This seems like terrible news :( After the focus on monetization of platforms such as udemy and coursera, edx seemed to give me a sliver of hope that education will be open. Given the immense trust funds held by Harvard and MIT, I had hoped money would not be a factor and these institutions would be able to develop their platform in the open.
I'd like to add .. non-profit does not mean free to end users. There are many good non-profits and there are many terrible ones (highly paid execs, insane amount of money spent on marketing).
I tried to use edX for the first time recently to take a "food science" course, but was disappointed to see that they've resorted to the same dark patterns as Coursera and others, such as:
* Removing your access to course materials when the class is done, and disallowing access to past versions of the class.
* Pressuring you into joining as many courses as possible, due to fear of missing out. When you visit the site, every course says "Course began ($TODAY-5)" to make you feel like "wow, I got here just in time! I better sign up for everything!".
* Breaking courses into useless 2-minute chunks and constant unhelpful quizzes. I really just want to hear the lecturer speak for 20-30 minutes at a time uninterrupted, especially if I'm listening while doing dishes etc.
* An unsettling UI that feels less like it's about presenting information in a compact and/or digestible way and more like it's tracking my every move and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Everything is a button or clickthrough menu that requires interaction.
Thankfully MIT OpenCourseWare still has plenty of lecture videos / course materials available. But I'm quite afraid for the future.
> Breaking courses into useless 2-minute chunks and constant unhelpful quizzes. I really just want to hear the lecturer speak for 20-30 minutes at a time uninterrupted, especially if I'm listening while doing dishes etc.
I disagree. If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. One of the best things about digital courses is that you don’t have to spend an hour zoning out to a professor talking and then spend a day doing exercises, but the two can be intertwined and knowledge can be cemented.
Of course it can be done terribly. But the best online courses I’ve taken have split things up into small chunks with relevant exercises.
That's something we have in common :). My disagreement spans a few dimensions:
* I've already been through school. An undergraduate and graduate degree already taught me how to learn. I have good habits, and I know how to buckle down and study when needed. For me, I find that having something to do with my hands while listening to a lecture actually helps me stay more focused on the topic. Before and after watching, I like to review the slides, do some reading, and take notes.
* I already have degrees. I'm not looking for extra credential. I'm just looking to learn something new from someone qualified to teach me who can filter out what's important and what's not. It would be nice to have the opportunity to listen without necessarily jumping through all the hoops of a normal college class.
* Sometimes I already have background knowledge that overlaps with the course content. In these cases, it's really frustrating when a course won't let me skip around and focus on the topics that I want to learn. The quickest way to get me to drop an online course is to make me sit through lecture content that I've already learned before somewhere else.
* Different students learn in different ways. You might like that the frequent quiz interruptions hold you accountable. That's great! For me, I don't find it too helpful. Usually the mid-lecture quizzes are simple "are you listening?" questions that don't really test your deep understanding. I'd rather go through a set of exercises all at once after listening to the lecture.
Basically, I see no reason online courses can't be structured to give us more choices about how we want to consume the content!
A target audience is a good broader point about MOOCs and online education. (I took edX courses during the "glory days" of 2012 and 2013 -- and also tested out Udemy, Coursera, and Udacity at the time.)
The one-size-fits-most nature of online education goes against the "customize your education at scale to learn" which was an earlier anticipated advantage about MOOCs. Specifically, adaptive learning and being able to accommodate a variety of learning behaviors and styles. "Learn at your own pace, in your own way, on your own time but still within bounds to the rest of the class" kind of thing.
I remember when Stanford launched online CS courses in the mid 2010s, that it was thought they'd have the best of both worlds and their in-person, offline course offerings wouldn't be affected. (Diluted down to the lowest common denominator of student, which now included online learners who weren't Stanford students per se.) Well, over time, turns out double duty-ing course material for online and the "regular" classes crept into all education for instructors. Which meant the courses with online equivalents became easier across the board. Thus, the target audience for everything shifted.
Again, with acknowledged intentionality, I don't really have an issue with this (which you could crassly summarize as "dumbing down" the course offerings for convenience's sake) -- except that from my vantage point it was an unforeseen consequence of part of the online and MOOC push.
Obviously, I benefited from online courses in my mid 20s and so I look at their rise with nostalgia and through a rosier lens than many. However, I also can't help but think that they ended up being not quite what was promised at the outset, which was better targeting in addition to expanded educational access around the world. Especially for students who thought they'd signed up for the more challenging materials and didn't want to be part of a grand new experiment.
Interesting that MIT OpenCourseWare will outlast edX, which for a few years truly did look like it was the future of university level education and beyond.
Yeah, makes sense. Just to clarify something though, I didn't mean it in terms of "dumbing down", but rather "intended to be taken like a college course". As in, with the same amount of attention and effort dedicated to it as you would "full-time" in a college setting. Ergo, people who are looking to do dishes, jog outside, etc. in the middle of it would not be the target audience of MOOCs.
I actually see MIT's OCW as different from MOOCs in this regard, since that was intended as "here's the material we teach, use it at your leisure" (e.g., feel free to wash dishes in the middle...), whereas edX/Coursera/etc. were (as I see it) intended as "here's a 'college-equivalent' course you can take remotely; we need to assume you'll treat it similarly and in return we think it'd give you similar understanding of the material as a college student would get in a classroom".
Exactly. When I find overlapping content in MOOCs, it becomes very annoying. I don't want to miss out a valuable insight I might gain listening to a different instructor speaking for a different point-of-view. The RoI is quite low. But it has happened in the past, so I don't want to skip overlapping content. So listening to it while tidying up or cleaning the desk makes sense.
And for new content, I never watch lectures with other things. I never did. And I still find 2-4 minutes videos annoying as hell.
> "This product that isn't aimed at me isn't aimed at *me*, and that makes me stamp my feet in anger."
> Sometimes I already have background knowledge that overlaps with the course content.
I used to think like you, all the time. "Oh, I already know this." and while I'm sitting there being all smug and self-satisfied that I'm the smartest person in the room I realized:
* The content is good for a refresher. "Background" knowledge is just that, you're admitting you want to hear an expert speak on a subject yet want to throw out what they have to say because you "already know it from before this class".
* The content often provides context. Just like the "Previously on..." segment of TV shows that will recap specific plot points so the viewer understands the events of the new episode they're about to watch, discussing what you term "prior knowledge" will help contextualize the new content that you don't understand properly.
> Basically, I see no reason online courses can't be structured to give us more choices about how we want to consume the content!
OK, but that's not edX/Corsera's job lol
They don't have to cater to every single whim of every type of education personality. It's all well and fine that you, a multiple degree holder, would love to skip around content that you find boring/tedious/whatever while saying you want "someone qualified to teach me who can filter out what's important and what's not".
