps are incredibly bad compared to plain YouTube.

That's a good thing, isn't it?

Do we really want everything locked down and centralised or do we want a portfolio of tools, marketplaces and such adding up to an educational platform.

Sure. I think the point though is that the education provided through MOOCs like Udacity, etc. is a small part of what's needed for an educational program in most cases. After all, we've had recorded lectures for decades. For certain types of course material such as programming assignments, computer grading systems are useful as well. However, for the most part, online courses aren't really all that different from Great Courses DVDs or YouTube videos. Which is to say nice resources but not very transformative.

Not transformative or not transformative in isolation?

Being able to use the Internet to learn things is pretty transformative in aggregate of which MOOCs is a small piece. (Although, arguably, it hasn't really been transformative in the sense of the educational certifications required for most jobs, whether at the university level or specific established IT training certs.)

If you search around on HN there are more than a couple of threads speaking quite highly of this curricula. It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.

> It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.

It's worth pointing out, that in many parts of Europe Master's degree is either free, or costs less than 7k. Of course, the quality cannot be easily compared.

Free to the student perhaps, but generally the average cost (to whoever pays) of a year in college (masters/cs courses may be more) tends to be in the €10k-€15k range.

I guess that is a start. I would really like to see these courses enhanced by technology related tools. Personally I think the teaching method that is offered by codecadmey is genius.

I'm personally not in CS so I guess that is why my views are slightly different compared to everyone else here. I work in accounting field. In terms of quality online curriculum there is basically nothing. The ones offered on coursera are basically a joke.

It's really hard for me to associate online degrees with quality... End of the day it all depends on the person. The main value of a college education has always been the signaling, not the actual material

From what I've seen, the theory of degree signaling might actually be breaking down because employers are starting to use more assessment tools to evaluate potential employees.

Are they? not seen much sign of that though.

I am pretty sure (90%) I got dropped from consideration by a FANG company because I don't have a degree.

I disagree. I've been in and out of FANG companies as a Software Engineer and in my experience the education factor has largely been an HR thing. It has literally never come up in interviews. I think your performance on technical interviews combined with behavioral factors are the sole determinant. I've had one non-FANG company turn me down (as I was leaving a FANG), because I didn't have a degree. They were pretty upfront with that though.

I suspect it was at the HR filtering stage (done in Spain) that I got cut at.

Out of curiosity, where do you see the quality difference arising between online vs. brick-and-mortar degrees?

The quality difference is in the students, not the courses. Top brick and mortar schools are very hard to get into. Beyond that, some of them are even very hard to graduate from.

As an example, take the University of Waterloo (by no means a top school in the world, but definitely up there in Canada). For the math faculty, in 2018 we had 16,000 applicants for undergrad math programs and admitted 1,200. That's a 7.5% acceptance rate. Beyond that, we regularly see upwards of 30% of first years fail one or more of their courses. Many of these fail two courses and are asked to withdraw.

You just don't see that with online courses. Anyone can take them and the high percentage who never complete the course are assumed to have lost interest, likely due to a lack of significant investment in the program. Brick and mortar universities signal serious commitment in time and money on the part of the student, in addition to ability.

> Many of these fail two courses and are asked to withdraw.

Wait, after a single failed course?! That seems... cruel to do to people straight out of high school. I failed linear algebra 1 (sort of by accident). But here in a European country, people fail stuff regularly, only like the top 40% maybe have "clean years" every year, actually some very good students sometimes fail stuff too when I think about it.

No, you are asked to withdraw if you fail 2 math courses out of the 5 courses you take in your first term. Most people take 2 math courses, a CS course, an English course (required), and an elective.

You can fail your elective and they won't care, but that's really unusual since people choose easier courses for that.

It is logical people have this view these days because the early versions of online courses were very weak in quality. Quite literally they were PDF scans of homework, a PDF syllabus, instructions on what to do (what chapters to read, when to submit stuff etc.) and power point slides. That was it. If you were lucky, you got video taped lectures from in-person classes.

There is a lot of potential with interactive media using a computer that never gets applied to these online courses because of the technical limitations of teachers and related support staff. It is hard to make really good online courses.

> Quite literally they were PDF scans of homework, a PDF syllabus, instructions on what to do (what chapters to read, when to submit stuff etc.) and power point slides. That was it. If you were lucky, you got video taped lectures from in-person classes.

If it's good enough for in-class, why is this approach insufficient for online? I actually prefer this exact setup when taking college classes online. I can rewatch portions of the lectures if necessary, and there's not a bunch of people asking disruptive questions.

> There is a lot of potential with interactive media using a computer that never gets applied to these online courses because of the technical limitations of teachers and related support staff

I don't feel much of these types of things have been superior to books.

At the same time online is shit for direct interpersonal communication, so that's the strongest tool teaching has out the window.

The best you can get online is one on one video calls, and while not too much worse compared to real face to face conversations, you will be hard pressed to get live video to web scale.

Discussion forums are one part of MOOCs that basically don't work at all. For technical courses that roll out on a schedule (which are probably not as common any longer), they're vaguely useful for platform issues and maybe some points of particularly common confusion. But they're swamped with people who are clearly way out of their depth, e.g. have no idea how to even begin to setup a required programming environment on their system.

From there, it descends into the absolute dumpster fire that is any sort of real discussion around less technical topics.

Some of the early versions of online courses like OCW weren't actually intended to be used "out of the box" as courses though. They were explicitly intended to be resources that teachers could use and adapt to create courses tailored to the needs of a group of students. (I'm not sure how much actual cross-pollination there was, but OCW would seem to have grown out of some of the same thinking as One Laptop per Child.)

As it turned out, OCW ended up overshadowed by the various straight to consumer MOOCs.

Not sure how it works in US universities, but in European universities degrees usually requires one to have written a master's or bachelor's thesis. These are what really sets apart the excellent from the merely good or average students. It is the hardest part of the curriculum since the students have to plan their work themselves and work independently for half a year. Online degrees without reviewed theses (sp?) will always fall short in comparison.

I think there is still a lot of room to disrupt education in the US, and the unfortunate lesson of Udacity is that there really isn't a market for sub-academic degree granted by for-profit institutions.

I agree that the educational platform is really the way to innovate: community based learning, interactive platforms, and social goal setting are all possibilities that could help people leverage internet connectivity to learn. We've yet to see a truly "mobile first" educational platform, which connects experts to the knowledge gaps of the population "on demand". Maybe someday I'll fix a flat tire by taking a quick course, or connecting directly with an expert to walk me through the process!