This will probably be downvoted like crazy here, but I thought we were against for-profit education?
Pretty sure everyone was up in arms when University of Phoenix and the like were bilking students of tens of thousands in student loans and then dumping them on the street with worthless degrees (or worse incomplete degree programs).
Sure the content of the Coursera programs may be better than anything you might have had access to with UoP, but the reality is that the degrees/certificates are just as useful right now as UoP's ever were. Until the rigor is there the degrees will continue to be worth nothing. Unfortunately, that means that Coursera's business model is probably fundamentally broken, as they have previously admitted that too many people drop out if the courses are too hard. Also, making the courses meaningful would certainly require hiring a lot of TAs to grade assignments, which would cost them a lot of money.
I agree that online education definitely has a role to play in the future... But I'm really struggling to see why everyone agrees that one for-profit school is unequivocally bad, but the other gets a free pass.
I'm one of the faces of the Coursera ads (they interviewed me about career change from drummer to deveoper). I feel exactly the same. When it was free, and when for profit institutions were experimenting more too, it felt like a revolution. The Stanford 'Startup Engineering' course on Coursera was only offered back then and it was amazing. Andrew Ng's ML, Prinston's Algorithms, all free including certificate.
I used Udacity CS101, Google Python Class and loads of other free resources and changed my life. It was true when I said Coursers changed my life. What has been slightly sad as it took Coursera years to start seriously advertising with my face, and even when they interviewed me they were almost beyond recognition.
It makes me sad I just happened to learn CS and software development during the online education wild west. That's what I dreamed of for everyone. Top level education for everyone, for free. I didn't care about certificates. I had knowledge and projects I could prove.
It may not all be doom and gloom, but when people ask me for recommendations after seeing advert, I sigh a little, because situation isn't as great as it was.
Count me as another person for whom Coursera was a life-changer. I went from disaffected lawyer to deeply satisfied software dev in 4 years, in large part due to Coursera and edX, with nods to MIT's OpenCourseWare and Stanford's platform as well. Classes such as Nand to Tetris, Prof Sedgwick's algorithms, Prof Ng's ML on Coursera and MIT's Intro to CS and Programming on edX, among many others, were more than enough to get me to a place where I felt confident applying for jobs. (Especially when mixed with a few years of a Pluralsight sub as well, and some time as a volunteer with a nonprofit.)
I am deeply indebted to Coursera, but I always felt like they would struggle making money. People are only willing to pay for certs if they mean something, and unfortunately they don't. When I interviewed, every place I met with was impressed by the courses I had put myself through and the knowledge I had gained -- but not a single one even asked a question about any certificates. I always thought a sub model would probably fit them better, but it's obviously difficult-nigh-on-impossible to claw back free content. If they wanted the content to stay free, they really needed the strong backing of some sort of private entity.
100% same. Never showed certificates to a soul. But just as with you, was is not too difficult showing knowledge in software industry, at least in most startups.
And yes, some of the other platforms have been amazing too. I did the full databases course on Stanfords platform. That was priceless, and also free. Relational algebra was exactly the sort of theoretical knowledge that just learning from experience and docs doesn't teach.
Interestingly I also find most companies I have seen willing to pay for courses want some kind of certificate at the end. They don't seem to value abstract learning, even though that's the part that their team leverage to hopefully help their bottom line.
I want the platforms to make money, but I feel like universities who were not wanting to be left behind when the concept was emerging gave away far more for a short moment than they ever were going to continue to do.
Certificates and credentials and things distract from actual verifiable learning in so much of education. It is deeply ironic because that is their entire purpose.
I understand regulated industries like legal, medical and engineering need to have minimum standards that require certification, but yet the quality and reliability of practitioners varies wildly. I just feel like by turning education into a product, it is a necessary evil. Government funding is an avenue that lots of academic institutions go down. Perhaps governments should invest in more free and open education. Rather than for example funneling so much money to textbook companies.
Call me naïve and idealistic, I appreciate that there are problems and counter arguments, and as mentioned in many comments, competition does help to drive down prices. I certainly think we are still in a much better place now with it all. I'm still optimistic about all the amazing education opportunities online.
>I always thought a sub model would probably fit them better, but it's obviously difficult-nigh-on-impossible to claw back free content.
That's basically the LinkedIn model as I understand it--which has what used to be Lynda and maybe other things. I have it available as part of my company's continuing ed materials.
But what works as a professional resource paid for by companies doesn't necessarily work for individuals who will mostly only pay for a cert that employers are specifically looking at. Maybe some would pay a Netflix-range monthly fee but I suspect not enough.
Anytime I see Lynda/LinkedInLearning come up I always mention that, at least in my area, a lot of local public libraries subscribe to give their residents free access. Although I don't think that site is as strong in the programming-type courses they have a huge breadth of courses that can help the average person learn a new skill.
What they don't really go into in edited interview properly is that early on it also felt like open courses online could end paying for mediocre teaching, you could basically skip around doing best-in-class courses from top teachers and experts in their fields, and it didn't matter if you had no money in the world, just internet and a computer.
Online learners need to be use multiple sources and tools to learn. Use some of Coursera's free content with some YouTube videos with some blog posts with some Udemy sales with some library books.
It's unreasonable to expect one institution to provide all of the above for free and they just can't compete with the broad range of the internet.
The internet itself is the revolution in learning, not Coursera and not Udemy.
I don't disagree. It is true I feel sentimental, the sadness is only that what I had at that precise moment in history was so amazing and so "let's just try it and see how it goes" from educators, platforms and students that it made it so easy to access great classes including lecturers time from places like Stanford for free. What I got is not available for free. All the knowledge is available, from free and open sources though. Just not packaged as easily.
