I used Udacity CS101, Google Python Class and loads of other free resources and changed my life. It was true when I said Coursers changed my life. What has been slightly sad as it took Coursera years to start seriously advertising with my face, and even when they interviewed me they were almost beyond recognition.
It makes me sad I just happened to learn CS and software development during the online education wild west. That's what I dreamed of for everyone. Top level education for everyone, for free. I didn't care about certificates. I had knowledge and projects I could prove.
It may not all be doom and gloom, but when people ask me for recommendations after seeing advert, I sigh a little, because situation isn't as great as it was.
I am deeply indebted to Coursera, but I always felt like they would struggle making money. People are only willing to pay for certs if they mean something, and unfortunately they don't. When I interviewed, every place I met with was impressed by the courses I had put myself through and the knowledge I had gained -- but not a single one even asked a question about any certificates. I always thought a sub model would probably fit them better, but it's obviously difficult-nigh-on-impossible to claw back free content. If they wanted the content to stay free, they really needed the strong backing of some sort of private entity.
And yes, some of the other platforms have been amazing too. I did the full databases course on Stanfords platform. That was priceless, and also free. Relational algebra was exactly the sort of theoretical knowledge that just learning from experience and docs doesn't teach.
Interestingly I also find most companies I have seen willing to pay for courses want some kind of certificate at the end. They don't seem to value abstract learning, even though that's the part that their team leverage to hopefully help their bottom line.
I want the platforms to make money, but I feel like universities who were not wanting to be left behind when the concept was emerging gave away far more for a short moment than they ever were going to continue to do.
Certificates and credentials and things distract from actual verifiable learning in so much of education. It is deeply ironic because that is their entire purpose.
I understand regulated industries like legal, medical and engineering need to have minimum standards that require certification, but yet the quality and reliability of practitioners varies wildly. I just feel like by turning education into a product, it is a necessary evil. Government funding is an avenue that lots of academic institutions go down. Perhaps governments should invest in more free and open education. Rather than for example funneling so much money to textbook companies.
Call me naïve and idealistic, I appreciate that there are problems and counter arguments, and as mentioned in many comments, competition does help to drive down prices. I certainly think we are still in a much better place now with it all. I'm still optimistic about all the amazing education opportunities online.
That's basically the LinkedIn model as I understand it--which has what used to be Lynda and maybe other things. I have it available as part of my company's continuing ed materials.
But what works as a professional resource paid for by companies doesn't necessarily work for individuals who will mostly only pay for a cert that employers are specifically looking at. Maybe some would pay a Netflix-range monthly fee but I suspect not enough.
It's unreasonable to expect one institution to provide all of the above for free and they just can't compete with the broad range of the internet.
The internet itself is the revolution in learning, not Coursera and not Udemy.
But you are still correct.
I did not take a single course in my profession (I'm a CS guy doing architecture work now). Most of it was in chemistry, org. chem, bio-chem., anatomy, physiology, medicinal chemistry (drug development), neuroscience, biology/genetics, clinical study design - plus a lot of statistics practical courses (using R to do stuff, there was a very good multi-course series on Coursera).
I would not have paid anything because 1) it was just for fun, I cannot make any money with what I learned, and 2) I was earning a pittance only because I was doing did for a few years while recovering my health.
I think I can generalize the second point at least a little bit - I could see a lot of people taking such courses exactly when they are not busy in their jobs. It takes waaayyyyy too much effort to do this on the side when you have an active job and especially a family on top. Therefore I think a lot of the people who would be interested are exactly those who may not have the budget to pay.
Even more so because there are plenty of alternatives (for me my learning marathon years started with 100 hours of physiology lectures in a Youtube channel, and if I had to pay anything for access there was no way I would have ever even found any for-pay courses in the first place since the whole thing was completely accidental, one thing leading to another), and also because those "certificates" don't mean a thing.
The FOR PAY model removes all the "play" part, only people with a plan andintent come to such a place in the first place. I think free education would be far better, attracting more "accidents" like myself who never planned for any of it.
Already when I took the courses I knew they were doomed to disappear (in that form) because there would be insufficient profit. I always thought some way to fund such sites so that they can provide FREE quality education would be better instead of forcing them into the usual profit constraints. Of course 99% would be "wasted" from the point of view of the monetary-minded people (for whom my own years-long for fun learning would be completely useless too), but even they might see that even just a tiny percentage of people who do benefit and who would never found the opportunity in a for-pay edu system would be worth it, globhal-economically speaking. The price is insignificant compared to any presence-based learning (and having created multimedia learning content I certainly don't undervalue the effort for even a single course, but it's a one-time effort, and the continued presence of TAs can be achieved from within the learning community, I did that too for some of the more technical courses, free support to other learners helped me learn that much more by having to research other people's questions).
