Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

The education market is such a conundrum.

On one hand it's enormous, clearly suboptimal, and clearly in need of change.

OTOH, anything outside of institutional norms is relegated to extremely small niches... with self learning being the most vibrant. Very hard to innovate within the box. Very hard to access the market, in money terms, outside of it.

Your online education product can be 10X better than a college course. It can costs 10X less. That's still not going to mean you compete with the college course, even if the college course is mostly online.

View on HN

previous EdTech founder here. can only agree. It is a weird business. I think it boils down to this: most students don't care about learning. They educate themselves for other reasons.

So if you make a good learning tool, it only will be liked by the small niche of high performance self learners / students.

The self learning market is completely disconnected from the formal parts of the market. There's very little substitution between them, in terms of money

My experience is that even community college classes are 100x more rigorous than online classes through services like edx. And that's saying something, given how easy community college is.

I graduated from one of lowest ranked CS programs in the country, and even the easiest CS course I've ever taken was orders of magnitude more difficult than any of the dozen or so online certification courses I've gone through.

Until places like Coursera step up their game and start offering something like "honors" courses, where you're likely to fail if you don't do all of the course work, then I don't think they will ever meaningfully replace college degrees.

> Your online education product can be 10X better than a college course. It can costs 10X less.

Or 1,000x less in cost is probably more accurate.

I don't know what the current rates are (I never went to college) but Google says it's about $50,000 to get a CS degree if you live in the US.

But an online course might be $50 or $100.

I've had lots of folks who took my build a SAAS App with Flask course say they learned more about web development in my 10 hour course than their 4 year degree. Of course you learn different things during a CS degree, but it's interesting at how big of a gap there is in time vs money. 4 years and $50k vs a few days or weeks and $50.

You're comparing apples and oranges there, in fact you say it straight out: "you learn different things during a CS degree". It's not a web development course, which is why there's such a big gap in time.

I could believe finding a well-produced collection of courses equivalent in material to a CS course for say $1000, but not $50. Not by a country mile.

What about the education market is suboptimal?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com