I took more than 60 courses on Coursera and edX, like the parent commenter mostly during the completely free days. About a fifth of it was top level, about a third was "easy" courses, for example history of architecture.
I did not take a single course in my profession (I'm a CS guy doing architecture work now). Most of it was in chemistry, org. chem, bio-chem., anatomy, physiology, medicinal chemistry (drug development), neuroscience, biology/genetics, clinical study design - plus a lot of statistics practical courses (using R to do stuff, there was a very good multi-course series on Coursera).
I would not have paid anything because 1) it was just for fun, I cannot make any money with what I learned, and 2) I was earning a pittance only because I was doing did for a few years while recovering my health.
I think I can generalize the second point at least a little bit - I could see a lot of people taking such courses exactly when they are not busy in their jobs. It takes waaayyyyy too much effort to do this on the side when you have an active job and especially a family on top. Therefore I think a lot of the people who would be interested are exactly those who may not have the budget to pay.
Even more so because there are plenty of alternatives (for me my learning marathon years started with 100 hours of physiology lectures in a Youtube channel, and if I had to pay anything for access there was no way I would have ever even found any for-pay courses in the first place since the whole thing was completely accidental, one thing leading to another), and also because those "certificates" don't mean a thing.
The FOR PAY model removes all the "play" part, only people with a plan andintent come to such a place in the first place. I think free education would be far better, attracting more "accidents" like myself who never planned for any of it.
Already when I took the courses I knew they were doomed to disappear (in that form) because there would be insufficient profit. I always thought some way to fund such sites so that they can provide FREE quality education would be better instead of forcing them into the usual profit constraints. Of course 99% would be "wasted" from the point of view of the monetary-minded people (for whom my own years-long for fun learning would be completely useless too), but even they might see that even just a tiny percentage of people who do benefit and who would never found the opportunity in a for-pay edu system would be worth it, globhal-economically speaking. The price is insignificant compared to any presence-based learning (and having created multimedia learning content I certainly don't undervalue the effort for even a single course, but it's a one-time effort, and the continued presence of TAs can be achieved from within the learning community, I did that too for some of the more technical courses, free support to other learners helped me learn that much more by having to research other people's questions).
I understand where you're coming from, but with my personal experience, I just can't completely agree. Like you, I earn my money with CS, but I do music as a hobby. Never earned anything serious from it. And yet, I feel completely comfortable paying for hardware, software - and yes, education, having completed both online and offline courses.
And yet, paying for it didn't remove the "play" part you're talking about. In fact, I would feel awful if I used the very valuable services provided to me by these business and persons for free, exactly because I enjoyed them so much.
I get the feeling you ignored well over half I wrote. I hate it when people carefully select only parts of a whole to find something to nitpick. Not to mention that it isn't about anyone's personal feelings, it's how people overall act. You can have the opinion that mankind should be more like this or that, but unless you manage large scale changing of the world's population I think it's better to do something with the people actually here.
Oh and you ignored half my post, I repeat: Not only is there a big difference between me and you, you actually use the gained knowledge, I also made the point that you will only reach a small part of the population who 1) have a goal and 2) have money, which for most of the world is not true. Providing knowledge to significant parts of the world who have Internet access but not nearly enough free money for multiple courses (thousands of dollars before you learn anything, even at just $50 a course, many cost much more than that). You not only look at only yourself, even assuming a broader view you concentrate on the top 10% of people worldwide.
Also I would probably consider a pay-it-forward model of being able to sponsor others doing the courses that have subsequently brought me value, now that I have actually got some value from doing them.
For me nothing, in principal, but in reality I would not have done it. I finished Startup Engineering staying on friends couch between gigs. I did not have the cash.
And when I first tried coding from a self-paced course much earlier on, I wouldn't have started casually with a paywall.
Also, I valued the fact people in economies where they would almost certainly not afford US / European prices could freely participate as long as internet was available.
For me it is sort of like if you had to pay for git. It is one of my most used and valued tools, but part of its inherent value is its ubiquity, which I do believe has only come to pass because of the fact it is free software in all senses.
There's a difference between something we all have, and something we could have if we are able/willing to pay and I think education overall needs a bit of both.
There are millions of kids and people of all ages going to extremes to access the internet to learn new stuff.
I met a kid in a remote village who would cycle for miles every weekend they were not working to seat in a public library to learn on the internet, for that kid a course costing 1 penny would be too expensive and no one in the family had a credit card to begin with.
Sal Khan deserves all the praise and more, Khan Academy is now in multiple languages, his videos are literally changing people’s lives.
MIT’s edX used to be free, they are now monetising the courses and will withdraw access after their self imposed artificial course time has run out if you don’t pay them, this also creates a second class of students, the ones with money get special privileges and get graded and the poor ones don’t and offering ‘financial aid’ doesn’t work if you really want to reach far and wide, how many will close the site when they see it costs thousands of dollars for a course? In a sense edX is way more disappointing than Coursera.
But just like I stopped recommending Coursera when they started restricting access to their courses I look forward to shorting their stock when they go public and donating the profits to educational nonprofits.
Coursera's upsell advertising (I'm working through, and recommend, Dan Grossman's Programming Languages right now) seems to have switched away from advertising the vocational benefits of their certificates to making it sound like a charity.
It used to be "get this certificate to get 6x more LinkedIn views". Now, 50% of the ads I get are "support Coursera's mission to bring people education for free".
These categories of schools just have different funding mechanisms and thus different incentive structures. Compared to private nonprofits, for-profits can crowdfund creation of the school, but give up some ownership. On the other hand, public nonprofits are controlled by politicians and the general public.