Like it or not, these websites are just simply not aimed at you, a large-brained Multiple Degree Holder. They're aimed at people who are behind you in education.
> If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course.
Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture when I'm going for a run. Sometimes I like to listen while I'm doing chores. Seems presumptuous to say I'm "not taking the course" when we know that learning styles vary so much between individuals.
>Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times.
YouTube has a ton of lectures, for free, that you can view and/or listen to in this manner.
But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
The notion that there's a single concept of the purpose of remote learning and a single concept of how students learn is exactly the problem.
It baffles me that people expect to take a process optimized for a neurotypical 20-year-old subsidized enough to devote 100% time to study and apply it to everybody else on the planet. I get how physical universities ended up the way they did. But software is infinitely soft and the internet is basically everywhere. Insisting that everybody must learn the same way a bunch of well-off youth did in 1950 is grossly exclusionary and wasteful.
In short, I don't care what the universities are trying to achieve with remote learning. I care what the studentssucceed in achieving. Let's focus on that.
>Insisting that everybody must learn the same way a bunch of well-off youth did in 1950 is grossly exclusionary and wasteful.
No one is saying "everyone must learn the same way". They are teaching a specific way, and are under no obligation to ensure that "your" unique needs are met.
I mean, you say yourself there's no single concept of how students learn. So maybe explain how you'd expect them to to do it?
There are all kinds of models out there. Udemy, Coursera, good old recorded lectures on YouTube. Find what works for you and use it.
> But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve.
They are trying to exclude large swathes of the population?
It is extremely common for people with ADD to focus better when they keep the part of their brain that distracts them busy. In college I folded origami in lectures so that my brain wouldn't go off on tangents that would lead to me tuning out significant sections of the lecture.
Some people combat the tangents by being busy, and some people embrace the tangents (which can be valuable for understanding) by listening to lectures multiple times.
>It is extremely common for people with ADD to focus better when they keep the part of their brain that distracts them busy.
They should cater to those people as opposed to other people for whom bite-sized learning works better? When did we become a society that expects everyone else to cater to our specific needs? No one is being "excluded".
If that's the way you need to learn, fantastic. There are options out there for you. It wasn't that long ago when none of this existed.
> They should cater to those people as opposed to other people for whom bite-sized learning works better?
I didn't say that. The claim was made that learning in this method is incompatible with taking a college level course. I was demonstrating how that attitude is both blatantly false and exclusionary.
> When did we become a society that expects everyone else to cater to our specific needs?
The value of accessibility and inclusivity in education has long been recognized. Why does online learning get a pass from considering this?
Edit: There is no problem with one person saying "I learn better this way" and someone else saying ”I learn better this other way". The problem is when people say "the way you learn is inferior and not suited to college level material" because that is exclusionary.
In undergrad I'd listen to lectures while doing chores all the time, especially when the concepts are theoretical and it's more about just listening to the information.
It won't work for a calculus lecture, but for a lot of topics it works just fine.
The problem with "audit" mode is that it is more than just not getting a credential (which I like most people who already have their educations don't need) but that often you can't take the online exams either. I still want to know if I've learned the material properly!
Sure they could do that. You're essentially asking them to implement an additional feature to handle a new use case—a totally reasonable thing to ask.
But it seems like it's really a stretch to say "it's a dark pattern to not implement this feature that covers my use case". If not implementing a desired feature is a "dark pattern", then I'm not really sure I know what constitutes a dark pattern
> But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
It seems, but it isn't. The inflexible way they structure their courses is just a failure to accommodate to different learning styles. And it's okay - they don't need to be everything for everyone - but it's disappointing.
What works best for me is to watch the lecture multiple times with different amounts of intensity/focus. Listening to a lecture while on a walk or doing other errands is a fantastic primer for when I rewind the lecture and watch it again with my pen and notebook in front of me.
I picked this up from Mortimer J. Adler's "How to Read a Book". There's lots of other techniques discussed in it, but the idea of "skim the content first to know what's coming up, so you have an idea of what each chapter (or lecture) is building towards" improved my retention massively and works well for things that aren't just books.
Well, it depends on the kind of a learner you are. Some learners prefer to listen to long lectures and some short (and some might prefer interactivities, and others might prefer one-way communication). This is where personalized learning comes in, which is something in its infancy and being explored by academicians and especially companies focused on e-learning delivery. (I work in tech at an online / blended learning higher education institution).
Now this comment by OP (benrbray) and you (wodenokoto) gives me an idea that courses can be designed in a way that the learner can mention how much hands-free time they have to spare now, depending on which the platform can hold off any interactivities / quizzes until then (or something like that), to make the learning process more personalized.
The problem with this "personalized learning" approach is that, outside of MIT OCW, everyone seems to have skipped implementing the normal, long lecture in front of blackboard to watch method straight to interactive laden content.
> If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course.
It sounds like you assume everyone suffers ADHD and that's no the cause, not everybody learns the same way and the dish washing strategy always worked for me in college.
> If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. One of the best things about digital courses is that you don’t have to spend an hour zoning out to a professor talking
Strong disagree - as you point out in the next sentence, slightly distracted is the standard model of consumption for in person.
Not surprised a cooking class doesn't lend itself to an easy online port! But the lecture content from Harvard's Science and Cooking with El Bulli's Ferran Adria is still as you mention freely available online for all to enjoy. I recently had a free week pass to Masterclass. And though I found the content more entertaining than enlightening (How to be a Boss with Anna Wintour). There is something to be said about educational content that is given a Hollywood production budget. I think it was always inevitable institutes of higher education would seek auxiliary revenue streams from MOOCs. And an influx of capital could result in lecture videos that are Netflix quality, and that enjoy near 100% levels of retention ;)
Science and Cooking: A Dialogue | Lecture 1 (2010)
Those are actually exactly the lectures I watched before attempting to join the very disappointing EdX course by the same professors :).
The lectures on YouTube were evening lectures meant to summarize each week of class, but the actual in-person students learned more about the actual chemistry involved, and did guided experiments to test different properties of food. I was hoping the EdX course by the same professors would give me an approximation that experience, but I was really disappointed. Technically there's a lot of good information still there, but the main problems were that the lectures were split into 2-minute chunks and the EdX UI constantly gets in the way of actually absorbing the content. I decided to buy a couple books on the topic instead.
Watching of a movie about agent 007 will not make you a super spy.
To learn something, you need to watch a lecture, then receive a task, perform the task and provide a result, then receive feedback, and, finally, learn from the feedback.
Harvard video lectures are just another form of TV. They are mostly useless without Harvard.
This is a dilution of the meaning of "dark pattern". darkpatterns.org which coined the term (and Wikipedia cites) says,
"When you use websites and apps, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another."
