I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
One of the strangest things about the MOOC boom in 2012/13 was the fact that so much of what they were doing already existed.
Taking a pre-existing paid-for product and giving it away for free is not innovation, especially when you can only give it away for free because of external funding.
If I could nitpick this particular point (because I agree with the rest), statistically it's true that the vast majority of online courses aren't finished.
But I think, going by my own use of these courses as well as anecdotes from others, this isn't because of a lack of willpower so much as professional working folk primarily being interested in learning a very specific solution-to-a-problem on-demand (exactly the thing Stack Overflow offers) rather than going through an entire course just because lots of other information happens to be bundled with the key information they're actually looking for.
There are of course many exceptions. I wanted to learn how hardware works so went through the entire Nand 2 Tetris course start to finish. But that was because independent of my "professional working folk" persona, I was just personally interested in the topic. But I've much more often used online lectures to get me over occasional humps in understanding specific nuggets of information and this is the use case I've heard from everyone else I know who uses online courses.
Survivor College https://www.amazon.com/dp/1593300670/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mY...
I completely agree with this.
>I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
I don't think the problem is online education, I think problem with these ed-tech companies is that they still are trying compete with the credentialing system of universities without access to all the student loan debt the latter have access to.
Gotta love the choices HS graduates can get funneled into/ reinforced by mainstream opinion today: bootcamps, nanodegrees, or loading up on student loan debt if you can edge out agaisnt the legacy/bribery admits.
I think what people are really trying to solve is a cheaper credentialing system, that get's distorted by some of the incentives involved.
Education is not a one size fits all - you cannot offer the same from MIT vs community college no matter if the course content is the same. The difficulty (proxied by the reputation of the school) of the same courses vary wildly and dramatically, as does workload, peer support, TA support, exams, and even the pace and how the final grade is curved.
By necessity they cannot grade difficultly, since they are trying to get people to pay for courses like they are dessert. By necessity they cannot offer different tiers of difficulty based on entrance exams or other tests, since they would insult their customer base (the intuitive argument being that those in most need of such nanodegrees are inversely the ones who may do worse in general).
One issue is that, especially in the context of a standardized online course, credentialing arguably runs somewhat counter to educational value. For example, organizations that offer technical certifications have to struggle with how specific to make their feedback so that someone who fails doesn't just look up the specific things they got wrong on a test and retake it. (Without materially changing their overall mastery of the material.)
>The other elephant in the room is that the rigor of their online courses.
I'm not sure that's universally true given in-depth problem sets, reading, etc. that a student dutifully works through. Of course, many will not and evaluation/feedback becomes more difficult as you move away from lecture formats and material that is amenable to computerized grading and evaluation.
But, as you suggest, most people are not really looking to spend the time they would need to in order to work through an MIT or Stanford curriculum, if indeed they are practically able to do so.
I agree with this.
>The difficulty (proxied by the reputation of the school) of the same courses vary wildly and dramatically, as does workload, peer support, TA support, exams, and even the pace and how the final grade is curved.
This doesn't sound like education to me, but a system of schooling composed of these factors with varying weights of assumed importance that most people in a society choose/blindly accept to be the one and only equivalent to an education (and all the ills that come from this assumption).
Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition.
I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them. I was probably their prime candidate for paid certs -- I am a lawyer who self-studied CS for 4 years and just recently successfully switched careers to software dev. I took so many online courses -- Coursera, edX, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Stanford's online courses. In every interview I had, the interviewers were impressed by the fact I took such a variety of courses (I listed them on my resume, underneath my "real" education history.)
But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second. The whole story you want to tell when you go this way is, "I got the practical learning and experience I needed; I didn't go for an official degree because I felt the piece of paper wasn't worth the money." The proof (for potential employers) that you succeeded is in your abilities -- specifically, your portfolio of personal projects you create and are ready to present. Taking all those online courses shows initiative, curiosity, passion for the field; a certificate of any sort from some place like Udacity means less than nothing.
Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. There's the whole cultural significance of them, and of the experience of attending a four year program. But, right or wrong, the value of these degrees comes from the school name. Is it a nationally known school? Or a regionally known one? Is it a school in the city that your interviewer (or their coworkers) attended? But if you come to them with some accredited papers from Udacity, there is going to be a very wide respectability gap that will have to be crossed.
It's not an inspiring approach, but I can't help but feel like a bland subscription model is probably the best they could have done. Maybe they could have become Google's Pluralsight or something. I think there's still definitely room for 'disruption' in the online education space, but I think it's probably going to look and feel a lot more like traditional higher ed than many might have thought 5 years ago -- even to the extent that I think we'll see traditional schools leading the way, because those traditional schools come to the starting block already carrying a lot of cachet. Why pay for a piece of paper if the name at the top means nothing?
I agree (my personal experience was similar as a dropout with regards to getting a onsite software jobs, pretty easy when staying away from Big Tech™), they needed some other way, and tried to fight a battle that even traditional schools are finding themselves needing to step into (at least for CS).
>Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. But, right or wrong
As someone who is constantly looking for alternatives that will fit for me for the types of problems I want to work on, this is the part that sucks to deal with. I enjoyed working/contracting for research labs in different (neuroimaging and a chemical engineering lab) fields than I had when pursing an undergraduate degree that I was only able to get because of someone I knew who could not only identify my interest, but vouch for me personally. From my experience, in the real world there is space for exceptions, but they have to be hacked around now, as there is no clean path. Maybe there is some entrepreneur out there with the right network/skills who could build an online product that could deliver that.
At this point, I can not be bothered paying to go through traditional academic routes because there is so much focus on optimizing for everything but moving a body of knowledge forward. When I see ed-tech companies try to emulate the existing system, I just have to laugh… at least until I see something different. I'm only 27, but I'd recommend to every future HS grad that wants more than the credential value of a degree and gives such a weight of 0, to just abandon all hope from getting that from universities.
And I can't speak to every Nanodegree, but the projects I worked on in my Nanodegree were 'easy' enough that it wasn't hard for the reviewers to mark. There wasn't a ton of room for creativity. Most importantly, their feedback was pretty mixed in terms of how in-depth they went. Often, they'd just link me to posts from other real-life experts to the point where I felt like I was getting most of the 'juice' from outside of Udacity.