Coursera raises $16M | Hacker News Reader

Coursera raises $16M

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88 pointsNonEUCitizen30 comments

I don't understand what's the need to constraint these courses in X weeks duration when one of the advantages of this presentation is to allow self paced study. I started the PGM course and found it interesting but cannot spend +10 hours per week on it just to get an email certificate in the end. I can do Kahn academy classes anytime I want right? why in coursera do I have to pretend I'm taking a college class?

Because some people work better with deadlines, without deadlines they might keep putting of working on it.

Psychology. The vast majority of people show significantly better results with specific deadlines. Here's one study showing the difference: http://www.iew.uzh.ch/study/courses/downloads/ariely_wertenb...

what you say is true, but also that getting a good grade is a strong motivator and that is not available unless you follow the deadline regime. Perhaps what is needed are more slow paced courses that you could fast track and finish faster if you wish to do so.

There could be other time-based methods to encourage students, rather than hard deadlines. For instance, suppose the class had a bag with unlimited (or large) number of question, and required each student to score 100 points to pass. Students would have unlimited number of attempts at quizzes/assignments, but their score decays with time (think HN submission ranking decay). That is, if you worked hard and scored 70, but then you were busy/away for a month, your score drops to, say, 50. So you are encouraged to finish the questions in a timely manner, but on the other hand, you can also make up for that missed month by putting more work when you are back.

With this method or a something similar, you do not "lose everything" when you miss a deadline. IMHO, "losing everything" for missing a deadline is part of the reason for the (exponential?) decay in the number of students participating in Coursera's PGM class[1,2].

[1] Based on PGM's "quiz's highest score" statistics, the total numbers of participating students are 6950, 3500, 2650 for week1, week2 and week3 respectively (other weeks' stats are not complete as of this writing).

[2] Another interesting stats is the ratio of perfect scores to all other scores: 25.2%, 34.3%, 49%. This could suggest that the deadline system filters out most students but the very top ones (assuming uniform difficulty of quizzes, and uniform quality of lecture videos/slides, etc.). This may not be what you want from an educational perspective. And, yet it may actually be what you want to support a business plan similar to Udacity- discovering talent. (see my comment below)

Interesting stats. I would love to see some stats on classes using different deadline models. For example, the Machine Learning course gave you 80% of the grade if you were late, and the NLP course gives 50%, as opposed to losing everything. I wonder how that affects the drop-out rate.

This isn't about coursera, but there was some interesting research in presented in Predictably Irrational about deadlines and student performance. Basically, deadlines help a lot, and having many small deadlines to ensure continuous work helps prevent procrastination.

http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%...

> Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the middle.

This is wonderfully circular-the study I posted in my original post was by Dan Ariely :)

Argh, sorry. One of the grand parent posts was too long, I didn't read the parents above it.

If you don't care about what grade you get you can probably still work at your own pace and just not get a good grade if you don't finish on time. And if you do care about what grade you get you are already pretending you're taking a college class.

That's what I plan to do and I'm assuming that the materials will remain available once the course is over like they were for the ML course, but there could be a better way to deal with left-behind students (which I believe are a big %) than making them circumvent a good chunk of the class experience (grades, email certificate), in particular I'm demotivated to do projects because instead of feeling rewarded for the work I did, I feel penalized for being late on some imposed schedule.

What I have liked about the strict deadlines is that a community can form around the course. If you have a large group of people taking a course at roughly the same pace, the forums etc. (IMO) are a much more useful resource.

Udacity have an interesting solution to this. The first run of CS101 and CS373 had strict, weekly deadlines. They are now being re-offered on a self-paced basis.

Absolutely agree and it's (normally) one of the main differences between on-site vs online learning. That there's a ready community of people going through the same thing as you at the same time (usually experiencing the same problems).

That, combined with the deadlines, can be very motivating. (essentially, 'you are not alone').

Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, iTunes U, YouTube University, OpenCourseWare...

Seems like we need a service just to keep a handle on all the content out there.

OpenEducationFormat?