I don't see any of that in your observations. Moreover, what you attribute to some nefarious purpose is better explained by effective curriculum design. I haven't used edX lately but I worked at Coursera and I can tell you that the people who make that product have a passion to support learning in the world.
* Removing access to course materials: it's a course, not a content library. When you can access it anytime, you're less likely to do the work of learning. You also won't be part of a learning cohort, which is a valuable learning activity.
* Encouraging you to sign up for courses: this is a problem? Wouldn't someone who wants you to learn encourage you to sign up for courses? "Course began ($TODAY - 5)" that would be deceptive. Are you claiming that edX or Coursera does this?
* Breaking courses into chunks and quizzes. How the heck is this deceptive? This design decision is backed by learning science. Listening while doing dishes does not get you the best learning outcomes; it's a university-level course not a podcast.
* "Unsettling UI" "opportunity to pounce" I really don't know what to make of this one.
I think it's funny that you mention learning science. Actually, all of these patterns go against everything we know about teaching anyone anything.
* Removing access to course materials is horrible! I use old courses and books for reference all the time. When you can access the course any time, you refresh your learning. That's the key to long term retention.
* FOMO to force people to work at your pace rather than their pace is just as terrible. We know that students working at their pace, with encouragement, is what really works. Pushing people into courses when they aren't ready is terrible.
* Constant quizzes are a lazy version of what we know works, which is engagement like https://icampus.mit.edu/projects/teal/ Yes, quizzes are part of it, but a small part, the focus is on making courses interactive with meaningful work instead of boring 1-out-of-n choices. Making such courses is hard, so they take the easy and boring way out.
* If users find the UI unsettling, like it's too focused on tracking and too little on actual learning, that's a legitimate and important complaint. Education is not about getting arbitrarily high scores on some random online quizzes. You want people to actually learn something for the long run.
It really looks like edX and Coursera are taking the exam-driven horrors that are being inflicted on K-12 students all the time and translating them to the web. This is no way to teach. And you can see that with their extremely poor retention rates.
EdX definitely shows “Starts $TODAY” on courses with self paced start any time schedules. I know it does this and it still gets me every time by creating this false sense of urgency that I must enroll today lest I miss the opportunity.
It's the false time urgency trick, aka "today only!"
Similar to the false inventory scarcity trick "only 1 left at this price!"
Note to MIT and Harvard: when you start adopting the deceptive sales tricks of used-car salesmen and dubious infomercials, you're probably doing it wrong.
> Removing access to course materials: it's a course, not a content library. When you can access it anytime, you're less likely to do the work of learning. You also won't be part of a learning cohort, which is a valuable learning activity.
"but I worked at Coursera and I can tell you that the people who make that product have a passion to support learning in the world."
lol, no one will take your points seriously with your clear bias. Coursera is utter shit and it is sad to see edX go down the same path. I guess because the people at Coursera are passionate it means the business does not have a desire to make money as much as a bank and thus the original OP's points are not valid.
> I haven't used edX lately but I worked at Coursera and I can tell you that the people who make that product have a passion to support learning in the world.
I don't doubt that there are people working at EdX / Coursera with a passion for education. I just think maybe these companies are moving in a direction that is at odds with the goal of providing free education, everywhere, to everyone, at any stage in their life.
I enrolled in some of the earliest MOOCs. Sebastian Thrun's original ai-class.com which now redirects to Udacity. I took the first iteration of Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning" on Coursera, as well as Geoffrey Hinton's original NNML course. Back then, everything was open. Course materials were shared freely, and the archives were available for years after the course concluded. There was an autograder for coding assignments that didn't get in your way too much.
Slowly, more and more roadblocks were put in place.
What was your experience like at Coursera? Did you get a chance to see how decisions about the UI and structure of courses were made? Did you get a sense of how much the marketing / business side of things interfered with the education side?
> better explained by effective curriculum design.
For who? Maybe these sites have created a product that works well for a certain niche of people, and they've hyper-optimized for that. Great. But that's not really the dream we all had for it ten years ago.
Like I said in a sibling comment: I've already been through school, and already know my own learning process. I find that the practices Coursera / EdX actively get in the way of my learning.
> darkpatterns.org which coined the term
Language changes. Most people include in their meaning of "dark pattern" things like "artificially restricting you from performing actions that the website is fully capable of performing, with dubious or justification or malicious intent".
I don't think EdX is malicious, just that their reasons for restricting usage of course materials are dubious, and conflict with their stated mission.
> Removing access to course materials: it's a course, not a content library.
Why can't it be a content library? I learn a lot at libraries!
> When you can access it anytime, you're less likely to do the work of learning.
This structure helps some people, sure. But some people like me are not full-time students. Some weeks I have lots of time to dig in, other weeks I don't have time to even watch a lecture. Moreover, I'm learning for myself, not for credentials, so why should I care what a website thinks of my progress?
> "Course began ($TODAY - 5)" that would be deceptive. Are you claiming that edX or Coursera does this?
I don't have definitive proof, but every time I visit the EdX or Coursera sites it just so happens that the exact course I was searching for started within a week of the current date. Maybe I'm being paranoid.
> "Unsettling UI" "opportunity to pounce" I really don't know what to make of this one.
This was mostly a joke :)
> Breaking courses into chunks and quizzes. How the heck is this deceptive? This design decision is backed by learning science. Listening while doing dishes does not get you the best learning outcomes; it's a university-level course not a podcast.
Again, I'm not a student. I trust my own learning process, which is impeded by constant quizzes. I'm doing this to broaden my knowledge. I don't have time to enroll in a college class, but I have time to listen to a few lectures when doing dishes, and read a couple book chapters per week.
Coursera and others are technically capable of opening up their service to this use case -- it doesn't cost them anything -- so why not do it?
In a certain sense, online education is thriving! There are tons of video lectures on YouTube available for free and I can easily pirate any textbook I want to with a quick Google search. It's just that Coursera / EdX / etc don't really fit into that for me. I really wish they did.
why is food science in quotes? you wouldnt put physics course in quotes. As someone that works as an engineer in the food industry, our work is just as rigorous as other fields. When working with vendors that support different domains, they always get excited to work with us since we have some of the craziest and most challenging problems that are not straight forward. While the work we do may not be critical to saving the world and solving some critical problem, it does make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
I didn't mean it that way at all. They were intended more like title-quotes than belittling-quotes. Everything I have read / watched on the topic tells me that food science is a really deep and interesting topic that demands expertise in many different areas of chemistry, physics, and engineering all at once! It's why I was so interested to take a course in the first place!
>useless 2-minute chunks
this is what keeps turning me off of moocs tbh. so many seem like they're designed specifically for people with no attention span... and no one else.
> * Breaking courses into useless 2-minute chunks and constant unhelpful quizzes. I really just want to hear the lecturer speak for 20-30 minutes at a time uninterrupted, especially if I'm listening while doing dishes etc.
