Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

This article feels intellectually lazy. This passage particularly bothered me:

"A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English. " (emphasis added)

How is that conclusion supported by the facts in the article? Its also possible that those taking online courses are also the ones with the least time for school in general. But who knows!

Similarly, if I found that students attending class at night performed worse than those attending during the day, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that learning is harder at night.

correlation != causation and all that.

I think the editorial doesn't make clear exactly what "online courses" mean.

There are two ways to interpret the phrase:

1) Normal high school students go to community and technical colleges and possibly take online classes. In that case, you are correct

2) In washington state, you can actually take online classes in high school and even k-8 (k12.com) and my understanding is that there have been studies on k12 students and their performance in community and technical colleges as a function of whether they went to a physical or virtual elementary and high school. I am guessing they are referring to the latter (where other studies -- take a quick gander at google -- do draw the conclusions that the article refers to as "well known")

Unfortunately I couldn't find the study that the article is explicitly referencing.

This begs the question. IS there trouble with online learning or online students? Certainly there are factors that would cause someone to enroll in an online class outside of the fact that "it is online".

Anecdotally, when I think back to my learning experience, I found that I had to be very self-motivated to learn in online classes and also take professors to task being available. This actually mirrored my experience with huge (100+ students) lecture hall style classes.

"This begs the question."

No, it doesn't. http://begthequestion.info/

The peculiar meaning of that euphemism in logic and philosophy is going to lose out to the way laypeople understand those words. The fuddy-duddies should pick a new less-confusing phrase to mean "assumes the conclusion". Might I suggest, "assumes the conclusion"?

I prefer "is circular thinking." Most people have no difficulty understanding the idea of circular reasoning even if they have no idea what it means to beg the question.

Educated people saved the word "ironic" once. "Begs the question" isn't dead yet.

Actually, it does. The article assumes that the reasons people did worse in these online courses is because of the set of students enrolling, when the question is 'does the set of students or the presentation of the course matter more'?

It's not an article, it's an editorial. Which means it's both opinion and severely space constrained. I think it's fair to assume the opinion is based on more information than is presented, and they link to studies.

I'm not claiming they're right, but "lazy" is ridiculous.

Hard to prove they are lazy but they certainly put very little effort into actually understanding or explaining the current state of online eduction.

Would it be lazy not to be familiar with articles on the subject published in your own paper?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-o...

Maybe I'm slow. Please point out the part of that article at odds with the opinion in the editorial? The only area of overlap I could see was this passage:

> Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it. “Signing up for a class is a lightweight process,” says Dr. Ng. It might take just five minutes, assuming you spend two devising a stylish user name. Only 46,000 attempted the first assignment in Dr. Ng’s course on machine learning last fall. In the end, he says, 13,000 completed the class and earned a certificate — from him, not Stanford.

My point was that the nameless editorial writer did not seem to be familiar with the basics of the recent developments in online learning despite it being covered repeatedly in their own paper. For example the highly pertinent fact that they are much more cost effective (most MOOCs are free and teach vast numbers of students - 13,000 in a single class in your quote). Or how about the huge numbers of students with no access to university education for many reasons (can't afford, have to work, live far from any college, live in 3rd world, etc.) that can take classes online. Or the ability to replay or even slow down parts of the lecture that you don't understand immediately. Or the impracticality of short lectures in the traditional classes.

Maybe the rhetoric of an editorial is disguising some deep understanding of the issue but what actually appears on the page is hardly convincing if not actually misleading to those not familiar with the subject. See the many other comments here.

Not saying this will solve all out education problems but sure seems like one of the biggest advances in a long time. Can you think of anything else of comparable potential impact?

Also low completion rates in MOOCs is a red herring. These are FREE class where you have to "enroll" to browse the material. It would be like counting everyone who read the course description, visited the class webpage or flipped thru the textbook in the bookstore as having enrolled in a traditional class. Not an apples to apples comparison.

It is more likely that the opinion in this editorial reflects those of the vested interests of our current education system than clear thinking on this issue.

We're talking past each other; a few points, though :). The content dissemination part of these MOOCs isn't new. You can get short lectures by VHS tape. Most classroom lectures are watered down versions of the textbooks/research monographs. PBS has had objectively fantastic educational content (not saying that all of their ed. content is fantastic, just that some of it is) for decades. It was before my time, but I think that people were initially most excited about the educational possibilities of TV, so, a priori, there's been comparable potential impact before.