> why did [many people] think that one for-profit is bad, and the other gets a free pass
I suppose for most people it was a value judgement, rather than an ideological one. The same reason why someone might dislike McDonald’s, but still like Veganburg. Bang-per-buck, many Coursera classes are a better value than those at other schools, whether they are for-profit, private nonprofit, or public.
I don’t get why we’d dismiss a cheaper option out-of-hand. Easy to steel-man this one;
* economy of scale means it’s cheaper for the same quality
* egalitarian access means you don’t need X gpa to get the top classes
* online means the TAM / impact is way bigger
* lack of actual degree for most courses means you are spending your dollars on actual learning and not merely paying to signal middle-class membership
I’m not necessarily buying in to all of these but I think there’s clearly enough to justify the business on its surface. Haven’t dug into the biz metrics though.
Anecdotally a friend did Open University which is probably equivalent to the full degrees offered at Coursera, but less convenient. They spent years grinding out a degree after work. They are a data scientist now. So this path is valuable and increases access to (I’d argue overly) credentialed jobs.
Open University is an incredibly interesting idea to me, and apparently a respected University in the UK at least, but even with that it just doesn’t feel right.
For someone who did not take the traditional path to schooling, wanting to go back open access is amazing, but if the primary value of the credential is correlated with selectivity, I can’t help but feel off. It effectively feels like pay to play and to the average person who hasn’t heard of the school/program, does it signal more than a for-profit. I also couldn’t be sure, not being familiar with how UK programs are generally structured, but a lot of the programs looks extremely superficial, and wide, like what you would get from a low tier AS program at a bad community college. This is kinda the same feeling I had with certain degree options through Coursera as well.
I considered doing an MBA with the OU. I called up, but I'd "missed the deadline", and I haven't gone back. The next round was starting in 3 or 6 months or something, not to mention it'd cost me several £k. In the meantime I've continued to take many courses on Coursera.
The only time a certificate would be useful to me would be if I wanted to change career. Other than that, I just want the knowledge, and Coursera lets me blast through courses to get top quality information. I love it.
OU is legit. My pal did Physics, then got into an engineering masters at a good university, then did a data science for grads transition course.
Flexible course curriculum but it seems they give you the stamp you need to get to the next level, and perhaps more importantly, the flexibility to do it at your own pace. It may be that as you say you can pick your curriculum to be shallow, I don’t know the details I’m afraid.
I think a lot of roles just care about box-ticking; degree in CS or related STEM field. The recruiter doesn’t care where from if you tick the box. In some sense it’s BS, and Coursera may be the cheapest way to hack the system here.
My friend found it really rewarding and empowering to get his degree even though he took a detour to get it, so i can at least provide a third-hand vouching for the quality of OU from an educational content perspective, as well as passing the bar for credentialism too.
Caveat Emptor, I don’t have any positive or negative testimonials on Coursera for getting a job. And I’d actually suggest in software that you can get into the field without a degree much more easily than other STEM fields. But if you’re not in a tech hub then the credential might help you to get a foot in the door if you are otherwise struggling to see a way to do so.
Was your friend UK based? Very cool that your friend was able to get into a good masters program (that’s part of the reason I’m considering going back) although I’m confused on how a physics degree works through distance learning. Do those not typically involve labs with millions of dollars worth of scientific equipment? I’m going to have to call a few schools I’m looking at to verify their programs are 100% distance learning, because while the marketing material claims that, many of the program courses seem to indicate otherwise.
I also did a physics undergrad (in person) and can attest that most of the classes these days are theory-based. Lots of maths; Quantum Mechanics is all maths, Nuclear/Particle is all theoretical/computational (though at the point of masters/PhD you would get to fire lasers at real things, I never did though). I did have one experimental lab class where we practiced measurements of various sorts, but that was maybe 10-20% of the first couple years. You could take different electives that emphasize experimental physics more, but the theory is plenty deep to keep you busy without compromising. So if you want to learn quantum physics or stellar nuclear physics for example you don’t need a lab at all.
I know two people with OU degrees (CS and Law respectively) and their qualifications are proper, legitimate degrees. The content seemed as challenging (frequently more so) as the material I had to contend with doing a full-time three year degree. But they did it over eight years while also doing a full-time day job. Anyone who can do that has my sincere admiration. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it.
I agree 100%, I have a deep respect for those doing a degree at their own pace and along side a 9-5. I loved studying at uni but I don’t think I could sustain that.
That's the root cause of the problem. I seriously doubt the integrity of any system can survive the injection of trillions of dollars into the market. Schools want to capture as much of it as possible and that means raising tuition, dumbing down classes to make sure students don't drop out as well as creating fun but useless courses. It actually makes no difference whether students are learning anything useful or even if they're learning anything at all. They just need them to be enrolled in order to get those loans.
I 100% share your concerns. What you and I hate is the predatory, indenturing nature of for-profit colleges that don't provide marketable skills--what currently exists. The certificate from UoP, Coursera, or the receipt from a Ruby on Rails book all have the same market value when applying for a job, but I hope everyone here has bought and got value from a tech book.
I honestly don't know what makes universities work. Their "mission" to educate in the US has definitely crept towards for-profit. Seeing endowments grow multiple times over but their student body stay the same size. Over the past few decades they've teased by publishing course materials online, but have usually been very protective. I can't imagine this not changing over the next few decades.
Like you point out, entry level stuff scales really well. Maybe "graduate level" material costs a premium or its a loss-leader as a way add prestige? University undergrad often has "filter classes" which always seemed like a money grab because otherwise their admissions and onboarding departments aren't doing their job. Graduate classes were always much smaller and hard for people to afford.