We're working on it :)

Class Central has a pretty good list.

http://www.class-central.com/

"Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Dr. Koller said that this would actually improve the learning experience."

wonder how that would work

This will be especially interesting considering how many of the people taking advantage of these courses are outside of the US and primarily-English speaking countries. Check the box if English is your second language? We'll see how the crowdsourced evaluation model goes, but then maybe they've got some tricks up their sleeves to rescue it from [potential] disaster.

Edit: The first thing I can think of is an advanced rubric that would allow almost anyone to break down an essay and feed the results into their own grading algorithm. A sizable group of writing teachers are clenching their teeth...

> wonder how that would work

one possibility might be to have multiple students grade a students work, and final score then weighted by the 'judging-student's' score on the same topic ?

yeah, wonder if you could do something like, here's 3 essays, rank them from best to worst

fancy algorythm

fit all the essays onto some sort of generous curve

grade

seems like essay a > than essay b > than essay c would get you better results than having each grader come up with a number from 1 - 100 or a letter from A to F, as everyone has different norms as to what they think should count as a 90 (or an A) or whatever

I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to take a class and earn a certificate.

On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while employed at a university?

MITx is planning free courses and pay to get a certificate. Udacity is planning free everything while making money by hooking top students up with recruiters. Coursera doesn't seem to have decided yet.

Can you link to the source for that info?

Regarding Udacity's business plan: In June Thrun "took the next step: cofounding KnowLabs... He pulled in David Stavens... as CEO… Thrun decides that KnowLabs will build something called Udacity… Stavens is thinking about potential business models. Though Thrun cringes at the notion of charging students, people might eventually pay for add-ons—say, TA services, study aids, or offline materials. He also considers other revenue streams. Near the end of the term, he emails his top 1,000 students, the ones with perfect or near-perfect scores on homework and tests. The subject: Job Placement Program. Thrun solicits résumés and promises to get the best ones into the right hands at tech companies, including Google. A recruiter who places a hire typically earns 10 to 30 percent of an engineer’s first-year salary, which might be $100,000. Stavens figures he could charge much less. After all, KnowLabs discovers talent in the course of doing business."[1]

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/

I didn't have links saved, but googling turns up, for example, this:

"While the certificates for this course will be free, students will have to pay a modest fee for credentials in future courses expected to begin this fall." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment...

0ren found a good link for udacity.

I don't know if that has ever been tested in court. Most universities are accepting (or even encouraging) of professors to share materials online. However, sharing materials online and making money off course materials are 2 different things. Currently, I would say professor because he/she is free to take course materials when switching universities.

Actually there's extensive case history on this topic. In the US where I'm familiar with it, most generally, books and course materials produced by professors while employed are not considered work for hire. Research results such as patents coming from work done in university research labs are much more likely to be considered work for hire. It depends a lot on the contract the professor has agreed to though.

Pro professor citations:

http://www.aaup.org/NR/exeres/517C85B6-CC13-4A47-AE3E-5C1763...

> Generally, faculty scholarly work is not considered work-for-hire. "[I]t has been the prevailing academic practice to treat the faculty member as the copyright owner of works that are created independently and at the faculty member's own initiative for traditional academic purposes." Statement on Copyright, AAUP Policy Documents & Reports 182 (9th ed. 2001).

More generally Pro-university or ambiguous citations:

http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/copyright-ownership/...

More neutral legal analysis of concepts:

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/owner.pdf

From some side conversations with MIT administration and faculty, professors are the owners of their course material and can distribute it as they please.

MITx would be encouraged, with incentives, but a professor would be free to use Udacity, Coursera, etc if they please.

This reasoning would match previous MIT-wide initiatives. OCW material was put up at professor initiative with some financial incentive. DSpace, the open source paper repository, is opt-out. If the professor wants to sell his rights to a publisher, who will typically charge others for access, that is completely their choice.

Whether this is a legal statute or if it's just that MIT would not sue a professor was not made clear to me.

A year ago I was talking about how cool something like this would be. I knew it had to happen but it happend faster then I thought.

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