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Comment by jsnk | Hacker News Reader

One thing that continues to bother me about Coursera (haven't tried Udacity) is why courses are offered only for a small window of time with stringent due date requirement. They tout themselves as this revolutionary force in education. Then why are they so insistent on continuing traditional university course model?

I wish Coursera would just keep the courses around for people to watch lectures, do exercises and HW.

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There's more or less flexibility depending upon the course (speaking about Coursera). Some of the reasons given for having a schedule are: - Provides a structure that a lot of people find useful - Is necessary for any sort of peer grading - Keeps discussion on discussion board in some degree of sync with the class.

If you signup for a class, at least the videos are kept around for some length of time for viewing. That may not be true with grading infrastructures and obviously not peer grading.

It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet

> It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet.

This is key. I still find myself wishing the deadlines were different here and there (or that they were better distributed... taking 10 courses with everything due in a six hour window Sunday night is annoying and takes being at least a week ahead to avoid). Still, I know that I do better because of it. The peer assessments aren't effective in every course but for some they're absolutely vital.

What I'm really looking forward to is seeing how some courses settle, probably after receiving a little more institutional support, into better defined roles. Instead of just splitting up the sequence in terms of "Part I" and "Part II" they could offer exclusively peer reviewed components for people who wish to write papers and a quiz/homework component which then give different certificates (it would be encouraged to earn both). At the moment EdX seems to be the strongest supporter of human review (either peers or TAs) with Harvard courses such as Copyright Law and National Security, but they can do it because the classes are limited to a few hundred people and everyone else must audit.

Peer review can be pretty good for a number of things when the students doing the reviewing are reasonably competent in the material. They get more problematic as the diversity of the class increases. In my experience, they're also pretty reasonable at grading according to a well-defined and explained rubric (though in a large enough population there will be frustrating outliers). They're much less good at providing useful feedback--a point that seems to be ignored far to often in discussions about peer review.

I'm actually taking a Harvard edX course at the moment that takes an interesting approach. For part of the content (labs) what they do instead of peer grading is a self-assessment with detailed evaluation criteria. This works quite well in this instance. If you don't concern yourself with certification it makes a lot of sense to focus on what provides the best feedback.

Have you taken the Dan Grossman's Programming Languages on Coursera? It gives a very detailed rubric– you're required to complete 3 peer reviews and a self evaluation with the same rubric. That being said the peer review is only worth 10% of your homework grade, the rest is done by the autograder. I haven't gotten a ton of feedback so far– just reviewing other people's solutions is probably more helpful. Still, it's better than some of the other courses. It would be great if there was an incentive for providing meaningful feedback– I don't know if rating your feedback would be taking that too far but it might be more effective than a simple wordcount.

My experience on EdX is limited to MIT and Delft– I'm looking forward to a time when I can try out one of the Harvard classes.

I haven't taken that particular course. I suspect that peer grading could be made better through incentives but, at some point, you're limited by what your peers are capable of in terms of providing feedback. That said, even making the peer review process more explicitly about feedback than grades would be a be a nice framing in the right direction.

I'm taking a HarvardX course on Science and Cooking at the moment which is very well done. Not exactly programming though :-)

I found that the fact of reviewing others is what actually was the most interesting. Not even getting to see good stuff I wouldn't have come up with myself, but also trying to figure out why people have issues understanding the subject at hand.

For more direct and "valuable" feedback, the forums are great. In every course I took there were fantastic discussions on the forums.

(I'm extrapolating most of this negative rant.)

Coursera is founded by bored professors who were tired of seeing their students get rich, so they decided to do a land grab in an "online education 2.0" space. They don't want to revolutionize education. They don't want you to have the option of running open ended courses. They believe in credentials, requirements, sacrifice, and the holy university cram session. They want to keep repeating what they already do make just make it more wide spread (because wide spread translates into money these days).

Have you looked at running your own course on Coursera? They require you have a PhD to even be considered. It probably makes perfect sense in their world, but in the real world, it's just condescending.

Coursera offers some phenomenal courses. If you don't like them, you can teach on Udemy, or skillshare, or a dozen other platforms. Don't b*tch just because they don't fulfill your every requirement.

Right now I'm taking a Coursera class taught by Thaddeus Hogarth. His bio does not list a PhD.

If you are not famous or educated enough to get a spot in the Coursera line up (neither am I), that is nobody's fault. Different strokes. But MOOCs are here to stay, and to revolutionize education.

Can we at least change the name?

STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) started out as SMET, but they rearranged it because SMET sounds like a disease.

MOOCs sound like a cavalcade gullible people with brain damage screaming slurred almost-words from rooftops.

I hear what you're saying. It's better than Large Online Course Offerings, or Classes Over Internet Telephony Usually Superb.

If anyone is unaware, I'd like to note that Udacity does not enforce a course schedule in their free courses. You can begin them at any time and traverse them at any pace you want.

I took Roughgarden Algorithm courses. Due date made me committed. Without due dates, I would just be lazy and might have never finished the courses.. to me it made sense to have students thinking about the assignments and then discussing it on the forums in the allotted time.

Absolutely agree! Without the deadlines, I would not have finished. That said, a 5 weeks course is a lot easier to commit to than a 10 weeks course, since it is very intense during the course. It is simply hard to find the time for it.

I like that Courser split the algo course by Roughgarden into two parts. Made it a lot easier to find the time for it then. Some other Coursera courses are 10 weeks or longer, which so far has kept me from signing up.

I wrote about my experience of both courses: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course... and http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...

I agree. The nature of my work is very cyclic. I would love to be able to work on courses during down time and put them on hold during busy periods. A coursera course that I was taking is just finishing up now and a few weeks ago work was busy and I feel behind. I'll end up 'failing' the course but at least I did manage to learn from it and hopefully the videos will stay up so I'll be able to finish it on my own schedule. There are also coursera and edx classes I've signed up for with no intention of participating so I have access to the material when I have time. To me, one of the biggest potential benefits of online learning isn't being utilized, everyone being able to work at their own pace.

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