What's (probably) new is the ease of entry and the communication & coordination between students and instructors.

The low completion rates aren't necessarily red herrings; these are students that are self-selecting into online classes, so they're probably more comfortable with computers than most other students. They're also choosing classes that are particularly well suited to online instruction. So it goes both ways.

If you have links, data, whatever, please share it. Otherwise it looks like you're giving your anecdotes and opinion some sort of privileged status and I'm sure you don't mean to do that. I still don't know what point you think the article you linked to makes or refutes. And the original editorial makes two recommendations:

"Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses."

What's wrong with those recommendations?

As I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, you'd probably consider me to be part of the "vested interests of our current education system" since I teach at a university. I'd bet, though, that the deans and university administrators of the world are short sighted enough to think that they're going to benefit from this direction in education (they like to cut costs). Most faculty are too busy to pay much attention. The only "insiders" that I'm sure are on top of this are the textbook publishers and standardized testing organizations, and they're pretty flexible about their revenue streams.

I'm not sure I would agree that video tapes or television has had the same impact on education as the internet but they were certainly useful tools. As you mention the new thing about online classes is the interaction. As a professor how do you think your interaction compares with that on a well designed MOOC like Coursera? I was pretty impressed with the responses from other students in addition to that from the professors and TAs.

On completion rates perhaps we are talking past each other. Think of this: if you class was free and took 5 seconds to enroll how many more students would sign up?

An interesting issue is self-selection. The editorial mentions that "those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges". Do you think these students might be self-selecting, perhaps they work and can't come to class, and thus invalidating any statistical significance of this correlation, not to mention causation.

Frankly the two recommendations are worthless. First as the editorial mentions online eduction is already widely deployed. Are they calling for a roll back until the classes are improved? Who decides when they are good enough? Should everything be improved - sure. I have had some pretty poor professors. How can we get those improved?

The second recommendation's sentence structure is quite convoluted but seems to say this: remedial students should not be allowed to take online classes until the are successful in traditional classes. I looked briefly at the Columbia School of Education site but didn't see any evidence to support this conclusion. Don't remedial student currently have a hard time in traditional classes? Shouldn't they improve this before they widely deploy them?

You seem pretty thoughtful so I hope you are on the side of better eduction for all. If university deans and administrators are short sighted then universities will struggle to adapt when the world changes.

If you have not already please take a class on Coursera. You might learn a thing or two and I'll pay for it. :)

I think that most universities will probably be totally fucked by the upcoming changes in education. :) If it leads to better and/or cheaper education overall, I'm fine with that, even if it could be slightly inconvenient for me personally. I doubt that the MOOCs will do it on their own, even though they could eat up a large source of revenue for these colleges, but whatever comes a generation or two after them should be really interesting.

I wasn't clear about the tv/video analogy; I meant that there have been people (in the past) as excited about the effect those technologies would have on education as people are currently excited about MOOCs, etc. I agree that tv, etc haven't had as big of an impact as the internet seems to. I plan to take a coursera class soon to get first hand experience but haven't gotten around to it yet, so I can't really make a comparison. I would not be surprised at all if it were just as good as or better than a large lecture, but I'd want decent data before making up my mind. Not because I think that there's a lot of "personal attention" that students get in a 500 seat lecture, but because showing up in person and participating with groups seems to (anecdotally) somehow matter in lots of activities.

re: completion rates, I know that a lot of the students who sign up for these classes have no real commitment to take it to completion. But I'm pretty confident that if you did a random experiment and assigned students to online or in-class courses, the students assigned to online classes would have a lower completion rate. I don't know how much lower, and it's quite likely that for some classes, the reduction in costs and the increase in access would make up for the decrease in completion rates, and for other classes it wouldn't.

The recommendations aren't totally worthless, because (at least as I read it) they're pretty specific to colleges replacing traditional lectures with online courses. There's a lot of enthusiasm among (many but not all) university administrators to do this -- to offer online versions of existing classes along with or instead of the traditional version -- as a cost cutting move. I haven't seen a lot of concern or resources for adapting the material to be a good fit for an online course, making sure that the students get adequate support (most resources for student support require the student to be physically on campus), etc.

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