MOOCs are not going away any time soon. There are professors and educators definitely taking the time to create quality lectures and make sure you get the help you need, and I don't think that's much different from attending an actual college. The only thing missing is probably the importance of human interaction.

Also, I'm not sure about that math because even he seems skeptical about it. Hope somebody can help enlighten me.

While according to Harvard itself: "The total 2013-2014 cost of attending Harvard College without financial aid is $38,891 for tuition and $59,950 for tuition, room, board and fees combined."

Unless summer+part time work is a lot more lucrative than I am aware of, the only way this would be true is if the students (or their parents) were financially well-endowed. A student that doesn't have rich parents is going to be incurring a fair amount of debt or spending way too much time working instead of studying.

Edit: Harvard is generous with its financial aid, so the author's message is more accurate than I understood (at least for Harvard). Learned something.

> approximately 70 percent of Harvard students receive some form of financial aid.

About 2/3rds of Harvard students graduate with no debt. http://madamenoire.com/111119/the-10-schools-that-generate-t...

It's definitely the case that when they say that Harvard students are graduating without debt, it is because of the generous financial aid and not just the independent wealth of the students and their families.

Or if, as is often the case at wealthy private colleges, Harvard has extensive school-provied need-based financial aid in grant, rather than loan, form (as well as any academic scholarships) which assure that the full cost is only paid by (some of) those who are financially well-endowed, while those who aren't financially well-endowed (as well as some who are, due to academic scholarships) are paying much less out of pocket (including loans as "out of pocket" for this purpose.)

I was Harvard class of 2013, and I received some financial aid from Harvard even when my family had an income well above 100k (my father is a professor and my mom works for the federal government; both have PhDs).

Edit: I think it's more around the 180k-200k range where the aid falls off rapidly, especially if you don't have extenuating circumstances like a sibling also in college.

Of those who graduated... of those who found a job at all.

>$59,950 for tuition, room, board and fees combined

If a summer job could pay for that, then why would I need a college degree to make $47K annually? Harry Lewis is le trollin.

This is really important. The discussion about education in this community (HN), and the a lot of the discussions I've seen related to the MOOC movement (or at least where it has seen success), tends to focus on self-motivated, usually high-aptitude students. But, almost by definition, those attributes do not describe most students.

I think MOOC's could benefit from face-to-face coaching. Students need someone to see them, to acknowledge their efforts, to monitor their progress and give them encouragement or advice when needed. This is the job of a coach, or educational counselor, not a teacher.

The teacher can very well be teaching the course on video, but the student needs to be observed by a real person in order to get that special feeling that motivates and makes the whole process efficient. A bunch of counselors distributed to major cities could serve a lot of students taking online courses, but they need to feel accountable to a person, not just a website. It's easy to do that and fits well with the online delivery model.

MOOC's could be a great solution to life-long learning and keeping up to date with relevant skills. Especially in computer science, a 4 or 5 year college program is too long - by the time the students finish, many specific technologies they learned might be already obsolete. Instead, coming back for a course or two every year might work much better in the long run.

MOOC's might still work out if they could be coupled with employment from the start - let Coursera or Udacity partner up with various companies and create relevant courses, and use this opportunity to teach and rank the participants and in the end, offer jobs to the ones that are up to par with their skills. This would make MOOC's much more valuable than what they are now.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. It is always important to remember that students are people and that most people are extremely social creatures who want to interact with other people directly, in a bidirectional, real-time way.

Our current education system is based on standards and Gaussian distributions. Some aptitudes appear to be distributed that way. But a lot of things aren't, like learning styles, speeds, comprehension methods, imagination, specific interests and aptitudes, and so forth. We can't dream of assigning an individual tutor to every student in the country. But we can dream of a world in which technology enables every student in a standard course to learn in a personally optimized way.

From my experiences as a student in both environments, I think the motivation required to successfully complete a college course is about the same as completing a MOOC. I don't think that an increase in the amount of content delivered online at a college level would increase the failure rates, because the students who aren't self-motivated would fail out anyway.

The classroom setting is important because it sets up social expectations and accountability. I tend to blow off MOOCs partly (there are obviously other reasons as well, including the fact that they are free) because there is no scheduled time. There is less pressure and it is up to me to make time, it isn't blocked out for me. I also get bored more easily in MOOCs because the communication only flows in one direction, from the teacher to the student. I can't ask questions or challenge assumptions during lectures. To me, that isn't as interesting, so I'm more likely to drop out.

My MOOC completion rate is also fairly low. In total I've signed up for 16 MOOCs, and successfully completed 6 of them (with 1 more in progress). I don't consider this a failing of the MOOC style - I actually consider the freedom to drop courses without punishment a great joy compared to my previous college engineering degree program. I've stopped "attending" MOOCs because I didn't like the instructor, or because I didn't enjoy the material, or just because I had too many other things going on to set aside 6 hours a week to work on a course.

But what if you had to complete the MOOC in a college environment, where you didn't have the freedom to just stop working on the material without punishment? I agree that having the lecture times blocked out is a motivating factor - I take "classes" at the gym to motivate myself to go every day. But when it comes to assignments, or studying for the final, that's still time you need to set up for yourself. Since you've been so successful at self-motivating yourself to do that already, do you think you'd be able to motivate yourself enough to watch the video lectures in a college setting?

Thanks for sharing your data point, even if it's just a small sample size. I'm really enjoying reading about other's experiences.