I hope you’re right and Khan Academy won’t ever be the same as Coursera, I hope they will remain free and can grow into becoming better than Coursera, perhaps educators on Coursera will start sharing their courses for free on Khan Academy.
In practice, it ended up being mostly another source of lecture videos used by motivated professionals with generally solid fundamentals. For which, frankly, there were already a lot of resources out there.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. First, at the time you couldn't find stuff like that online. I'm talking, legit course from legit professors for free.
Then about the audience? I personally was a student when Coursera became a thing and I got into my masters by taking the course on cryptography. I have many student friends at the time who learned a lot through other courses.
I'm not sure if there are courses that you can't take without paying, I remember that they sometimes made it really difficult to figure out if you could access the course for free (I believe it's better now).
Honestly it's hard to complain, because all the stuff is still there. It's just not as utopian and revolutionary as it once seemed to be. Or maybe it is and I should stop complaining. I just wished it was like wikipedia.
Actually, I was doing some updated courses a while ago, which I started a few years back and wanted to finish. I could follow the videos and reading material, but I could not do the end—of-week quizzes without paying. This really put me off.
And at that point, you're just watching videos and, while people learn in different ways, you may be just as well or better off picking up a book and taking advantage of resources like MIT OCW.
> but I thought we were against for-profit education?
So it just .. shouldn't be allowed? Free markets allow you to set your price for your abilities and have agency over your future. If I want to charge people something to teach them something, I don't want a group of hackers telling me I can't.
I'm totally in favour of for-profit education. Obviously teachers need to earn money/eat. Unregulated education tends to have a wide variety to choose from, from free to very expensive, and that's a good thing.
Not for profit doesn't mean what you think it does. Teachers at not for profit schools earn a wage, just like at for profit schools. It means that the excess can be siphoned off to stock owners instead of being reinvested in the school.
Can you clarify your argument, I don't get where you are going with this? Also once Coursera is on the stock market then you and I can own it and we didn't create the school.
Have you used Coursera before? You don't have to pay to take a course. You pay for the certification of completion.
Regarding for-profit education, does anyone here think that a government-backed education platform would have achieved what Coursera did in the last 10 years? Don't kid yourself. It wouldn't have been remotely close in quality and content and would have been a feeding trough for the political class. It wouldn't have even been granted funding.
In a lot of cases these days, auditing a class doesn't give you access to anything other than the video lectures--so no autograded assignments, quizzes, etc. So basically no different than a bunch of YouTube videos.
I am firmly of the opinion that industry should fund public education in their respective sectors. If every talented person gets best and practical-focused education possible, that's a plus for the industry. Commoditization of high quality education makes sense to them.
Who's the "we" who are supposedly against for-profit education?
And, why would someone's negative impression of one particular for-profit education outfit – one whose abuses were strongly associated with a particular set of misguided incentive-misaligning government loan subsidies – turn them off against all for-profit educators?
Would either of the following formulations make sense:
"I thought we were all against for-profit investor Bernie Madoff, why do people like for-profit investor Warren Buffett?"
"I thought we were all against for-profit medical hype like Theranos, why do people like for-profit BioNTech's mRNA vaccine?"
You shouldn't erase all the other salient differences between people & projects under some broad, & assumed derogatory, "for-profit" label.
I took Geoff Hinton's Coursera course on neural nets when it was first offered and it was incredible. No exaggeration to say it changed the course of my career. That's all to Geoff's credit of course, not Coursera per se. But the idea that you can get instruction from the world's foremost expert in a topic rather than whoever your university happened to hire, or even if you're not in university at all, is pretty disruptive.
I also took that course. It might be a bit due to my less than stellar math background but mostly due to the way Geoff explains stuff that I had a really hard time keeping up.
I ended up giving up and not bothering with deep learning and neural nets until the amazing, legendary, awesome CS231n was made available taught by Andrej Karpathy.
I don't know what it is about the way Andrej teaches but it's so good that I literally binge watched all of CS231n over a weekend and then went back to the start and watched again while working through the exercises.
Just goes to show that not every teaching style will fit every student and that's why online learning has a big future - teaching/learning style compatibility is a hugely under-appreciated issue.
I admire Geoff Hinton. I'm also proud of his accomplishments as a fellow Canadian. But I'm not in sync with the way he explains stuff though I'll always watch every lecture and presentation he puts out on video.
Karpathy really knows how to teach and keep you engaged.
Random anecdote; I learned how to solve Rubik’s cube and get to sub 30 seconds by watching his YouTube channel ~10 years ago (He was a PhD student at Stanford at the time). I was always amazed by his teaching skills even back then.
It was definitely not a casual course. I went in hoping for a graduate level course and that's what it was. I had to spend a lot of time on it. I didn't find the math too advanced but understanding the lectures and doing the exercises took a while.
Karpathy's CS231n was indeed another great course. We're really spoiled for choice these days.
The real benefit of this online course thing is that you can find multiple explanations of anything, instead of being stuck with whoever is teaching at your institution.
> rather than whoever your university happened to hire
Two years ago Geoff Hinton requested his course be removed because it was out of date.
At a university, at least at a post-graduate level, you are probably going to be taught by a deep learning researcher passionate about the subject, with the added advantage of support if you struggle with some concepts.
True, but while there's a qualitative difference between traditional university provided education and on-demand e-learning, there's also a striking monetary and commitment difference.
