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Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

They're not free. That was a lie. Right now, most edX courses have switched to models where homework (the key value of the courses) is paid.

A lot of people supported edX with time and money, including much of the early team and course contributors, based on this lie. Coursera was at least honest about it.

Aside from that, most Harvard online courses have amazing production value (fully staffed video teams), and preciously little learning value. That's reflected in the hiring too. How many Harvard professors care about teaching-and-learning, much less online.

I predict ASU, SNHU, Georgia Tech, and other schools which try to do online well will eventually eat Harvard's lunch unless something changes. With "eventually" being 50-100 years, since that's how long university reputations last :)

That's lots of time for even a Harvard to change.

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What we really need is online courses from Reed, Davidson, Amherst, and similar.

They’ll have had an entire summer to improve online course work; I expect last spring’s online semester was, at best, scattershot.

Somewhat related, Amherst is bringing back 60% of students; Reed wants all back, but is limiting to one student per dorm room (and is encouraging nearby apartments for others.)

Bottom line, it seems the small liberal arts schools (less than 5,000 students or so) are bringing students back. The big unis (Harvard, Stanford, Cal), not so much.

I was listening to a Radiolab the other day talking about college in the time of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, colleges like ASU, SNHU and Georgia Tech, who already had online degree programs set up saw their enrollment rise in the time of the pandemic, while other schools were scrambling and dipping into their rainy day funds, worrying about sports boosters and admissions. They were piece mealing together online classes, with poor security and having to charge more for classes to cover the costs and the lost revenue from the loss of sports.

I don't think edX was deliberately misleading people about the "free education" aspect. They are a non-profit, and I think they genuinely wanted to open up education to people around the world. They tried that for over 5 years, only charging for verified certificates. The switch to charging for full course content happened after many years of trying to compete with Coursera (and to a lesser extent, Udacity).

All the execs make for-profit salaries, and profits flow back as investments of the MIT/Harvard endowments. They qualify as a not-for-profit on paper, but they're no different than any other investment of the MIT/Harvard endowments.

Virtually everyone at edX who was mission-driven left in the great purge of 2017 (or was it 16? or 18? I might be off by a year). More than a third of the organization, including the author of the platform, left around that time.

The CEO walked around, publicly announcing he'd switch to paid models as soon as Coursera did. If that's not an attempt at market collusion, I don't know what is.

Whether intentional or not, it's a pretty frustrating experience to not able to do all the course work, and for many courses you can't even pay to do it. bec they're archived the course that's it. You get just the partial class.

Additionally despite being an online platform that ostensibly allows you to work on your own schedule, they still cut off access after some arbitrarily predetermined amount of time and there's nothing you can do to extend it. Again, for many courses, you can't even pay bec they're archived. the only way to finish the course to create a new account.

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