I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
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.
I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.
Udemy figured out that selling to enterprise is way more profitable than individuals. Coursera figured out that University/Company brand is more valuable than Joe's Ultimate Course.
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.
This same week, Egghead (https://egghead.io) started offering $500 lifetime access to everything they ever made or will make. There's definitely some excellent material in their catalog. But the signals sure seem to point toward the decline of centralized human-created coursework.
Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth.
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
66 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 69.3 ms ] threadI’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
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.
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO.
The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me.
What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual.
To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
But what do I know.
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it