To reinforce our long-term commitment to providing global access to affordable and flexible world-class learning, on February 1, 2021, we amended our certificate of incorporation to become a Delaware public benefit corporation. Public benefit corporations are a relatively new class of corporations that are intended to produce a public benefit and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner. Under Delaware law, public benefit corporations are required to identify in their certificate of incorporation the public benefit or benefits they will promote, and their directors have a duty to manage the affairs of the corporation in a manner that balances the pecuniary interests of the stockholders, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit identified in the public benefit corporation’s certificate of incorporation. See “Risk Factors—Risks Relating to Our Existence as a Public Benefit Corporation” and “Description of Capital Stock—Public Benefit Corporation Status.” The public benefit stated in our certificate of incorporation is to provide global access to flexible and affordable high-quality education that supports personal development, career advancement, and economic opportunity.
I've really enjoyed taking courses on Coursera, some paid, but I've mostly audited stuff I've found interesting. Really hoping that they're able to find a way towards profitability and exist as a public company in the long run. Looking at the numbers it doesn't seem like it'll be that hard.
They definitely seemed to have benefitted from covid in terms of registered users which isn't a huge surprise. Registered users from 2019 to 2020 grew by 67%, averaging around 23-24% for the few prior years.
Revenue jumps at a similar rate from 2019 to 2020, from about $184m to 293m, 59% growth.
11,900 degree students at the end of 2020, with degree segment revenue doubling from $15m in 2019 to $30m in 2020.
The jump from 2019 to 2020 is enormous compared to their typical growth rate of around 20%. It'll be exciting to see if they can sustain that post COVID.
Coursera has definitely aggregated some great content, but the evaluations on most of the courses if you go for the certificate are ridiculous — it works well for auto-graded programming assignments, but so much of the other stuff is peer-graded with lots of spammy submissions, so it's barely more meaningful than e.g. a microsoft certification.
Does anyone have some experiences with their degree programmes? Curious to hear if these are more promising...
Based on my experience in a couple courses a while back, the programming auto-graders were pretty good. Not perfect, your code could presumably be a total tire fire but so long as it produced the right answer it was OK--which is admittedly a good part of the battle.
But, yeah, every peer-reviewed assignment and use of discussion board was awful. This isn't a university where everyone is more or less on at least roughly the same footing with respect to language, educational level, and commitment. At least company certs have to maintain some quality floor if they're going to have some value for employers and therefore of interest to would-be employees. As soon as they become viewed as diploma mill trash they're done.
In their defense, I went to a large state university, and some classes used automated grading as part of the assignment grade. One class was basically just one large group project, a large portion of my grade there was based on peer feedback. The most detailed code review I got was at an internship. But I do agree, I'd say in-person and online degrees should both be higher quality than a MOOC.
I'm enrolled in CU Boulder's MSEE program that's administered through Coursera. It's decent, definitely not as good as in person instruction (for me at least), but is probably a good deal for people who are ok being largely self-taught/directed and only need some light help from TAs if necessary. The content seems pretty good and up-to-date so far as I can tell. The price competitiveness and flexibility is ultimately what led me to give it a shot. I'm also doing it to complement an existing career, not bet my future on it, so the downsides for me are somewhat negligible vs someone with no work experience who might be doing the program. So take that as you will...
The peer reviews are definitely better in the degree program, but there's always a few people not even trying, of course. Nothing that's really impacted my own work.
I looked at that program, but I was very cautious. It’s an open program, which means you don’t even have have to have an undergrad at all, albeit you do need to have an understanding of the prerequisites. While personally, I find this and the price point absolutely amazing, I have to wonder what that means for the value of the credential obtained. On paper it’s basically paying for a degree and an MS-EE at that. From engineers I’ve talked to, they don’t even trust accredited online programs.
CU Boulder advertises the resulting degree as indistinguishable from their on-campus program from a records perspective (you're even invited to the graduation ceremony afaik). How much truth there will be to this, I've yet to see.
I don’t necessarily doubt them, but it still just feel off. Why can’t just anyone enter their on-campus program and prove themselves the same way? If they had some more courses focused in certain areas I’d take a more serious look at it though.
Agree on the peer reviewing in non-degree courses. I never got spammy-looking reviews, but I did get ridiculous reviews where one reviewer would grade high, another low and a third make no effort and just say "pass". It was clear that many had no clue what they were talking about or made zero effort. No way I would settle for that in a paid course.
I'd be inclined to trust the degree programs, but can't speak from personal experience. There are reputable universities putting their names on the line and giving out degrees. They're also cheaper than in-person degrees but way more expensive than the specialization certificates. There is clearly effort there and I'm sure you get real TAs grading your work and giving feedback, not peers, and the classmates are people who qualified to get into a MS program, not literally anyone who clicked a sign up button. UIUC and Penn aren't going to give you a MS if you didn't earn it.
I guess this is the time to make the big money. So much moola you can buy out your neighbors homes, and live like a king.
The wealthy boys have so much money they don’t know where it park it. Ten year interest rate is up, celebrities are now guru SPAC wizards, hedge fund guys are acting like immature teens in order to manipulate stocks on Reddit.
Every time I’ve seen this exuberance; the Retail investor is left out to dry badly bloody, and completely broke.
I sure hope Warren get’s her rich boy tax passed. In my neighborhood the wealthy can’t buy enough junk off Amazon, and at the same time complain over the number of homeless camps popping up.
My experience with Coursera was very positive at first. I took the popular Andrew Ng machine learning course. Subsequent visits have been less positive as the site tried to monetize.. offering mostly meaningless certificates and intruding to authenticate you while taking quizzes (even though I didn't care about the certificate)
To think that i took the original ml-course Ng) and ai-course (Norvig) years ago. Great courses.
