by Amadou on 11/30/13, 12:17 AM with 95 comments
by glesica on 11/30/13, 6:36 AM
"I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students."
Thrun is an elite academic. He has most likely never even attended a university that had to teach remedial math courses, let alone taken or taught one. Thus, by extension, he has likely never had to deal with students who had anything but excellent preparation for studying the material he was teaching.
I sat through most of Thrun's AI lectures and I felt that he and Norvig were questionable teachers. They are clearly brilliant men, and their excitement was contagious. They would be tremendous guest-lecturers in any CS course (the particle filter lectures were Thrun's best because he was so excited, but he spent most of his time gushing about how cool the ideas were). But as far as teaching a course to non-Stanford students without the help of an army of TAs, they were uninspired.
Compare Thrun's experience with the sentiments in this article about Miami University in Ohio: http://www.propublica.org/article/on-country-club-campuses-a...
The common vein is that education is fairly easy when the people you are educating are well-prepared and generally hail from the upper half of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Teaching poor kids, and kids who, for other reasons do not have adequate preparation is really something of a Sisyphean task. The problem is not in our schools, and it can't be fixed by fiddling with the curriculum or delivery method, it can only be truly fixed by fixing the underlying social problems, but that usually means talking about sticky issues like racism, sexism, ethno-centrism, and capitalism itself.
by hkmurakami on 11/30/13, 1:15 AM
The greatest challenge of education is to nurture the desire for learning in students and for students to be in a situation in life (e.g. situation at home - income, safety, etc) in order to even have a chance at becoming motivated.
MOOCs address the problem of access. But access wasn't the main problem to begin with for the vast majority of students whom people like Thurn was trying to reach.
by Eliezer on 11/30/13, 3:01 AM
(It still seems to me that MOOC's might be done right with enough effort, like spending $100K per hour of nationwide-reproduced instruction the same we do as with TV, but I have not been keeping up with the literature here and perhaps I don't know how pessimistic I should be.)
by AnotherDesigner on 11/30/13, 3:09 AM
by g9yuayon on 11/30/13, 12:56 AM
San Jose State is a reputable university with many graduates doing well in the valley. The statement that "many of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills" sounds shocking.
by kenster07 on 11/30/13, 10:52 AM
As Warren Buffet has said, the courses he took at Wharton barely differed in quality from the ones he took at Nebraska. Our culture is so obsessed with shallow accolades that it is slow to recognize a humongous opportunity right underneath its very nose.
There is absolutely no reason that MOOC's cannot teach many college-level courses as good as or better than their real life counterparts. Unfortunately, the motivation of students largely stems from the aforementioned shallow accolades.
As a filtering mechanism for professional skills, I think the current academic system has some flaws which MOOC addresses nicely, perhaps not as a complete replacement, but a powerful complement. But the reality is, academia should be used to filter academics, and in many industries, a degree represents nothing more than 4 years that could have been spent learning the actual profession and adding value to the economy.
by Amadou on 11/30/13, 12:49 AM
Is there more to the story?
by kriro on 11/30/13, 10:46 AM
This model will work eventually. It's mostly a matter of how the courses are structured and taught. I don't think it'll replace traditional universities but it should challenge the price structures and general lazy-bureaucracy attitude of many of them.
If you look at programming in particular I feel very good about all these online courses. It's easier than ever to teach yourself programming which is a net+ for society. I don't understand how more accessible education for everyone is ever a bad thing.
I don't think it's just education that's broken though. HR is also broken because they mostly look for the signature on the dotted line (oh look someone else has done the vetting for us) and tend to value certification over actual skill. Long term, I hope it'll be enough to list coursera etc. courses, books you read and a github link on your resume. IT should strive to be a leader in this shift because it's generally an industry where self-learners can do extremly well and have traditionally shown it's possible.
by dinkumthinkum on 11/30/13, 12:51 AM
by Pitarou on 11/30/13, 2:35 AM
by ziedaniel1 on 11/30/13, 7:18 AM
by bachback on 11/30/13, 9:52 AM
This was going from "best thing ever" to "lousy idea" in light speed. That is the downside of big ideas if they haven't been validated early. Not only investment of time and resource, but psychological energy. This is really the story of all change. It it unlikely, extremely hard and often at the wrong time.
by _delirium on 11/30/13, 3:09 AM
by EGreg on 11/30/13, 4:56 PM
That's what motivates them and pushes them to work. After all habits are hard to form and break. Wanting to learn is not enough, putting in a regular effort to do so is a habit that needs to be coached. That's one of the main jobs of educators for under-motivated students (read: most no grad students). And sorely missing from Udacity.