That's actually one of my favorite things when taking online courses...
That's cool, do what works for you! I just wish I had the option to disable the quizzes/breaks and see it all in one go. I personally like to watch talks / lectures while I'm doing dishes, but I can't click on the quizzes with my soapy hands.
I'm frustrated that tools that are meant to be empowering actually prevent people from customizing the course content to suit their own learning style / constraints.
The pushback you're getting on this is.... I mean i struggle to find the words. If someone wants to not stare at a screen during a lecture this is 100% ok and I literally cannot fathom the idea that someone is "doing it wrong" if they do not.
If someone does this and they don't absorb the material they..... watch the lecture again in a more focused manner. It really is ok!
You have made excellent points. So many of these courses feel that they are out to make one feel like shit if they decide to do free audit instead of paying. And this is despite telling multiple times the one is not interested in certificates which now can be attached on Linkedin.
OCW started doing the same annoying 10m chunks with their scholar versions but so far have always still provided the full unedited lecture as an option.
> MIT OpenCourseWare still has plenty of lecture videos / course materials available.
Hmm, I'd disagree. For example, Analysis 1 is a very desired course for many technical majors. Go look at OpenCourseWare's offerings for Analysis 1, perhaps peruse some of the videos.
Then go look for other desired courses -- missing content is characteristic and not the exception.
For analysis lectures this guy is hard to find in the Youtube algorithm but has the best analysis lectures you'll ever find https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22w63XsKjqxqaF-Q7MSy... many go well with Terence Tao's book or whatever analysis text you're currently doing.
As for OCW it is missing a lot of content that you can find if you look at the class page on stellar for prev semesters, for whatever reasons they're not allowed on there but you can still find full lectures (until they lockdown that access too)
I guess I see it from this perspective: I don't start my search for learning materials at OCW, but I often end up there through a Google search! Sometimes, it's for a surprisingly advanced / specific topic, too.
One of the problems of the current structure (at least as of five-ish years ago) is that most of the EdX employees are on the MIT payroll and benefits system (meaning the benefits are pretty great, but the pay bands are incompatible with competing [financially] for engineering talent against the actual tech market). If this breaks that logjam, it could be good for EdX in this one, small regard.
Fundamentally though I agree with your summary; I trusted EdX a lot more because it was tightly affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Spun out into an arms-length institution, it seems like it will now be more likely to be driven into the ground by its leadership at some point in the next 100 years because of the lack of enough stabilizing "keel" provided by the affiliation with world-class universities.
Coursera and Udemy are two radically different platforms.
Udemy has a very standard pricing model. You pay what you use (=courses), so I don't see any way this can significantly change either way. The teachers are private and not institutions, so it would likely be unprofitable to adopt a "significantly-free" freemium model.
Coursera, Edx and so on apply instead the freemium model, which could be under theoretical threat (eg. reduce availability of free material, introduce ads, etc.). However, I've been using them for a while, and I didn't really experience any impact due to this supposed monetization orientation - the courses are still free, and there's no pressure to pay for them. I actually pay each course.
To be honest, I'm much more annoyed by the terrible, terrible UX of their products. There are also certainly some dark patterns, which I find dishonest, but at the end of the day, courses are free, and one can take them without interruption.
A personal note: I actually find negative the association between well-known institutions and learning platforms. For example, Harward and EdX- the certificates are stamped as HarvadX, which is an intentional disassociation. This is fair, however, customers/students tend to associate prestige with the MOOC, which is misleading. There's a lot of people around who think that MOOC certificate have formal value.
Yes I use Udemy a lot but I never even thought to compare it to online MOOC platforms. Udemy is great for short how to series on a particular technology, not for broad academic topics.
As someone who has spent many, many hours deep in the guts of the edX codebase, this news does not bother me.
For what it does, the codebase is extremely sprawling, with layers upon layers of abandoned architectural directions. A lot of code for not a ton of functionality, and very basic functionality at that.
Of course that all is secondary to the actual success it has found, and good for the the project for making it happen. But, if this move ends up being a catalyst for investing in alternatives, that will not make me sad.
FUN (https://www.fun-mooc.fr) is another good option that seems to be keeping it together. I haven't counted, but I think that most the courses are available in English.
Having a highly paid executive (even multiple) doesn't make a non-profit "terrible." People deserve to be compensated for their work and you'll have a hard time arguing that running a large non-profit successfully isn't challenging, demanding, and deserving of good compensation.
It isn't necessarily so, but there's a correlation. A lot of terrible nonprofits are excellent at funneling money to execs.
A lot of the work at nonprofits is challenging and demanding. Everybody deserves good compensation. But as with large for-profit companies, it's often only executives who get that. Take a look at CEO compensation over the decades. It has risen massively compared with worker pay: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
Maybe CEOs have gotten 940% better at CEOing in the last 40 years. But I think the more likely answer is executives have gotten much better at skimming a larger slice of pie.
One could argue that if investors want to grossly overpay for-profit execs, that's between the investors and the execs. But that's definitely not true in not for profits, which get all sorts of legal and social leeway because they're in theory doing good for society.
So yes, it's fair to argue that having very highly paid executives in a non-profit is terrible. Does that mean execs who are in it for the money will stick with fleecing investors? Probably. But I'd say that's better for the nonprofits, as then they're likely to end up with people who are there for the mission.
Unfortunately this is not just a non-profit issue. This is an everyone issue.
One popular trending reason is that boards ask an outside firm what an average CEO makes at a similar size company. Then they decide to pay them slightly above average if they like them. Over 40 years this tends to sky rocket the salary of CEOs to where everyone wants an MBA just so they can get paid crazy amounts of work compared to what they put.
Of course the salary of the CEO doesn't even tell the whole story when you bring in tax perks of shares vs W-2 wages. Plus the CEO will probably get many other company "perks".
Oh, sure, I think it's also terrible in for-profit companies. I think it's a source of vast economic inefficiency. But the usual excuses for it don't apply at nonprofits.
I disagree. It seems unreasonable to hold not-for-profits to such an extreme ethical standard. They're already doing charitable work, why must they also be expected to lead the charge on unrelated social matters besides the one they chose?
I agree that executives are paid too much, but I don't expect a Soup Kitchen to be posting on social media about how they are fighting against discrimination of purple elephantfolk in Norway.
Because not-for-profits, which have special legal and tax treatment on the theory they're doing good for society, are accountable for how they spend money in ways that for-profit companies aren't.
I also think it's hilarious that "don't overpay executives and instead spend the money on the good you're supposed to be doing" is an "extreme ethical standard". How did the Overton Window get moved all the way to the basement?
It's not just executives though. It's all staff. It's hard for a lot of people to take rather huge pay cuts to work at a non-profit.
