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A comment on Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of its workforce. Parent comment

Re:Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of i... by trendnet on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @02:59AM (#19622468)
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.
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Re:Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of i... by dalbasal on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @08:27AM (#19623915)
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.

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Re:Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of i... by ghaff on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @08:42AM (#19624021)
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.
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Re:Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of i... by dalbasal on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:37AM (#19624474)
Not transformative or not transformative in isolation?
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Re:Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of i... by ghaff on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:58AM (#19624649)
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.)
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