But second, and maybe just as important, I just hated watching the video lectures. I had a lot of trouble motivating myself to spend several hours watching lectures, and when I did watch them I often found I got very little out of them because I couldn't ask questions in real time. So, for instance, if I wasn't completely clear on a point in minute 10, I might be lost for the next 40 minutes and my only recourse was to watch the part that confused me over and over again in the hope that it would become clear (which is boring).

I think I simply can't learn well from video lectures. When I was in school I was the type of student who would always engage the lecturer. I asked a lot of questions, sometimes when I was confused, sometimes when I wanted more information, and sometimes when I thought I had something to add or wanted to know about some special case. This just doesn't work with video lectures.

So I think the answer to your question is that I probably wouldn't do very well in a MOOC, even if there was some kind of consequence behind it.

Edit: I do think that MOOCs are a great thing and I hope they stay a part of the "scene", partly because it is nice to have the option (I enjoy participating in them even if I usually don't get very far), but mostly because they seem to "work" for a lot of people, like yourself. More options is good, just don't take away my in-person lectures! :)

It's also overlooked that most college courses look more like MOOCS than not. Much ado is made about the importance of teacher intervention for struggling or marginal students. Is anyone under the impression that such interventions actually happen at scale (or at all) at your typical large university? Especially the lousy ones most directly threatened by MOOCs?

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.5.htm...

I took way more math courses than my CS degree required just because I wanted to -- so I enjoy math -- but I still benefited from the pressure exerted on me by being in a formal course. I don't believe I would have studied as deeply on my own just with the textbook, nor do I believe I would have studied as deeply with today's MOOCs.

I don't know if it was the threat of wasting tuition money, or the concern about getting a bad grade on my transcript, or the camaraderie of my in-person peers, or what, but for some topics I know good and well that the traditional college course helped me stick with learning the material.

There is very little evidence that university education actually does anything other than act as a signal for students' already-present aptitude.

At that point, the question employers will be asking traditional students is: why didn't you do your education online where it is faster, of better quality, and much cheaper? The fact that a person needs the hand-holding and extrinsic motivation of a traditional college is not a plus.

"And none of this is to suggest that institutions with very high prices ... aren't going to collapse. THEY WILL. And there may well be more people who get smart <who> go to a lower priced school rather than to the unaffordable "best" school they get into."

(Emphasis mine & I removed the aid discount, since that's all that it really is - a discount.)

Notice that "best" is not really the "best" it's only conditionally the "best".

And when this is applied world wide, MOOCs will transform education, and vast numbers of educational institutions will pivot towards research, private industry partnerships or disappear altogether.

In the end I believe that with MOOCs the world will be smarter, and the elite institutions more exclusive and elite. They will return to being class dating organizations that they once were before the idea of them being meritocratic academic institutions overtook them.

Harvard, Stanford will survive. MIT, CalTech will excel. Cornell, Brown, UPenn, Yale, Princeton, the UCs, etc will struggle. None of them will be able to support their capital loads when the educational opportunities are presented significantly cheaper elsewhere. Add to that the fact that the Student Loan bubble will have burst, and student credit will be severely curtailed, and we see a significantly changed educational future.

Kodak indeed.

That said, it is a good example of why the "downvote if you disagree" policy that has been encouraged here is a rather idiotic idea.

Your comment is clearly not commercial spam or anything of that nature. And it does present an argument, with justification for why it may hold true.

It might "offend" thin-skinned people associated with some of the well-established academic institutions you'd listed. That's not a problem with the comment, however, but rather with the people who can't stand to read an argument that they may disagree with badly enough to want to censor.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with what you said, but I do know that it wasn't a waste of my time to read it, and it did get me thinking somewhat. The most bothersome part was dealing with the unnecessarily gray text.

So why the downvote? And why not add something substantial to the conversation.

When the MOOC "bubble" started, I was sort of stunned that so many schools thought that they could deliver a valid learning experience by just posting videos and syllabi online. Everyone's been doing that since 1995. MOOC was just a way to say "lots of people are watching our videos in the same sequence!" The model started breaking down quickly as soon as tracking objectives, assessing students, and interacting with instructors came into play. That's when you're into LMS territory.

LMS seems to be a bad word when you talk to MOOC advocates. Like so many buzzword people, they say that MOOC's are "disrupting" the traditional LMS.

But at the end of the day, if you're going to be successful with a MOOC, you're going to have what amounts to an LMS to deliver it. There's no magic bullet shortcut there that combines ("mashup"- another favorite buzzword for people reinventing the wheel) all the things you need to deliver a successful learning experience.

MOOC people say they're disrupting learning systems by mashing up all these things. It's a great idea- but once you actually implement, you've built an LMS.

My current client's LMS could easily, today, deliver a class to 100K students with manageable interactivity and assignments (and delivery on mobile devices), and yet the client wants to throw the thing away because it's 10 years old. Most universities who have failed with MOOC's would spend a million bucks or more to have this LMS, and the client is just going to throw it away. Wasting money seems to be the true meaning of "disrupt" in the learning context.

Also, universities have failure and money-wasting baked into their institutional DNA. That they've failed at delivering content electronically (and almost everything else that's socially valuable) doesn't mean MOOCs can't be successful.

That they haven't succeeded says less about MOOCs than about the distribution of institutional power in traditional universities, where your typical administrator will see MOOCs merely as an opportunity to cut costs that wouldn't have to be cut if administrative bloat weren't crowding out everything else.