Very few people at non-profits are "overpaid" when compared to salaries at a similar for profit company. Non-profits also have less tools available to pay their employees, such as stocks.
If their executives get paid above their level of competence then the nonprofit is no longer nonprofit, it just distributes the profits via executive salaries.
This needs to be said more often! Having worked at & with many non-profits, if you don't have competitive wages your top talent keeps leaving. That crushes small non-profits because top talent wear multiple hats & are very difficult to replace. Anyone who has had to replace talent knows the pain of having to hire & then get a new person up to speed.
As for marketing, spending lots of money on marketing isn't bad as long as it's working.
People need to quit judging non-profits just by looking at 2 numbers without understanding the entire scope. This is a huge issue for non-profits.
I know of non-profits that have been forced to setup multiple entities. One for "public" where they can say 100% of donations go to the cause & one for people who understand running a business where they can get private donations that help pay people salaries, building expenses & everything else.
I worked at edX for a few years as an engineer, but left 3.5 years ago.
There isn't much of a story here. Of the top 10 officers listed on page 7 of the 990, only two—Anant and Adam—work directly for edX. The directors are MIT or Harvard employees.
This transfer values edX, Inc. at $800M. Would anyone be complaining if the board and execs of a for-profit near-unicorn made $500K-$1M per year? I highly doubt it.
Indeed. And Clinton, let me ask you. What was your opinion of Anant?
Did he seem honest? Did he seem to care about the not-for-profit mission? Did the employees respect him? Or did he seem like a sleazy used car salesman?
If Anant were a highly-skilled, qualified executive acting in the interests of edX, I might have no problem with a high salary. Did Anant seem like that to you?
Did the teaching-and-learning on edX advance or regress since the MITx days? The focus on equity? The technology platform?
Did edX lead to major research breakthroughs? Did it impact the developing world?
And for that matter, how many URMs worked there? Were there leaders who had any knowledge of how less affluent people lived or who to build a platform for them?
Part of the reason lower compensation packages make sense is that people who care about initiatives like edX usually don't do it for the money. Paying Anant a megabuck a year exactly selected for the type of executive who worked his butt off to maximizes quarterly bonuses, rather than mission or long-term.
MIT and Harvard's top asset is in brand equity. Did you feel like the $800M -- let's call it $400M each -- which will in effect add 1% to Harvard's endowment and 2% to MIT's -- is worth the reputation hit?
As someone on the other side of the table (essentially chief revenue officer for a college)—there is a real dichotomy here: on the one hand, faculty were themselves trained face to face, it’s what we know best, the medium at which we are most proficient. That said, the presence of scaled alternatives makes the educational economics of yesteryear, no longer feasible.
So our choices are:
(1) Cut salaries and tenures or
(2) Scale up
Option (1) is a political third rail. Option (2) comes in many shades of grey: all in with someone like coursera, literally operating at 8x scale relative to traditional endowments, or lightweight (either roll your own or with select niche vendors), say 2x. By fiat, the closer the new medium to the old, the better the early results. Faculty CAN become entirely proficient and effective educators leveraging new technologies at 5c+ scale—but only if their’s a will.
And, in order for the latter to exist, unfortunately it must be accompanied by a strictly positive remuneration, ie it cannot be free.
This isn’t the utopia that MOOCs first promised, but rather the political realities higher Ed finds itself in. For these reasons, I myself have begun paying for professional tutelage when I encounter a pencil of mine in need of sharpening. Despite a career’s worth of mastering the practice of learning, my capabilities (and will?) were insufficient to glean more than the most elementary basics upon enrolling in MOOCs, however I came to learn that I benefited tremendously from personalized feedback in my learning, something AI is still some ways from delivering!
The way they structure this is that it continues to be a non-profit where users have to pay a fee. The non-profit licenses content and things from 2U at rates that are mutually agreed upon by all principals. It just so happens that 2U will be negotiating with itself on what a sustainable fee should be...
>highly paid execs, insane amount of money spent on marketing
I don't understand how not-for-profit orgs are supposed to succeed when they are constantly hampered by being expected to pay theirbwmployees low wages and not market themselves or spread the word because if they spend too much money doing these things then they are suddenly "bad" organizations. If not-for-profits are not allowed to compete in the market with for-profit organizations by offering competitive wages and utilizing competitive marketing budgets, then it's no wonder that charity is generally so ineffective. I suspect that the average armchair marketing executive might not be a good judge of what an "appropriate" marketing budget is.
I'm sad that all education endeavours eventually turn for-profit and then the goals get misaligned.
Produce as many courses at as minimum cost as possible.
Enroll as many people as possible without regards for completion percentage.
Create an economy where random people are incentivised to create courses and then the course quality tanks.
I wish this turns out differently.
Even Udemy and Coursera have become commericialised with edX the last major standing.
I think good goal posts are even further away.. If you complete 100% of calculus I and then delete all access to it instead of solidifying it by going to calculus II, you will need to learn calc I again within months and the cognitive dissonance that creates will cause most people never to learn calculus.
Originally Coursera only wanted money for the - for the vast majority of people useless - verified completion certificate. You had access to all course content including all the tests and could access course content long after the course had ended. So if you did not see any value in that "verified certificate" there was no reason to pay anything. You got a free certificate either way.
I saved all certificates I ever got from edX and from Coursera as PDFs to remember which courses I took. They actually look quite fancy.
- Here is an R-Markdown document I created for another of the courses in that series, which used peer assessment where we had to evaluate each others results: https://rpubs.com/Noseshine/74191
At the start everything was free, including all these exercises, all the assessments, and even the certificates. I knew it would not last and used the opportunity, over three years of heavy course taking, over 50 completed courses. I did not have much to spend at the time, I could definitely not have spend the current amounts.
I took over a dozen courses on Coursera alone, medicine and statistics, it was good. I just checked my (long unused) login just now, they only list two courses under completed and "forgot" the other well over a dozen others. Good thing I saved those completion certificates, although there probably is little use in remembering what courses I took - either I remember what I learned or I don't.
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Just for fun, this was one of my favorite courses, great professor too, great content: https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience
Don't know if it still is as complete, at the time it was almost 25 hours of videos alone, never mind all the reading and all the tests and exercises. It wasn't complicated though, you just had to invest the time but not nearly as much brain as for other "STEM sciency" courses.
My previous post was a bit too glib, so here's an explanation:
There's a common belief on Hacker News which verges on mental illness, that the best solution to any problem is free market capitalism. This belief is false because free market capitalism doesn't solve problems when the customer isn't the person with the problem.
The problem in this case is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's hard to get money without an education, and it's hard to get an education without money.
For-profit education cannot solve the problem, because for-profit education is the problem. If the customer is the student, then that means people without money can't be students. If you start letting people without money be students, then the customer is someone else, and the customer's incentives will always be misaligned with the student's interests in some ways. There simply isn't a way to fix this which makes any sense and still includes for-profit education.
> The problem in this case is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's hard to get money without an education, and it's hard to get an education without money.
> For-profit education cannot solve the problem, because for-profit education is the problem.
Have you seen school that only gets paid after you start working (and based on a percentage of your salary), for example: https://www.holbertonschool.com
I like the concept in that these school are somehow "investing" in the student: they only get as successful as the student is.
This is exactly what I mean when I talk about misaligned incentives. Making money isn't the only reason people want an education, but that's the only thing Holberton is going to prepare students for, because that's how Holberton makes their money.
This is reflected in what Holberton offers: if I'm understanding correctly, they offer 7 different kinds of computer programming and 0 different kinds of pre-med, elementary education, psychology, etc. While nobody would argue that these aren't necessary components of our society, they don't fit Holberton's business model--a student with an elementary ed degree doesn't walk out of Holberton and start making close to six figures with which to pay Holberton back.
There's nothing wrong with having a more focused school, of course, but realize that the way Holberton is getting around the chicken-and-egg problem I'm talking about is by picking a field of education where there isn't a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't need a degree to work in computer programming. And in fact, you don't need to take classes at Holberton: I know two different programs that will pay you to learn computer programming, instead of you paying. This has done exactly nothing to solve the problem I'm talking about: it just avoids it.
Yes many of these schools exist like 'lambda school' where they siphon your income for x years. Holberton website is filled with dark patterns requiring personal information and logging in to see any fees so if anybody is wondering it's $85k for 2 years, 60+ hours per week (so covering own cost of living for 2 years), and they can siphon your income 17% per month for 42 months so 3.5 years. It's not clear if this is gross or net but it's almost always gross siphoning for these shady schools. There is also absolutely no proof you will be employed after or that anybody will recognize your education as you do not receive credentials.
No regionally accepted credential means don't invest your money at all, ever, no matter what they promise. You go to a plumbing trade school they give you a regionally accepted credential so you can work, never trust these outfits they end up costing the same as a state school so just go to the state school and get your credentials.
If you want to take 2 years off to teach yourself watch MIT free lectures and contribute the entire time to open source software. There you get people auditing your code, experience working as a 'team' or whatever. Nobody takes $85k from you.
This is a huge bummer. edX was the prime example I would hold up when people said "remote learning is terrible". Several of the courses I took on there ranked among some of the best classes I've ever taken, in-person or otherwise.
I agree with another commenter in that I had hoped it would persist since 1) education is ostensibly the business of Harvard and MIT and 2) Their pockets are deep enough to think long-term.
I will admit that I haven't used it much in the past few years. Had been getting turned off by the credential chasing and access disappearing after some time.
Tough to see an excellent path forward from here. I've never heard of this 2U firm.
"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
It's worth reading the article - there is much more that's not being addressed on HN.
I have surveyed these, but in general, they simply don't come anywhere close in quality to that of courses offered by edX.
An example that readily comes to mind are the courses on manufacturing processes offered by both MITx and NPTEL. The MITx course was clearly a class apart - you actually got to see the processes in question and how they were applied in the real world factories. When speaking about how a product was made, the lecturer actually bothered to bring samples of those products, sometimes dismantled them, and showed us how they could have been put together. I only audited this a few months ago, and to this day I remember the concepts vividly.
On the other hand, in the videos I watched, the NPTEL course lecturer simply read out from powerpoint slides, which he prepared from a standard textbook. You were better off reading the textbook directly than watching the video alternating between the slides and the lecturer's face. It was a very uninspiring, depressing experience.
I was originally worried at how dishonest seemed to faculty and TAs who have spent years creating many textbooks' worth of content for edX. Something akin to MIT Press selling their catalog to Elsevier or Pearson wouldn't be tolerated by the faculty. But, in the press release they do mention that MIT faculty can opt-out and operate in a MIT-only instance & fork of the Open edX platform:
"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
With that in mind, it seems that Open edX development will be under a new non-profit held by MIT and Harvard. I hope this new non-profit will be less at odds with itself in respect to maintaining openness while creating profitable pay2play courses.
MIT is the gold standard of education. Most of their computing classes already give you full access to all the course materials, videos, labs, readings, handouts, etc. directly from the course page. These direct resources are far better than typical edX/Coursera courses.
The same is not generally true of Harvard courses (with a few exceptions like cs50), which hide all materials behind paywalls.
A complete tangent, but its somewhat amusing that this idiom remains popular when the literal gold standard itself is no longer generally considered a figurative gold standard of anything.
I didn’t know where the term “gold standard” came from up until a couple of years ago. I thought it simply meant top standard (and there would be a silver standard, bronze standard, etc)
Orwell says something along the lines of never use outdated idioms in his Politics and the English Language. I'm withholding judgement on the extinctioness of this one until we see how the whole debt bubble plays out though :)
This makes no sense. They could do a simple transaction transferring it to a 401c3 entity and be done with it.
The idea of a public company, a public benefit company, a university, a nonprofit, and 800 million dollars changing hands in this complicated of a transaction seems incongruous.
Harvard and MIT are selling the right to use their name-marks in a limited context for $800mm, which they will now invest in becoming leading institutions in AI teaching/tutoring. They also get to divest themselves of something that was (perceived as) cutting-edge and world-changing 20 years ago but is no longer particularly hot/novel.
Doing MOOCs was good business for Harvard/MIT like 10-15 years ago when designing and delivering MOOCs constituted "thought leadership". Now, MOOCs are ubiquitous and AI teachers are the hotness.
FTA: "...2U will transfer $800 million to a nonprofit organization..."
While that org is led by Harvard and MIT, the institutions are not getting the money. Which begs the question - why didn't the edX organization just sell off the IP to 2U? would have been much cleaner.
I'm doing my Micromasters in Statistics from MIT on EDX. Enjoying the amazing content and recognition of certificate. I'm not sure what this means for enrolled students like me. Is anyone else doing MicroMaster or similar course from a university and worried what this means?
"MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
They are basically graduate certificates, which are a normal university thing. You take 3-5 graduate courses, they give you a certificate saying that you did this, you give them money. Not a full blown masters, thus the micromasters branding, but it can open the door to changing a career or entering a specialization.
I dunno, giving people who might not be able to afford a masters otherwise or aren’t able to move away for two years an opportunity to get half a masters degree from home seems like a pretty big deal to me.
i don't know if that's "less" or "more" than a graduate certificate. Certificates don't usually give you half the credits toward a masters program at the same university, do they?
