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Yeah ditto

Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar. Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe? Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.) I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. …

Original discussionCoursera to combine with Udemy377 source comments · at import
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IA

It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application. But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn. These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.

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IA

Unfortunately the get rich quick/grifter community realised that online courses was a way to make money.

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EL

> Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera. Mean while their prices seem to go up every year.

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