CONCLUSION: Udacity's "experiment" blatantly omitted a crucial hidden variable.
by krisoft on 11/30/13, 6:29 AM
I know that I'm just being selfish here, but I was hoping that Udacity will continue on that path. I would love to learn celestial mechanics from Belbruno, or neural networks from Hinton, or operation system design from Linus in the accesible Udacity style. It seems that won't happen any time soon, or ever.
by riffraff on 11/30/13, 8:10 AM
I know I gave up every time I tried to do something on udacity while I completed most of the classes I took on coursera, and all the original stanford ones.
I blame this on the interaction between class style and myself being terrible at self management without deadlines.
I mean, I took the original Thrun AI class with a coursera-like model and I did it fine, while I don't know if I got to the 3rd lecture of Thrun's Stats 101.
by walshemj on 11/30/13, 4:32 PM
I started on the professional apprentice track back in the day and our college had two entire blocks filed with machine tools and labs.
by psbp on 11/30/13, 4:36 AM
by EGreg on 11/30/13, 4:18 PM
That said, Udacity can serve a different purpose. And after all, the computer courses there are vocational...
by robomartin on 11/30/13, 8:28 PM
The truth is online education is here to stay and it will get better with time. It will, eventually, replace big chunks out of traditional education. Probably not all.
My son is currently going through MIT's 6.00.1x Intro to Computer Science and Programming on edX. He is 14 and in High School. Watching him progress from mechanically typing conditional statements to having his mind opened to computational thinking has been an amazing experience. Yes, this course is pushing him around and challenging him in big ways. It isn't easy.
From what I've seen, there are only two ways one could succeed with these kinds of courses: self motivation or external support (or both). In our case he has all of my support. I am actually taking the class alongside him so I can see what and how they are teaching in order to help him out.
Motivation is a huge factor. He is a member of the local FRC robotics team and was involved in FLL before that.
We work on every problem set in a collaborative manner, with me guiding rather than providing solutions as well as simply being there to expand on topics that are not covered to a great depth (pointers comes to mind). Lately I've been doing a lot more watching than guiding as he has definitely begun to think like a programmer and is solving most every problem without external help.
For me it's been an interesting review of topics I have not touched in years. Recursion, for example, is something I haven't touched in quite some time as I have not run into problems and systems that could justify the resources required when using these techniques. Playing with recursion in an academic setting and helping my son learn the concept was lots of fun.
I can absolutely see that a course such as 6.00.1x would be impossible to complete for a kid without the support of a parent. Not sure if that parent has to have domain knowledge or not. I can't be a good judge this because I obviously do and all of our conversations have taken advantage of this.
I can also see the difficulties in entering into some of these courses without the necessary preparation. Students who went through school by mechanically doing math without really understanding math tend to not do well on higher level courses regardless of whether these courses are online or in person.
There's also the case of the working engineer who might need to brush-up on skills before attempting a class. Using myself as an example, I have not used statistics in any formal way in a long time. If I wanted to take an online ML class I'd have to spend an amount of time reviewing statistics and probably a couple of other areas in Calculus.
In this sense this is where, perhaps, MOOC's do it wrong. Conventional live courses go through a qualification phase in order to ensure that the "herd" has reasonably uniform and adequate capabilities. The beauty of MOOC's is that anyone can jump in. And that's absolutely fantastic. What might be lacking is a departure from a linear model of teaching. Why can't I enroll in that ML class and, when and as required, take off in a branch and review statistics to then come back and "merge" into the main thread of the class. Perhaps this non-linear approach is what is missing.
All MOOC's are pretty much online versions of some kind of a traditional live class. Lectures, problems, homework, tests. All presented in a linear timescale and on a similarly linear schedule. A learning system that is truly after the acquisition of knowledge must work differently. It must take a highly interactive approach in which the teaching system is flexible enough to, effectively, deliver curriculum that is customized to the needs of each and every person.
This is a challenge. We have to be glad there are people like Thurn who are willing to stick their necks out, try, fail and try again. The critics are usually people who will never compromise their station in life to try and drive progress. They don't want arrows in their backs. Far easier to shoot them at pioneers, eventually you hit one or two of them and for a brief moment in time you might actually sound like you know what you are talking about. Reality, however, is quite different.
What I would tell Thurn is: Don't give up. Don't exit the segment. Try to figure out how to change the approach and make it work.