Currently I find Udacity model better than Coursera: I can get a course and take it in my own time without having to stick to a schedule. Also the fact that I pay for what I consume. I personally dont like subscription model for these things you may use once or twice every yesr
> Subsequent visits have been less positive as the site tried to monetize..
Yeah, I remember Dan Ariely's course on behavioral economics, and — my favorite — Yuval Harari's course on the human history from the early, pre-paid-certificate days of Coursera. That was fun! I have a feeling that as the site became more commercial it has also become less fun.
Wow, didn't expect them to spend so much money on marketing. Given that they are now registered as a public benefit corporation wouldn't this money be better spent as "scholarships" or something for their courses for students who can't afford the fees. I would assume that if they are actually providing a worthwhile public service, then word of mouth should bring in enough users rather than having to spend most of their opex on marketing.
Fast-growing young companies with big ambitions often overspend heavily on everything (marketing, r&d, operations) relative to their current size. Their bet is that as they grow, they will gain unique dominance in their field, plus deeper engagement from customers, which will translate into much higher revenue/user and the emergence of a very profitable business.
This is a workable strategy! Examples include Amazon, Facebook, Workday, Snowflake and practically every biotech company. Some wait until they're profitable to go public; some don't.
It's also a strategy that often fails. Lots of less famous examples are out there, too.
It's interesting that Coursera's 2020 revenue per current learner is about $8. I ran the numbers on Stanford ($6 billion budget; 17,000 enrolled students) and the revenue per learner is north of $300,000.
Now Stanford sells a vastly different product than Coursera does. (At least right now.) And the bulk of Stanford's revenue comes via grants, investment income and other stuff including ticket sales. Tuition revenue per learner is far less, though still well into the tens of thousands of dollars per year.
If you believe that over the next decade, the education dollar will be reallocated to the advantage of organizations like Coursera, the way to get rewarded for your prescience is to get in now and smile as you wait for the revenue/learner curve to bend your way.
I'm not minimizing the risks. But if your analysis ends with "they're losing money right now," you're shrinking your horizons to a strange degree.
Right here comes the ad hominem attacks. Year 2000 called, P/E ratio is at dangerous levels. Not to mention frauds, crypto and somehow rolling a truck down a hill creates billion dollar companies over night meanwhile there is a liquidity crisis brewing in the bond market
yet bond yields go up a small basis point and nasdaq wipes out gains from this year. The current loss leadership model works because of cheap capital. That's it. There's nothing genius about it. SaaS stocks are heavily inflated and were hit particularly hard with the recent correction. Double points if they bought bitcoins.
> tell me. please why a company that loses 40 cents for every dollar they spend should have double digit multiples. you have 1 hour to reply with a fully cited explanation justifying this level of exuberance in a low yield credit bubble driving up valuations while overall the industry has seen a net reduction in profitability.
so I dissed a YC company going public and it gets flagged. The censorship here is ridiculous and this place has turned into a creepy brogrammer pump & dump.
I never understood why Coursera chose to use a .org URL, since they were clearly a for-profit corporation. Perhaps coursera.com was simply not available. Or perhaps this was an attempt to market themselves as if they were an educational institution. Anyone know the truth?
Coursera was never a non-profit corporation. They were founded in 2012 and raised an initial $16 million funding round backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates.
I used coursera and edx back when they first came out. Can't say I'm surprised that I can no longer find Jeffrey Ullman's Automata coursera but it is on Edx.
Coursera's layout seems intentionally convoluted and anxiety inducing to me. Seems geared to guide you to a Certificate rather than any one good course that might meet your interest.
I have the same feeling about the UI. The last time I tried watching a course was easier to find the videos on youtube(the author had uploaded them there as well).
I recently took a course on Flutter from Udemy and was pretty disappointed. Not with the platform per se, but with the entire _idea_ of video courses on programmatic concepts. I only took it because for Flutter most of the resources are videos, and not books or articles.
I find that video courses do not invite the same level of interactivity I feel when I learn from, say, a textbook. There are also of course a horrible reference as one has to dig in to find a specific video, then find the time within that video to learn a concept, while with a book I can merely do a text search.
Videos also are frustrating in the fact that one cannot fluidly control the pace. One can pause and resume and increase from 1x to 2x and back again, sure, but with text I can merely... stop reading to code something up and then when I am ready to proceed I can... resume reading. I hate fiddling with a mouse or a keyboard to pause/resume/pause/resume/rewind, etc.
Needless to say I will not be taking a video course for anything programming related again.
There really is no comparison. Udemy is youtube tutorials that you pay for, while coursera are modified versions of actual college/graduate courses from the best universities in the world, and they're free.
Just took Intro to Mathematical Thinking from Stanford on coursera, it was fantastic.
I hate videos too, but they are useful. If you're taking a course that's GUI heavy it pays off. First time I decide to learn iOS programming, it was great. Figuring out the exactly 10 locations I have to click and in which order is faster with video than any other way. So it depends exactly on what you're trying to achieve. Before acloud guru had it's site, they were on udemy. It was great for getting my AWS cert back then, I just watched the videos and didn't have to wade around AWS console to find out where things are. So for tech stuff, it's really useful if what you're learning is more GUI heavy than CLI heavy.
Yeah, it depends. I've taken some LinkedIn (formerly Lynda) courses on video editing and the like and it works far better than text with photos would. But video for something that could simply be explained with some bullet points is awful.
I also used to be very excited about online courses until I experienced them as superficial when compared to books and self-checks. I think the best way to learn some things ends up being experiential, so something more like an apprenticeship than a lecture would be the most efficient. But in reality, it seems hard to find that.
You also find the same in, for example, college. Where a tutor may be able to get you up to speed faster by 'debugging' your learning.
Took an algorithms related course. Video lectures are there. But practice using Quiz & auto grader for evaluating programs was pretty good. IIRC there will be transcripts but check with the particular course.
Coursera - taught by some of the world's best professors on cutting edge topics.
Udemy - professionals looking to make money outside of their day job by teaching, with varying levels of competency at either their profession or the ability to teach.
You'll get more "practical" or "current" topics out of Udemy, but better education out of Coursera.
Coursera is very bad at keeping their courses live though. Udemy is much better at this.
> Coursera - taught by some of the world's best professors on cutting edge topics.
I would say the distribution is way wider. Yes, there are top courses by top universities but those are sadly a minority. There are lots upon lots of mediocre courses either by big or small universities and the worst offenders the programs created by vendors (Google, IBM, etc) which are nothing but a barely disguised way to push their platforms. Going directly to the university site and you will find the real deal, last term course which usually will be significantly better.
Nothing to disagree with here. Come to think of it I hope COVID puts more recorded lecture online from Ivy League et al, overall. The only issue is that it's easy to put them behind paywall or student logins or what have you.
One bonus with the Google/Facebook/whatever approach is that you sometimes get academics who became in-house researchers to teach their courses. This was more common in the early days and pretty much what you get out of Udacity. It's true that they train to the platform but there really isn't another way to get e.g. Sebastian Thrun out there anymore. Another view may take that as a broken window, however.
I don't see a compelling story for their product. There's great educational content all over the web, much of it freely available. Their credentials are worthless, and in some industries may actually have negative value.
They lucked out with coronavirus, as that sent people scrambling for distance learning. That won't last.
edit: Apparently folks disagree. We don't all see the same things or interpret the future the same way. I think education as an industry is going to go into decline, but I don't see companies like Coursera as being able to thrive by feeding off the corpses.
> I think education as an industry is going to go into decline, but I don't see companies like Coursera as being able to thrive by feeding off the corpses.
People have been saying that for years and yet there is little data to back it up. If anything in economic downturns people are more likely to go back to school so as not to waste the time being unemployed. The fact that Coursera is doing so well during this downturn indicates to me that the industry is just going to transform, not necessarily decline. At least in # of people touched, although revenue might decrease in aggregate. People need the motivation that comes from organized education, whether it be Coursera or college.
They were already in a good position pre-Covid and that just amped things up for them. Your opinions on the value of the credentials is simply your opinion, and both the market and downvoters here seem to think you are wrong. The interesting revenue that has the biggest upside, IMHO, is for enterprises doing internal training and 're-skilling' for employees. In any company of more than a thousand people it seems there is some branch of HR that organizes courses on everything from how to avoid a sex discrimination lawsuit to using some ML library in the analytics stack -- this seems to be where the long-term money is when it comes to online education.
While true, in my experience, companies are generally looking (rightly or wrongly) more for the sort of content that Udemy and LinkedIn crank out; i.e. practical hands-on material that's often relatively bite-sized. I don't think you typically see University-type courses on corporate training platforms--though I'm sure there are exceptions.
Where's Coursera's moat here? Dozens of companies offer this, and from what I can gather, companies will want to spend the minimum amount of money they can get away with to cover the legal liabilities.
> using some ML library in the analytics stack
This was a fad. You don't teach your average software engineers how to do this. If you care, you hire data scientists and have your own ML team. Or you just carry on with business as usual.
edit: your downvotes flag my account and prevent me from interacting with the HN community. If that's how you'd like to do things, then fine. I'd rather this was an amicable discussion than a downvote party.
The moat is that Coursera can bundle all of these into a single package and sell it in bulk to these companies. No one wants to deal with this themselves. At the FAANGs that I have worked at there were teams devoted to this task, but it is the sort of thing which is easy to outsource and when it comes to certain compliance courses you sometimes need a legal imprimatur for the course that is a pain for each company to certify but easy for someone like Coursera to do.
(I am not downvoting you, just commenting on why some people might be doing so...)
Companies like Coursera are the reason there is going to be a corpse. I went to university, but I've also taken many online courses from Coursera, Udemy, and others. Coursera's classes in particular were far better than my classes at that top 25 university.
Maybe. That's awesome that you had a good experience with their platforms.
The thesis I've come to believe is that universities will be abandoned by the majority of Gen Z because of the high cost and student debt issue. Also the increased awareness of the low value of a college education and the lack of a guaranteed employment.
I think we'll see continued enrollment in fields like computer science, and I think the university and community college setting will continue to be popular.
Unless Coursera and other platforms can attach value and employability guarantees to the credentials they offer, they're not a 1:1 replacement for universities. They're more of a form of "continued learning" that many universities offer to adults and seniors. Learning for a small audience that actively seeks it out.
>They're more of a form of "continued learning" that many universities offer to adults and seniors. Learning for a small audience that actively seeks it out.
Which is why you heard so much howling when Udacity first "pivoted." Continuing education for mostly early to mid-career professionals, often with grad degrees is one thing. (And, yes, there are stories including in the comments here about Coursera being someone's big break but they're a small minority.) Which is great. But it was a real kick in the teeth to the people who saw MOOCs as this great opportunity for populations underserved by traditional higher ed.
> People don't go to uni to learn. They go to network, party, and get the signal that employers require. Coursera doesn't replace any of those.
I know this is a popular opinion on HN, but I think it's lazy and cynical and just plain wrong. Plenty of people go to university to learn, either because they felt that need or realised they had it in themselves when they got there.
