Comment by ibrahima
3 days ago
That's basically MOOCs, but those kinda fizzled out. It's tough to actually stay focused for a full-length university-level course outside of a university environment IMO, especially if you're working and have a family, etc.
(I mean, I have no idea how Coursera/edX/etc are doing behind the scenes, but it doesn't seem like people talk about them the way they used to ~10 years ago.)
They're still around and offering new online courses. I hope they don't have any problems to keep afloat, because they do offer useful material at the very least.
I agree it's hard, but I think it's because initially the lecturers were involved in the online community, which can be tiring and unrewarding even if you don't have other obligations.
I think the courses should have purely standalone material that lecturers can publish, earn extra money, and refresh the content when it makes sense. Maybe platform moderators could help with some questions or grading, but it's even easier to have chatbot support for that nowadays. Also, platforms really need to improve.
So, I think the problem with MOOCs has been the execution, not the concept itself.
Most MOOCs are venture funded companies not lifestyle business so they will not likely do sensible user friendly things. They just need to somehow show investors that hyper growth will happen. (Doesn't seem like though that it did happen)
Most of the MOOCs were also watered down versions of a real course to attempt to make them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. the Stanford Coursera Machine Learning course that didn't want to assume any calculus or linear algebra background), which made them into more of a pointless brand advertisement than an actual learning resource.
> pointless brand advertisement
I understand what you mean, but I disagree it's mostly or pure branding.
I'd argue that even watered down versions can be useful as a bridge to more advanced courses and material, provided you have access to both.
Personally, I benefited from that ML course by Andrew Ng, because I got the vocabulary and introductory math knowledge to proceed to courses and textbooks on linear algebra. It wasn't the only thing that helped, sure, but it helped.
There were also other STEM and non-STEM MOOCs which brought me free knowledge I probably would've never pursued or paid for otherwise.
They are mostly used for professional courses. Learning python, java, gitlab runners, micro services with NodeJS, project management and things like that