I can see this being great "marketing" for the university too though -- once you got the "micromasters", the only way to get half your credits toward a degree is to go to the same university that gave you the micromasters (if you can get accepted, they took your money for the micromasters without promising that) -- they've kind of locked you in.
Micromasters is a trademarked credential. Each of the different online learning platforms has their own, normally leaning on/leeching off established and recognised credentials as in this case the Masters. They could have made it an entire category, open to use by others and instead chose to TM it.
> i had never heard the phrase "micromasters". Wikipedia suggests it is unique to EdX.
Coursera has something similar called MasterTrack; there's not a generic cross-platform name for it, though if it is successful for multiple platforms and graduate institutions that will probably change over time.
Note that the benefits of the sale ($800M) will all go to a non-profit dedicated to the development of the Open edX project. This just gave the project one of the largest warchests of any open source project, and freed it from the sometimes conflicting needs of monetization edx.org had.
Author of Open edX left a long time ago due to corruption at edX / MIT. See commit log for who built the platform. See press releases for who got the credit. MIT promised all open courses, all open platform, all open everything.
The $800M will be used to line the pockets of privileged MIT professors. It will be as effective at closing equity gaps as supply-side (trickle-down) economics. 60% will go to overhead, which will fund faculty clubs and yachts. From there, a ton will go into generous salaries and benefits packages. And so on down the line.
I am willing to bet that this will be equivalent to giving maybe $10M to an HBCU, in terms of benefits to the poor.
This ia unfortunate but not altogether surprising.
I think it can even be deemed benefocial as follows:
If they manage to increase offering, enrollment and completion by say 3x, a big chunk of those students may be coming from paid physical colleges, which means huge savings in education dollars overall.
I guess my point is, losing nonprofit edX to paid education is not a negative if on the whole it chips away at students paying full sticker price and lowers the overall avg cost of education.
I have a friend who works for 2u. the bootcamps just pump out bad devs. everything is taught way to fast, everything is glossed over, they are expected to learn the majority on the own
Tbh what do you expect from a 3 month intro to web dev? You have 12 weeks so you spend a week learning HTML, a week learning JS, then CSS, SQL, etc.
With that in mind, of course it’s pumping out bad devs, just like every other boot camp. I wish it were different but that’s what happens. What’s worse is they charge over $10K for the pleasure.
theirs almost no focus either. html, css, js, react, mysql, Mongo, various apis, jquery, and there's more. I'd be surprised if any were hirable after the class
At this point it's pretty well known bootcamps are not a great hiring pipeline. Unless you can get "grads" at a significant discount. There's a reason Lambda is so desperate that they will "loan" you someone for a month at no costs (the VCs pay for it!). [0]
That is probably very bootcamp-dependent, I've found bootcamp grads have been very good. In particular, the fact that most grads have had "real jobs" elsewhere mean that they have good people skills/time management/actual sense of "getting things done" that vastly outweighs the skill imbalance.
Hell of a lot easier to increase someone's React knowledge than it is to, like, fix how they interact with people.
No, they do not have 'multi-hundred billion dollar endowments'. Harvard's is around $40 billion, which is a lot, but income from the endowment only covers about a third of operating costs. It is all already budgeted for other purposes. Even for Harvard and MIT, $800 million is a non-trivial amount of money.
It's a shame how academy ends up being unaccessible for many people, even though they receive a lot of endowments... while there are a lot of ways to make them more accessible!
Like: online courses... or... What about the white elephant in the room? The cost of social events and Ivy League athletes/sports.
I don't have anything against those, but if I were in a position of power in one academic entity, I'd definitely make sure sports is not a cost center, as it is today for many.
I think you either misread what I wrote. The relevance is the that such activities have been driving up the tuition costs, so attending or not, they've a cost on the student.
Usually this extra cost is not explicit, though, as nowadays most students have to get a loan to attend university. This wasn't always the case.
This really feels like the end of an era. I got my start going through the MITx computer science and probability courses. I wouldn't be a data scientist today if I didn't have those resources available.
I now understand how to self-learn difficult subjects with textbooks and online lectures but I really appreciated MITx's commitment to making rigorous courses freely available.
EdX really got to me with their removal of past class materials and the "class starts today" dark pattern, and the constant certificate upsell attempts. Something like freecodecamp and Udemy is much more usable IMO.
Anecdote: MitX's science and math classes (QM, molecular bio, general bio, materials, Diffeq etc) are outstanding. I wish they didn't have to move to a paid model for exams etx a few years back. The classes I tried from other universities on EdX seemed to be of lower quality.
Hypothesis: MIT and Harvard had enough experience in distance learning by now to realize that it is NOT going to be the wave of the future in education. They don't want to exactly say this out loud and take flak for it, so they're just unloading this (for significant $$) primarily in order to refocus on in-person education, since they've realized that distance learning has been around for decades and nothing about the Internet has really made much difference in how well it works. For a few people, it could be significant, especially if they are in a remote location and don't have the option of attending in person, and have an iron will to remain motivated when not in a school environment. It is not what most students need, does not give the networking bonus that is a big part of MIT and Harvard's value, and is not going to be the future of education.
Seems like an overly negative take. I see no reason not to take the article at face-value here, namely, that MIT & Harvard saw the growing gap between for-profit and not-for-profit online education--and decided to take steps ensure that the latter doesn't fall behind.
It's also pointed out in the article that MIT & Harvard will be investing money into a new non-profit to explore the "next generation" of online learning, which is literally the opposite of "[refocusing] on in-person education", as you hypothesize.
The problem with MIT's online courses is that while the content itself was fantastic they refused to treat it like an online course. They wanted to have it run on a schedule, strict no-compromising deadlines, and large fees for full access.
That's fine and all but it's forcing the university model they know into an online format and it doesn't work so great for the audience that wants to take online courses imho.
The value proposition on it's Micro Masters course was that you could use it for credit at full universities. The problem is it was extremely unlikely one would get the opportunity to use it at MIT, and the rest of the partners were universities that I had never even heard of before. Not necessarily places I'd probably want to go to further my studies.
For the math & physics classes, the deadlines are 3 weeks after being assigned, whereas when you take the class in person, there's a strict 1 week deadline.
Part of the advantage of taking an online class, as opposed to self study, is the motivating factor of deadlines. I have a lot of textbooks I've started reading, then said "I'll get back to this" and never have.
Another advantage of class over just textbook is discussions with classmates and TAs. Having a schedule helps with that too, since there are others working on the same material at the same time.
I do agree, but fortunately having the course online means one should be able to choose how they learn best. Want to sign up for a scheduled online class with available TAs? Neat, now you can pay for that separately. Want to just consume the material at your leisure and not require any outside assistance other than maybe a forum? Pay a smaller fee or even get it for free depending on the needs of the content creator and get access at any time without deadlines.