And yet, paying for it didn't remove the "play" part you're talking about. In fact, I would feel awful if I used the very valuable services provided to me by these business and persons for free, exactly because I enjoyed them so much.
Oh and you ignored half my post, I repeat: Not only is there a big difference between me and you, you actually use the gained knowledge, I also made the point that you will only reach a small part of the population who 1) have a goal and 2) have money, which for most of the world is not true. Providing knowledge to significant parts of the world who have Internet access but not nearly enough free money for multiple courses (thousands of dollars before you learn anything, even at just $50 a course, many cost much more than that). You not only look at only yourself, even assuming a broader view you concentrate on the top 10% of people worldwide.
And when I first tried coding from a self-paced course much earlier on, I wouldn't have started casually with a paywall.
Also, I valued the fact people in economies where they would almost certainly not afford US / European prices could freely participate as long as internet was available.
For me it is sort of like if you had to pay for git. It is one of my most used and valued tools, but part of its inherent value is its ubiquity, which I do believe has only come to pass because of the fact it is free software in all senses.
There's a difference between something we all have, and something we could have if we are able/willing to pay and I think education overall needs a bit of both.
There are millions of kids and people of all ages going to extremes to access the internet to learn new stuff.
I met a kid in a remote village who would cycle for miles every weekend they were not working to seat in a public library to learn on the internet, for that kid a course costing 1 penny would be too expensive and no one in the family had a credit card to begin with.
Sal Khan deserves all the praise and more, Khan Academy is now in multiple languages, his videos are literally changing people’s lives.
MIT’s edX used to be free, they are now monetising the courses and will withdraw access after their self imposed artificial course time has run out if you don’t pay them, this also creates a second class of students, the ones with money get special privileges and get graded and the poor ones don’t and offering ‘financial aid’ doesn’t work if you really want to reach far and wide, how many will close the site when they see it costs thousands of dollars for a course? In a sense edX is way more disappointing than Coursera.
But just like I stopped recommending Coursera when they started restricting access to their courses I look forward to shorting their stock when they go public and donating the profits to educational nonprofits.
Start with free tell them you are doing novel thing -> Becomes Popular -> Start milking money
I am thankful to Khan Academy for this exact reason. Everyone is equal in their eyes and doesn't discriminate people based on how rich they are.
European and American people don't realize how much privileged they are.
Same story, now I recommend Freecodecamp & Khan Academy. Some of Stanford free courses are very good too.
It used to be "get this certificate to get 6x more LinkedIn views". Now, 50% of the ads I get are "support Coursera's mission to bring people education for free".
Jeeze, not everyone on HN has the same viewpoint!
These categories of schools just have different funding mechanisms and thus different incentive structures. Compared to private nonprofits, for-profits can crowdfund creation of the school, but give up some ownership. On the other hand, public nonprofits are controlled by politicians and the general public.
> why did [many people] think that one for-profit is bad, and the other gets a free pass
I suppose for most people it was a value judgement, rather than an ideological one. The same reason why someone might dislike McDonald’s, but still like Veganburg. Bang-per-buck, many Coursera classes are a better value than those at other schools, whether they are for-profit, private nonprofit, or public.
* economy of scale means it’s cheaper for the same quality
* egalitarian access means you don’t need X gpa to get the top classes
* online means the TAM / impact is way bigger
* lack of actual degree for most courses means you are spending your dollars on actual learning and not merely paying to signal middle-class membership
I’m not necessarily buying in to all of these but I think there’s clearly enough to justify the business on its surface. Haven’t dug into the biz metrics though.
Anecdotally a friend did Open University which is probably equivalent to the full degrees offered at Coursera, but less convenient. They spent years grinding out a degree after work. They are a data scientist now. So this path is valuable and increases access to (I’d argue overly) credentialed jobs.
For someone who did not take the traditional path to schooling, wanting to go back open access is amazing, but if the primary value of the credential is correlated with selectivity, I can’t help but feel off. It effectively feels like pay to play and to the average person who hasn’t heard of the school/program, does it signal more than a for-profit. I also couldn’t be sure, not being familiar with how UK programs are generally structured, but a lot of the programs looks extremely superficial, and wide, like what you would get from a low tier AS program at a bad community college. This is kinda the same feeling I had with certain degree options through Coursera as well.
The only time a certificate would be useful to me would be if I wanted to change career. Other than that, I just want the knowledge, and Coursera lets me blast through courses to get top quality information. I love it.
Flexible course curriculum but it seems they give you the stamp you need to get to the next level, and perhaps more importantly, the flexibility to do it at your own pace. It may be that as you say you can pick your curriculum to be shallow, I don’t know the details I’m afraid.
I think a lot of roles just care about box-ticking; degree in CS or related STEM field. The recruiter doesn’t care where from if you tick the box. In some sense it’s BS, and Coursera may be the cheapest way to hack the system here.