University education has many problems, particularly right now, but it has also made a large contribution to making the world we have today. I think it's worth valuting that.
Since Coursera provides major-university graduate degrees including onramp programs that provide alternatives to traditional prereqs, it does provide the signal employers’ require.
I went to university after a relatively long(~10 years) software development career to study bioinformatics. It’s something you can practice from the comfort of your own home, but you can’t learn it without enrolling in the university program. There’s just not enough resources on the internet. And don’t get me started on other biotech degrees.
Coursera has pretty good content but I’m not sure their certifications lead to anything meaningful. I’m just using it to learn stuff so I don’t really care about that aspect but I see so many people online cheating.
Platform is pretty basic/poor. There’s bugs months old in some of the courses that haven’t been solved. I don’t think there’s much community/networking. They ask cringe questions at the end of a module to create discussions, very LinkedIn like “How will you use what you learned in the real world?”
The mobile app and the web app are out of sync. I’ve completed the course on the web but on the mobile app it says I still have 4hrs to complete.
I think all colleges will start to offer online degrees going forward. Lambda school seems to be taking off and it seems more like the future of education.
I’m a customer but won’t be an investor, nothing groundbreaking. Could easily be copied. They seriously need a better UX. Pluralsight & Datacamp UX is a lot better.
> Coursera has pretty good content but I’m not sure their certifications lead to anything meaningful.
I agree with this. My cynical take when I see someone with a Coursera certification is "so what?"... Not in a mean way. I just simply don't see the value of that certification.
But then I remember that the tech industry is not the same as other industries. There are other industries where there's still a strong cultural bias towards formalized and demonstrable education.
So those certifications could indeed signal employers in other industries about competence in certain knowledge area. I strongly believe that those certifications don't prove anything but I guess there's some people that do believe in their value.
I recently signed up for a course on Coursera. Maybe I wasn't paying attention or maybe I was tired, but I didn't realize the plan was a trial that would automatically start billing. It wasn't even a month before I received a bill. Their policy is no refunds. It's an easy mistake to make and many other apps offer refunds for this. It might seem minor but it got under my skin. I've decided to never used them again.
2020 was a great year for Coursera. Good for them. This is a company that I am so glad to see reach IPO. Now they have to convince the market that 2020 and 2021 financial successes are indicative of structural changes rather than pandemic-specific gains. Page 21 of the S-1 can tell at least a book's worth of story.
It's kind of crazy to see a tech IPO that doesn't come with the boilerplate "we make zero profit, we've never made profit, and we have no idea how to change that in the future" caveat.
Uhhh, are we looking at the same S1? Coursera currently loses money, has never been profitable, and does not provide any indication of when or if they will ever be profitable.
From the S1:
We incurred net losses of $46.7 million and $66.8 million in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and we had an accumulated deficit of $343.6 million as of December 31, 2020. We expect to incur significant losses in the future. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods to achieve profitability, and even if we achieve profitability, we may not be able to maintain or increase our level of profitability. We anticipate that our operating expenses will increase substantially for the foreseeable future as we continue to, among other things...
These expenditures will make it more difficult for us to achieve and maintain profitability. Our efforts to grow our business may be more costly than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our higher operating expenses. If we are forced to reduce our expenses, it could negatively impact our growth and growth strategy. As a result, we can provide no assurance as to whether or when we will achieve profitability. If we are not able to achieve and maintain profitability, the value of our company and our common stock could decline significantly, and you could lose some or all of your investment.
The real value of education is what students do with it. I wish Coursera put all the content free for users and make a living on income share agreement based on a small part of users.
Or maybe they can die, burn in hell and let universities record their lectures with a phone and a 50$ microphone, upload them to youtube, post pdfs of slides, lecture notes, etc and be done with it?
Coursera and other 'education' companies are mostly attempts to put themselves in-between government subsidized higher education and citizens who already fucking pay for higher education institutions through taxes.
This company is pure scum, let's be honest about what it is.
You could apply your perspective to any industry and company.
I think you should reframe what's being done here.
Coursera sees an opportunity to make money by creating a market for affordable educational content. Universities do not feel compelled to offer their educations for free or at reduced costs, because that's how they sell their expensive services to students and wealthy families.
You have many forces acting in a complex, multi-dimensional market. Don't assume evil. Different brains, different angles of attack. Lots of offenses, defenses, and interesting state space landscapes.
Better. Coursera will try to monetize even harder and turn away even more customers.
With edtech the name of the game has always been quality of the curriculum and how innovative your technology is in terms of being able to make learning more successful for the learner. The "interactive coding" in the browser model I think is perfect for learning how to code.
I've looked at coursera and personally I haven't seen anything significant in terms of innovation.
None taken - but it really is. You could argue that my "direct" competitors are the people making courses on those platforms, but decisions coursera makes affects their courses directly.
Pretty sure everyone was up in arms when University of Phoenix and the like were bilking students of tens of thousands in student loans and then dumping them on the street with worthless degrees (or worse incomplete degree programs).
Sure the content of the Coursera programs may be better than anything you might have had access to with UoP, but the reality is that the degrees/certificates are just as useful right now as UoP's ever were. Until the rigor is there the degrees will continue to be worth nothing. Unfortunately, that means that Coursera's business model is probably fundamentally broken, as they have previously admitted that too many people drop out if the courses are too hard. Also, making the courses meaningful would certainly require hiring a lot of TAs to grade assignments, which would cost them a lot of money.
I agree that online education definitely has a role to play in the future... But I'm really struggling to see why everyone agrees that one for-profit school is unequivocally bad, but the other gets a free pass.