Personally I have a study friend and we motivate each other. But we don't necessarily move as fast as MIT's deadlines because we are professionals with deadlines that take priority. So it's completely lost on me which is frustrating because the material is great!
To paraphrase Tom Lehrer [1]: education is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. This is true regardless of the medium. Some people will get value out of distance learning, others won't, just as some people will get value out of in-person learning and others won't. The only difference is the cost. Distance learning can be provided for a lot less money, so you can afford to be less selective on who you provide it to, and so your failure rates are likely to be higher. This does not reflect at all on the actual effectiveness of the process.
[EDIT] Reference added, because today's youth are apparently not well-versed in the classics:
Maybe the point is that what you get out of it depends a great deal on what everybody around you puts into it, a depressing fact that online learning can hopefully mitigate at least a little bit for people who have access to it.
It's not the future for the elite institutions, why would you try and saturate the market with degree holders who can claim they graduated from Harvard/MIT? But it is the future in terms of replacing third rate degrees that charge too much and return too little ROI. Maybe they've decided they don't want to compete in this space anymore given that reality as colleges shut down, and it's no longer seen as an altruistic endeavor, but merely a market share war.
I don't agree that the Internet hasn't made much difference in how well distance learning works, but I agree with a weaker version of your hypothesis applied to educating young people. An indispensable feature of their university experience is building personal and professional connections that will last a lifetime, and that can't be built through distance learning.
On the other hand, distance learning makes a huge impact on mature learners. Whether they need to "reskill" to improve their job prospects, or simply cannot attend a university in person because they juggle many adult responsibilities, innovations and improvements in distance learning is extremely important to them and is beneficial to society. I also think this group is often ignored/pushed to the side in these debates.
I work at Harvard and take classes at the "Extension School" (Classes are good, and as en employee discounted). A lot of the classes are "Remote" or "Hybrid", (even before the pandemic). There have been classes with 40 people with just a handful showing up physically.
Oddly they didn't use EdX as the online platform for these. It was "Canvas".
I suspect it was just not a sustainable program from a revenue perspective for either school and has the risk to lower the schools reputation and suck away resources.
2U is one of the biggest for-profit higher education companies and seemingly one of the most successful ones, often partnering with other colleges and universities.
I am suspicious of any of the for-profits being able to sustain a business. Most end up failing because, as it ends up, education is not very profitable if done correctly.
> I am suspicious of any of the for-profits being able to sustain a business.
Blackboard has been around a long time and seems to do okay. Instructure (makers of Canvas) has done very well. Both sell Learning Management Systems (LMSes), not educational content itself. Big textbook publishers, like Pearson, have been managing incorporating online educational materials.
But yeah, don't expect a unicorn to come around and "disrupt" education.
The people most in need of education have the least money. Monetize that. Education is a public good that requires social subsidy and personal interaction.
I would do some more research on 2u, they do not have a good reputation (indeed, almost no for-profit education companies do...the sector is very fashionable because a bunch of Chinese companies have made tens of billions in this market...but it is replete with frauds).
I bailed from edX many years ago after my course was abruptly ended to modify it. I was near the end but that didn't matter. After much back and forth arguing the best offer was 50% off the same course. I declined since there was no way to know whether edX would do the same thing again.
I am an assistant and help handle an edX course at a <fairly well known EU university>, so from my perspective there were a few things that I thought might be interesting to share (though I am quite a few hours late to this thread).
> Nearly 10% of the students have paid for a certificate. I do not know how much server hosting costs, but given the cost of a certificate being several tens of Euros, I wouldn't be surprised if this covered costs (though I'm not aware if the uni gets a cut).
> Apparently the main issue with Coursera (which is why our uni chose edX) was over copyright - edX material remains owned by the creating uni and not edX itself. I wonder how this will be impacted by this change.
The key to online learning's sucess is counter to the current system's goals. What these big-name universities could do to make online learning go mainstream is lower the barrier to entry by: i) lowering tuition fees in accordance with mass production practices and ii) provide real credits and degrees without the pomp. But both these actions would water down the "good" name of these legendary institutions (a legend built on exclusion and cronyism). In other words, they themselves are the ones holding on-site education as superior, lest the system collapses. No matter, it's just delaying the inevitable.
Download or get a textbook and read it yourself + find some lectures on YouTube with a high rank that you also feel you are getting something from. This is and always has been the best way to learn most subjects.
I agree that you can find resources else where but these courses have already a structure, have tests and deadlines… that makes you study! At least for me, a good structure is essential.
Well, patents and degrees work that way too. Universities are businesses first... extracting value from students and faculty. It's uncool when it becomes the primary focus.
It's not like Harvard and MIT don't have enough money already, so it's curious why they need obscenely more.
> So the universities have decided to monetise their own great reputations by simply selling it to a bidder?
I think that this is a terrible decision and regret it, but there's not much surprise: this monetisation of their reputation is kind of the business of modern universities.
Like others, this worries me. Does anyone know of a platform or service that backs up quality educational content (think Coursera, edX, YouTube lectures, etc.) forever, so that its open-access is not at the whim of a for-profit corporation?
We have this new, open-source water fountain system that properly prevents overconsumption and resource depletion. It was just sold to Chevron for 100 megabucks and they intend to monetize them... $1 per sip.
I suspect that they're stepping back and makeing $$$ because if this stuff was really going to take off it would have happened during the pandemic. When that didn't pan out they decided to divest.
edX has been my go-to recommendation for people in my side of the world (I live in Sri Lanka) to get quality education at no cost. This is the end of that - they might have some protections but its no longer going to be focused on quality content delivered in a highly learnable manner.
From 2U's press release [https://2u.com/latest/industry-redefining-combination/] it's clear that they benefit significantly from associating themselves with the MIT, Harvard, and EdX brands. At $800M, I assume they have a well-planned monetization strategy for EdX.
My personal experience with EdX over the years is mixed. I audited a few EdX courses (CS50, Linear Algebra) and generally enjoyed the quality and pace of the courses, but was never compelled to purchase a verified certificate since these were more for leisure. I recall hitting up against the paywall and losing access to the exams. Although, I understand the need to monetize, it was a bit demoralizing.
Overall, I feel EdX helped define massively open online education and I hope they continue to support this mission in the future.
Everyone at edX who helped define the future of education left about a half-decade ago. A third of the staff, including everyone who cared about learning, poor people, open, or much of anything else.
edX was overmonetized. If you want to see corruption on a grander scale, see where this $800M goes.
More like "I'm tired of anticipating the inevitable, while being relentlessly gaslit about its probability". Whether or not edX is sold to a third party, the underlying problems are already in the system. It's the effect, not the cause.
I'd like to add .. non-profit does not mean free to end users. There are many good non-profits and there are many terrible ones (highly paid execs, insane amount of money spent on marketing).