My friend found it really rewarding and empowering to get his degree even though he took a detour to get it, so i can at least provide a third-hand vouching for the quality of OU from an educational content perspective, as well as passing the bar for credentialism too.
Caveat Emptor, I don’t have any positive or negative testimonials on Coursera for getting a job. And I’d actually suggest in software that you can get into the field without a degree much more easily than other STEM fields. But if you’re not in a tech hub then the credential might help you to get a foot in the door if you are otherwise struggling to see a way to do so.
I also did a physics undergrad (in person) and can attest that most of the classes these days are theory-based. Lots of maths; Quantum Mechanics is all maths, Nuclear/Particle is all theoretical/computational (though at the point of masters/PhD you would get to fire lasers at real things, I never did though). I did have one experimental lab class where we practiced measurements of various sorts, but that was maybe 10-20% of the first couple years. You could take different electives that emphasize experimental physics more, but the theory is plenty deep to keep you busy without compromising. So if you want to learn quantum physics or stellar nuclear physics for example you don’t need a lab at all.
That's the root cause of the problem. I seriously doubt the integrity of any system can survive the injection of trillions of dollars into the market. Schools want to capture as much of it as possible and that means raising tuition, dumbing down classes to make sure students don't drop out as well as creating fun but useless courses. It actually makes no difference whether students are learning anything useful or even if they're learning anything at all. They just need them to be enrolled in order to get those loans.
I honestly don't know what makes universities work. Their "mission" to educate in the US has definitely crept towards for-profit. Seeing endowments grow multiple times over but their student body stay the same size. Over the past few decades they've teased by publishing course materials online, but have usually been very protective. I can't imagine this not changing over the next few decades.
Like you point out, entry level stuff scales really well. Maybe "graduate level" material costs a premium or its a loss-leader as a way add prestige? University undergrad often has "filter classes" which always seemed like a money grab because otherwise their admissions and onboarding departments aren't doing their job. Graduate classes were always much smaller and hard for people to afford.
Yet, I still believe coursera is amazing and I’ll buy some shares just to fund the idea. I guess that was the original intention of the market.
Many people thought it was anyway.
In practice, it ended up being mostly another source of lecture videos used by motivated professionals with generally solid fundamentals. For which, frankly, there were already a lot of resources out there.
Then about the audience? I personally was a student when Coursera became a thing and I got into my masters by taking the course on cryptography. I have many student friends at the time who learned a lot through other courses.
Honestly it's hard to complain, because all the stuff is still there. It's just not as utopian and revolutionary as it once seemed to be. Or maybe it is and I should stop complaining. I just wished it was like wikipedia.
So it just .. shouldn't be allowed? Free markets allow you to set your price for your abilities and have agency over your future. If I want to charge people something to teach them something, I don't want a group of hackers telling me I can't.
Yes, but the excess isn’t siphoned away to random people. It’s paid to the investors in exchange for creating the school.
Paying to take a single class has never been the problem with for-profit education.
Regarding for-profit education, does anyone here think that a government-backed education platform would have achieved what Coursera did in the last 10 years? Don't kid yourself. It wouldn't have been remotely close in quality and content and would have been a feeding trough for the political class. It wouldn't have even been granted funding.
Well you are on one of the hotbeds of the internet where the mantra is 'monetize everything and see what sticks' sooo
And, why would someone's negative impression of one particular for-profit education outfit – one whose abuses were strongly associated with a particular set of misguided incentive-misaligning government loan subsidies – turn them off against all for-profit educators?
Would either of the following formulations make sense:
"I thought we were all against for-profit investor Bernie Madoff, why do people like for-profit investor Warren Buffett?"
"I thought we were all against for-profit medical hype like Theranos, why do people like for-profit BioNTech's mRNA vaccine?"
You shouldn't erase all the other salient differences between people & projects under some broad, & assumed derogatory, "for-profit" label.
Competition is a good thing and the best way to drive prices down.
Just because bad actors defraud their clients, doesn't mean all business should be outlawed.
Pretty sure everyone was up in arms when University of Phoenix and the like were bilking students of tens of thousands in student loans and then dumping them on the street with worthless degrees (or worse incomplete degree programs).
Sure the content of the Coursera programs may be better than anything you might have had access to with UoP, but the reality is that the degrees/certificates are just as useful right now as UoP's ever were. Until the rigor is there the degrees will continue to be worth nothing. Unfortunately, that means that Coursera's business model is probably fundamentally broken, as they have previously admitted that too many people drop out if the courses are too hard. Also, making the courses meaningful would certainly require hiring a lot of TAs to grade assignments, which would cost them a lot of money.
I agree that online education definitely has a role to play in the future... But I'm really struggling to see why everyone agrees that one for-profit school is unequivocally bad, but the other gets a free pass.