Re: [silk] MOOCs, Thrun, Udacity

[Dave Long]

The internet for me is a large library, and that's really all I  
need. So
the idea of a digital classroom doesn't excite me as much as most  
people.


I also fail to see how the stated problem is more than a strawman.   
If education were really the goal, given the stated 7% completion  
rate average, classes with more than 2'900 starts should already be  
beating the meatspace numbers. (cf grocery stores: pitiful profit  
margins, but they're in the turnover business, and so as a class  
their bottom line looks like everyone else's)


Education is really pull from the student instead of push from the  
instructor, anyway.  Back when my wife still taught children, she  
often had to tell parents she wasn't dropping their kids permanently,  
but that they should try something else for a year, and only come  
back if the kids really missed it and were sufficiently prepared to  
be engaged.


Maybe the critical meta-skill is learning to ask interesting  
questions, but again one is probably better off here learning by  
doing, as that's not exactly the sort of thing that either  
governments or employers are enthused about paying for.


-Dave

Re: [silk] MOOCs, Thrun, Udacity

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 7:41 AM, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> The idea of an online classroom that controls the direction and speed of
> thinking in a medium that can break free of such constraints befuddles me.
>
> I vastly prefer reading a text book at my own pace, jumping across books
> and between chapters and working on problems with my own mental models than
> adopting the pace and thinking style of a lecturer.

The current form and shape of the MOOCs are merely the first/second
generations. There will be more tweaks to the story of massively
online learning pieces before they reach a stage where learning routes
become personalized.


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay