Thankfully the article is much better than its title. Low retention is not a problem per se - since there's no cost to signing up for (and subsequently dropping) these online courses, it's to be expected that retention won't be great. However, I agree that retention could probably be improved among the marginal subscribers by using some of the techniques covered in the post.
I usually sign up for a bunch of classes just so I can access the material at a later point when I have time or when I'm interested. I'm pretty sure that in most cases Coursera locks you out of old material unless you were enrolled. I don't follow along with the class.
Synchronous learning, IMO, is an anachronism. We have video recording technology, practically infinite bandwidth, and near speed of light communication. The idea of synchronous learning, where you have five thousand teachers teaching the same Calculus I class every year, is predicated on a world where these technologies don't exist.
As an aside, for this reason I think the collegiate model is going to completely change in the near future as people start realizing how absurd it is. The real value professors provide is having someone to answer questions (and in a lot of cases, professors don't even take questions during lecture). And even that functionality can and is (in my experience) mostly replaced by other students in the class or students who have already taken the class.
Put the material up, and let communities form around it. I don't need the professor to answer my questions, all I need is the relevant forum (in the original sense) to ask.
Only terrible calculus teachers/class setups don't respond to student questions. Until you can do the same thing with a video there is going to be a gap. Traditional collage classes are generally based on the idea that ~1/3 of the time is synchronous learning in a classroom with a teacher 2/3 is self study. Have a 3 hour class expect 6+ hours of homework / projects on average. With that said, most classes don't spend a lot of time on questions, but they occur at the right time as in right in the middle of a lecture or right after it.
Presumably online videos could let you cut down on some class time, but even 1 hour after watching a video your going to forget some of your questions and much of the context of other questions you remember.
PS: If you took calculus in a setting of 500 people where you could not ask questions you still got ripped off even if there was a teacher in the room.
You can do the same with a video. You pause it, get on a relevant IRC channel or internet forum and ask "what does she mean by X at 23:51?" Or you Google the term or process you were confused about and find someone else's explanation (I have personally done this loads of times). Or you turn to the person you're watching it with and ask. Or you call up your study group on skype. Do those two latter things usually happen now? No, but they easily, easily could if this type of learning became mainstream.
Is having a professor there that you can ask immediately in the moment (and interrupt the lecture for the other students who understood the material) worth $1000 per credit hour?
That's why I prefer Udacity's approach: they have the tradicional weekly classes when they open the course, but after that they're open enrolment. Start and finnish anytime you want.
Unfortunately, they have much less courses available, and they're all more or less computer science related.
I think the synchronous model makes it easier to have small communities of students working through the same thing at the same time, helping each other.
On top of that it makes work of TA easier. Everyone works more or less on the same problem, be it programming assignment, quiz, etc. If there's a new question TA most probably remember what was in the last lectures and what are the common issues students are having this week.
I also find the assignments/exercises on the courses are first class and that's where a lot of the learning comes in especially when backed up by discussion forum activity from other students. Watching the videos on their own doesn't really appeal to me.
That may be but I personally find it extremely difficult to juggle my everyday working life with an online class. I would much rather download and watch a video lecture on the way to work.
Just thought I'd add a data point in the opposite direction. I've signed up to two Coursera courses and two Udacity ones, and it's the Udacity ones I'm sticking with. I've finished Cryptography already and am 1/3 through learning python in CS1.
There is something dispiriting to me about a synchronous model. Once I can't keep up I tend to drop it as a failure, knowing there's no point in working through something that might be removed at any point. I also think it's the way I respond to the "don't break the chain" apps. Once life gets in the way and I do break the chain, I feel like a failure.
I'm quite happy to motivate myself however, so Udacity's model of giving the student however long they need, works perfectly.
I have taken classes at several top private and public universities and except in a few smaller, more advanced classes few questions were asked during the professor's lectures. And only some of those questions were helpful to the majority of the class. Having discussed this with many other students I believe this is typical, at least in US universities. (I have heard it is even worse in European and Asian universities where interruptions are discouraged. Is this true?)
I believe this is due to the constraints of the tradional class format. It is simply impossible to both cover the material and answer very many questions in typical length of a class. This means that if the class has more than a small number of students their questions simply cannot be answered during the lecture.
This is why many larger classes are divided into sections with labs run by grad students. These smaller forums are are better for discussion but their quality depends on finding grad students who are good at teaching. This is also fundamentally not scalable.
Online learning has the potential to break thru this limitation. The recent wave of MOOCs are a huge improvement over the online classes of just a few years ago. I believe there is still lots of room for improvement from both tailoring the class to the individual student (e.g fast vs slow pace) and A/B testing which has only just begun to be applied.
Interestingly some of these improvements can be applied to tradional classes some of which are already using online discussion forums and automated grading. A hybrid approach (in person lectures and discussions with full online support) will probably provide the best overall quality but will be more expensive than a pure online approach and not practical for people who can't physically attend classes.
It's a reality that for most people, learning gets tedious after a while. The synchronous learning helps a lot of people drag themselves back into class when they're not really "feeling it."
Same with me - I signed up to loads of these things because I loved the idea. Turns out I didn't have time to actually do any of them, but it didn't cost me anything to sign up. I may at a later date search my inbox and access the material.
It's not really a retention problem if you offer something for free and tons of people have a look without making much commitment. Having said that, probably the only relevant statistics about these courses are how many people did them and completed the assignments/tests.
Exactly this. I was almost offended when the course material was taken down or that I was 'locked out'; it seemed like it went against the whole idea of the online learning initiative. Quizzes and exams, okay, but learning materials should always be accessible!
I used the database course to supplement a database course that I was taking at the same time, and it was not just a stark difference in quality but also fantastic that I could pick the pieces of material that I needed to learn better and watch those lectures at my speed and how I wanted!
It's important to me that all course materials are available at the start of the course, and until at least a year after I take the course. Otherwise give me an easy way to download the course materials as a bundle to use in the future.
The way that Udacity does it is perfect for me -- work through at your own pace. Coursera has a couple of self-paced classes, I believe, and I wish that more of the courses had that option.
I think the majority of MOOC course developers want to run their online courses as closely to their university versions as possible, since that's what they're used to working with. It also provides a handy way for them to go off-duty, in a sense, if the course has a finite end date. Using their current pacing structure (which is incredibly difficult, as the OP points out, for people that aren't full-time students) allows the teachers to do something other than devote themselves solely to the course, assuming they don't want to just post an archive and leave it alone -- which would meet a lot of people's needs, but misses the whole teacher-student interaction, which is pretty much missing from MOOCs anyway. If they want to provide an environment that's like a classroom, with students interacting with the instructors and with each other, you kind of need everybody at the same pace. It would be nice for us if they could slow that pace down, but that would probably increase the workload for the instructors.
We're still early in this game. I'm glad that so many professors have been willing to invest the time into developing the courses, and I understand why they are currently set up to be conveniently structured for them. I think we'll start to see some improvements if/when the money appears in the MOOC game. Once it's no longer basically charity work for the instructors, there will probably be more efforts to work around student schedules.
I agree completely on the Udacity model allowing you to work through at your own pace, as well as keeping the course open After it finishes. The strict scheduling thing with other sites drives me mad!
In addition to having a normal job, I'm a traditional university student, so any of the online classes I take are simply out of interest in the subject. I dip into the class when I have time, almost like a leisure activity. I just don't currently have the time to fit in more strict course work on top of my already over loaded class schedule and work week.
My problem was mainly the availability of the materials. Codecademy and duolingo give you access to as much as you require from the start and you can go through as quickly as you like. The university driven sites limit access to so much per week (though I'm not sure how courses will operate the second time) and demand you stick to their schedule, though granted this may be due to their need to peer-review the more demanding assignments.
Unfortunately my free time isn't available in nice predetermined six-week chunks, but even if I am able to catch up three weeks or more in a weekend the courses gave a very negative vibe about continuing to progress as soon as you miss a single one of their deadlines (i.e.- "you missed our deadline for this multiple-choice computer marked test, so your effort no longer counts"). I've 'failed' several coursera sessions in the fourth or fifth week for that reason.
Timetabling seems a very traditional educational view, and it contrasted sharply with codecademy and sites like duolingo where I spent Jan and Feb learning the basics of new languages - computer and human. I finished the courses I took because I did them at my own pace.
really great points in this article. I hope that Coursera sees this and really takes it seriously. I love what they're trying to do, and have signed up for about 30 classes myself that I totally intended to study, and just couldn't finish a single one. And its true, artificially imposing the traditional college course model just does NOT make sense in the online context. Why are there deadline for problem sets, and test schedules? Fix that, and it'll change everything
One of the things to that I found confusing with the coursera classes was that each one seems to have its own set of rules for dealing with homework assignments, late homework, and partial credit. At one point I was signed up for two classes at the same time and I assumed they had the same policy for when homework was due. It wasn't a big deal but there were several times I would have a free hour or so and it was a task to figure out the best way to use that time. I think it is a positive thing that the courses are trying out a lot of different approaches to see what works best but this reminded me of the parts of academia that I didn't really care for.
There will continue to be low retention until there is an incentive to finish. Without the credentialing piece, I don't see a problem with low retention. I think it's awesome that people dip in and out as their needs and interests change. In every class I ever took at MIT/Caltech there were at least a couple lectures I would have been happy to skip. MOOCs enable that.
I hope there will be more short and tightly focused online courses in the future instead of monolithic traditional-length courses we have today. I think that'd go a long way to improving the apparent retention rate.
(Coursera engineer here) It's great to see thoughtful critiques like this.
Thankfully, we have a data analytics team now (3 out of our 17 engineers), and they are studying our retention statistics and the factors that affect it. They're also running A/B experiments to see what increases it and getting some interesting results.
We do see some big advantages of the timed model for learning, particularly in classes with peer-to-peer grading and evaluations, but there's obviously a big desire for the self-study mode, which is enabled for a few of our classes currently.
We're also introducing things like Signature Track, which some students sign up for just to encourage themselves to make it to the end (and it seems to work for many of them).
We'll keep experimenting to see what makes students both happy and successful. :-)
I do hope that you will open up most (if not all) of your courses for self-study mode. There are a few courses I really wanted to take, but due to the lack of time I really couldn't commit myself at the time they opened (I wanted to do them in the summer instead!).
Hi, Pamela. I am a long-time user of Coursera and I love the site.
I have feedback for you as regards retention of students.
The number one thing is due dates and late penalties. If I sign up for a course and work through the first few weeks and get everything done, and then I miss a deadline because life happens, suddenly I am no longer able to get a 100% in the class. I do not mind getting an A- in a class if it happens naturally because the material is difficult, but losing my A+ or A because I am 12 hours late on an assignment ruins the experience for me. I usually drop a class when this happens and wait for it to come around again.
A counter-example to prove the rule: Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms course. The last time he gave it, he had late penalties and I only had time to get through the first two weeks of the class without getting behind. This time around, there were no late penalties. Being enormously busy with other things, I was not able to keep up with the class as it went along. However, because I lost no credit for doing things late, I was able to complete the entire class in the final 10 days of course and I got an A. I have no problem staying up all night to finish interesting programming assignments and quizzes, but I need to be allowed to do this on my schedule.
I strongly encourage you to encourage your professors to do away with late penalties. It should be up to us as students to determine what our work schedule is. I know for some courses, those that use peer-evaluation, this is impossible, but many more could take this route than currently do.
I agree that Signature Track does have the effect of encouraging one to keep up with the class.
For online learning the grades aren't likely to matter, people are mainly doing it to get the knowledge. I can see though if you distilled it down into telling people what you got, say a B, won't reflect how well you actually learned the content if the B was only the result of late handins.
On the other side of the coin though people are relying on the strictness of handin times in order to motivate them to get through the course in a reasonable amount of time.
Timed based on a final date to finish everything is a compromise but wouldn't work for everyone, as some would loose motivation after falling too far behind. So maybe there needs to be a few deadlines throughout the course, but not a weekly one.
The only course I have done I ended up missing a week handin as well, I think most working people would be in the same boat.
With work, family and everything that goes around, it is very hard to be in time...
Standford Class2go gives you half credits if you are late for all the quizzes and exercises but the final exam counted triple so you could skip a few things here and there and still work it out(you had to study them for the exams though!).
I love the fact that there is a due date, it forces me to do it and a certificate is very rewarding too (I tend to give up the courses that give me no "credits")...
I think in general,the schedule are too tight though.
You may want to rethink that. For most of the classes I have taken the lectures were very enjoyable. I like the frequent quiz breaks also. The videos have captions if you like them.
For the Stanford Introduction to AI course, I was at about 1.7x to 1.8x, depending on who was speaking and how fast they were talking; but I had to use a combination of pitch-shifting and non-pitch-shifting audio speedups to get that far.
This might be true for you, but I always prefer a transcript. I hate watching videos, unless it's strictly for entertainment and requires little real attention.
Having taken online courses from the start my sense is that enrollment/participation is slowing. The bulletin boards of some classes are pretty dead on the first run.
Its not crazy to think that the people most likely to take the classes would participate right away and finding the next batch of students will be harder.
I agree with the sentiment, but I wonder if having a low barrier of entry is really the solution, or does having a low barrier of entry average out to a low level of initial commitment. It'd be interesting to see if an online course for which you pay for would be better at retention. From a business point of view, they could even offer to give you the money back if you finish the course, or use some other retention trick, like have people calling you to create some social pressure if you seem to be falling behind.
There is something to be said for class participants having some "skin in the game" so to speak. But I think at this stage, the companies/organizations involved are most focused on getting the most people to experience the courses--which having a fee would certainly diminish. As someone else wrote, I expect that these will become more modular over time. It's only natural that they're mimicking traditional product classes to start--but it's hard to believe that's necessarily the optimum chunk size, especially for those doing this as a relatively casual part-time thing.
Hah, I was about to post the same idea, about paying for a course and getting the money back on completion. Maybe even redistribute the funds from prior students who hadn't finished the class to students who complete the class and go back to help others. Get paid for answering questions, kind of like a university TA.
Another idea I had was that students who completed a course, and achieved a certain level of proficiency, would get access to a special forum. This forum could be shared by potential employers.
I totally agree that commitment is a major part of any educational success, and paying for something drastically increases our commitment and motivation.
At kenHub[1], we offer anatomy online training for medical students, physiotherapists etc. Since we are working in a collaboration with the Charité University[2], we offer students at the university the same content other students pay for, completely free. Our statistics shows around a factor of 8x in engagement of paying vs. non-paying students[3].
Taking a Coursera course is hard work. I've taken 3 courses so for (one on databases and two on algorithms) over the past year and a half. This is about as much as I can manage (I work full time and have a family), even though I would like to take more (so many interesting to choose from). But the main reason for this limit is the amount of work it takes, not how the course is presented, or how well written the mails are.
For me, the pace of the course is actually a plus. If there were no deadline, I simply would not get around to doing it. I remember when I first found all the MIT courses on-line (several years ago). I really wanted to take some of them, but because there was no schedule and no deadline, I never got around to taking any of them. It's only with Coursera that I have actually taken (and finished) any.
One of the main problems the author has with Coursera or EdX is that it is "too fast". To address this problem, I urge the author to try Udacity [0]. You can set learning at your own pace.
That said, not all material on Coursera is "amazing". Some of the classes have very high completion rate like Functional Programming with Scala has a 19.2% completion rate [1]. Similarly, the class taken by Andrew Ng on Machine Learning is fantastic. However, many of my peers had bad reviews on Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models class. Last year, I myself registered for one of these MOOC's and found that half of the course was good while the other half was quite bad - both halves had different professors.
At some point of time, universities would have to realize that great researchers do not make great teachers. Some excel in both - researching & teaching while some in just one of those two fields.
PS - Other problems on reengagement do stand though.
Koller's class is difficult, but it's a graduate-level CS class with almost all the same material as the class at Stanford. I thought she taught it well. It was rough, and I didn't make it through the whole thing the first time, but I'm back to try again.
Koller's class is difficult, but it's a graduate-level CS class
A graduate level class is not a guilt-free pass to make it "difficult". A course no matter what level, should be engaging and challenging. It need not be difficult to be an engaging course.
I'm taking two Coursera courses at the moment - Calculus One and Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures for Concurrent and Networked Software. I'm very pleased with the material and presentation in both, but I don't think I could handle more than two such (relatively difficult) courses at any one time.
Codecademy and Udacity allow you to freely dip in and out of lectures and assessments, whereas Coursera courses demand that you deliver quizzes/assignments every week. It's hard to recommend one approach over the other -- with weekly deadlines I find I have more of an incentive to engage in the lectures and course materials, but the added failure conditions can push students to abandon the course.
For the past year, I've only been seriously interested in three Coursera courses - Scala, Ng's Machine Learning, and Probabilistic Graphical Networks.
All three overlap at the same time!! And they don't give assurances of when they will be offered again, or even if. Argh. I've started Scala but doubt I'll be able to continue if it I attempt PGN again. This happened to me last fall and I ended up completing none of the three.
Plus, it is apparently "known"... somewhere... that certain courses are easier if you take other courses first... but good luck finding that information when you want to refer to it.
I agree the scheduling makes it difficult. I'm doing the NLP class right now, and scheduled to start the PGM class in a couple of weeks. I'm worried about the overlap, but I'll make it work out.
But I also wanted to do the Scala course. I didn't start it because I know I'd not be able to keep up with all three when they overlapped for a few weeks. It's a shame, but I had to prioritize.
Even if 5% people(say 5000 people) complete the course, whats wrong in that ? 5000 is still a big number. Many Prof's wouldn't have taught that many students all their life. I have myself completed 7 courses from edX,udacity and coursera. Each of these have a different approach. Udacity for beginers while edX and coursera have some advance courses and I found these courses a great supplement to my course work at my school.
True, that's a nice number. But you have to keep in mind many of these startups, while doing something noble, still need to make a big business (often they're VC-backed). Increasing retention rates is essential for business and for making online education viable. I'm not sure if 5% retention makes the model work or if you need >10%.
Also, their mindshare: "We're changing the world, 100K under-served people signed up!" vs, 5K who finish and most have at least a Master's already anyway :)
Does it matter if not everyone watches right until the end and completes the final coursework?
I want to know as much as I can about different subjects but I want to immerse myself in them to different levels.
Sometimes I am happy just to stick a few videos on in the background while I do something else, so I get the gist of what something is about and know what to focus on later if I need more information.
I don't necessarily care if I could pass an exam or not.
I'm more likely to finish a few chapters of a textbook than a series of videos:
1. Videos are usually too long. There isn't a natural break to stop and try things out. (Udacity does a good job with this one.)
2. Information density isn't constant. With text, this isn't an issue: I naturally adjust my reading speed if I hit a sparse or dense area. With video, I have to either live with it or constantly re-adjust the video speed.
I don't see how something can be a "dirty secret" when everyone already knows about it. This is not news, and I think the author is well aware of that and just wanted an eye-grabbing headline.
As for courses being too fast: they're college courses. That's a core part of their value proposition. If they were slower, or did not follow a rigid schedule at all (like the "better" examples presented in the article), they would be a fundamentally different product. The author simply doesn't understand the concept behind MOOCs, and probably isn't their intended audience. He would be better served watching lectures on Youtube (I don't mean that sarcastically, there are fantastic courses available there).
Synchronous learning is not, as another poster claims, an anachronism. It simply isn't necessary or valuable for everyone. For some, myself included, it is a significant benefit. That is the market that Coursera and edX are targeting, and one shouldn't criticize a company simply because one isn't a member of their target market.
Or should you not criticize dissenters just because it happens to fit you? There could be a better way for more people, regardless of your personal experience.
There is a substantive difference between the service offered by iTunes U, Youtube, and countless others, and the service offered by Coursera and edX. This difference corresponds to a difference in learning styles (synchronous v. asynchronous, as it has been phrased in this thread), and it doesn't make sense for any one product to target two diametrically opposed learning styles. What does make sense is the approach that Coursera has actually already been taking: offer both as separate products. You can take classes on schedule, or you can take them off schedule for no certificate. Complaining about the synchronous model because you are an asynchronous learner simply doesn't make any sense.
Nothing that you've listed is an asynchronous course. Currently, the choice is synchronous course or asynchronous video playlist. Coursera can likely fill that gap with a single database flag. It makes plenty of sense to suggest that they consider doing so.
You're mistaken, actually - in most cases, coursera does not offer taking classes off schedule for no certificate. That's exactly what everyone is asking for.
I'm not sure everyone is asking for that. I think it would seriously water down the courses in terms of discussions in the forums, sharing online (study room, hangouts), in terms of the quizzes and assignments.
The only thing I'd like is the more intense 6 week courses split over say 10 weeks. Other than that I think they are taking the right approach.
The issue with Coursera is the synchronous model. The material's good and the selection's excellent, and they deserve a lot of props for solving such a critical problem. College life is sanitized. Real World interjections are rare enough, at that age, to be handled case-by-case when it comes to extensions and such. Adult life is messy and complicated-- sick parents become more common, job demands fluctuate-- and synchronous education is just brittle. I didn't find Coursera courses to be "too fast". The paces were fine, so long as I didn't have fires in the rest of life.
It's not a "dirty secret", though. One should know and expect that. If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out.
I feel like we have three problems to solve in online education. I'm sure there are plenty more, but 4 stand out right now:
(1) Hidden node discovery. You're 23. You just learned Python. You want to be a Data Scientist in 3 years. How do you get there? "Data Scientist job" is one node, and there are a bunch of prerequisites to those (hidden nodes) and prerequisites to those. How do you navigate this network? The 23-year-old programmer doesn't know where those hidden nodes are. In other words, the Google for Learning and Development.
(2) Forward learning. Recommendations. Things that would be interesting to a person that she doesn't know she wants to know, because she doesn't know that it exists. Since there's a lot of investment here (you're not just buying a book and possibly reading it, but anticipating putting 50+ cognitively intense hours into a course) it would be nice if the service gave indications as to why it was making those rec's.
(3) Interactivity and (buzzword warning) "gameification". When you haul out an 800-word machine learning textbook, you often have to go for a long time (hours) without the "kick". There's a flat array of 50 exercises of which 25 are easy, and 25 are really hard and will take a long time (they might be worth doing, but they aren't quick) and it's hard to pick which ones to focus on. The programming exercises in texts often don't get your creative juices flowing. Not a lot of people can get through long spells without feedback, and the skill of "making your own feedback" seems to be losing ground in our distracted culture.
(4) "Social". Online study groups. This is Big and I don't know how it's going to evolve. How do we keep quality control in place and make sure that our automated expert discovery mechanisms work?
As someone who has personal interaction with the disorder (I'm not officially diagnosed, but probably have it, my son has it, several siblings, nieces and nephews as well), I hate this phrase. Because people use it to mean the exact opposite of what the actual disorder is.
People with ADD or ADHD (different names for pretty much the same thing) do not lack focus. To the contrary, a primary characteristic is extreme focus. Instead we lack the ability to focus on what we are told to focus on.
Society labels this "distractibility" because the person does not focus on what those around would want them to focus on (following instructions, getting dressed, doing homework, etc) but instead goes back to what interests them (bugs, dinosaurs, math, etc). But in terms of ability to get fascinated by something, then follow through on complex tasks, people with ADD or ADHD are significantly more capable than the general public.
It sounds different, but I am simply giving more detail about what happens inside of the disorder. Any decent book written in the last decade will confirm my description.
People with ADHD or ADD don't have executive control of what they will focus on. Inability to focus on what you're told to focus on is noticed in most environments as not listening to instructions, inability to stay on assigned task, poor attention to detail if you do stay on assigned task, etc. Everything in that link you posted is covered. In most environments your excellent focus on things you're NOT "supposed" to be doing is not likely to be noticed. Or if it is noticed, it likely increases frustration over the inability to pay attention to assigned tasks.
Speaking personally, I was very confused when screening for ADHD was recommended for my son. He seemed to have excellent focus - at 3 he would often get involved in a detailed task for half an hour or more, at 5 he would sit quietly through a full length documentary, then demonstrate how much he had learned for days afterwards. It was not until my sister explained from her experience that this was, in fact, characteristic that I became less resistant to having him screened.
I was also resistant to medicating him because I'd absorbed all of the usual biases about how overmedicating leads to drug abuse. However after being pointed to the statistics for ADHD, medication became a no-brainer. Children with ADHD do not become addicted to their medication, and have the same risks of drug abuse as the general population. By contrast ADHD people who are not treated are at massively increased risk for all kinds of drug abuse, including both prescription drug abuse and cocaine. (Cocaine is an interesting one since it actually is an effective ADHD medication! Though inconvenient, illegal, and subject to abuse.)
Therefore popular wisdom is exactly backwards - appropriate medication for ADHD reduces the odds of drug abuse later in life.
Why medicate? So he can pay better attention in class? So he can pay better attention to the teachers who are mostly wasting his time and talents? Why not find alternative means of educating your son that suit his temperament.
I believe our education system is harmful and hostile to boys in general and especially ones who have "ADD." There is Khan Academy and there is your boys curiosity and then there is your own creativity. Between those three things I am sure you can arrange an alternate (better!) way of facilitating your sons education. I know this may sound like a radical idea, but felt it my duty to submit it for your consideration.
I myself did well in school, but was bored and demoralized. I would have been farther ahead in life if I could just explore on my own and educate myself on the "need or want to learn" basis. I.E. whenever I was fascinated with a subject or needed to know something to complete a project, I'd learn it.
P.S. I can relate I think I have mild ADD as well. I just don't think it's a disorder or is harmful in life.
I have a child with a diagnosis that significantly increases the risk of his failing to graduate, using drugs, becoming a convicted felon, suffering accidental death, and being unable to hold down a regular job. There is a safe medication that addresses all of those risks, with reasonably moderate side effects.
If some day you have a child in the same situation, you'll be free to try whatever unproven experimental course of action you want. But I see no point in taking such risks with my child's future.
The one problem I have with an ADHD diagnosis is the power of choosing a useful narrative for oneself. I see an ADHD diagnoses as a stepping stone to letting go of the ADHD diagnosis. Use the tools but don't let your son get stuck there.
Here are various narratives I've had for myself:
1) Child prodigy
2) Failed child prodigy
3) Something's not right about work / study. I know what to do, but in the moment I do the wrong thing or procrastinate egregiously.
4) ADHD (medicated)
5) ADHD (stopped medication due to side-effects and depression)
6) Square peg / round hole. Make (startup) or find square hole.
7) Found square hole. First non-founder programmer at regional success story mobile games company. Crucial to the company, recognized / compensated as such. In demand.
Guess what hasn't changed all that much through all of these narratives? Me. I've just become ... optimized. I'm still terrible at time-sheets and coming in before 11. I would be a failure in a place that expected that.
P.S. Check for sleep issues (e.g. sleep apnea). As a society, I think we encourage and tolerate sleep deprivation to an absurd degree. From what I've seen, chronic sleep deprivation is indistinguishable from ADHD.
I have been diagnosed with ADD, and I know I can't trigger that focus, even for things I want to do. I sometimes fall into extreme focus mode, but it's usually on "accident".
I think Coursera has struck a very effective balance between synchronous and asynchronous learning. Once you sign up for a class, you're able to go back and watch videos, get assignments, even submit assignments for automated grading.
For those of us who find the synchronous style to be a sufficient motivator, it's a great benefit. For people who fall behind but want to cover the material, they're welcome to do so. The grades don't actually matter, remember? Coursera is already "gamified." It's just that the game is done so well that most of the time we're not aware of it.
I think the real "dirty little secret" is that not nearly as many people actually want to learn a topic as think they do.
The author said he really "intended" to take the class, but did he? Or did he just like the idea of it?
Learning is hard work. Learning difficult subjects is harder still, and it's very demanding of your time. There's really no way around that fact.
Let's be honest here, a lot of subjects sound interesting, but are you really willing to put in the time and effort to learn about them? It's never going to be painless.
I'm pretty much constantly in a Coursera course, but I drop half of them. I'm over feeling bad about it. Turns out I wasn't as interested in the topic as I thought. For other courses I am, and I do the work.
I truly believe you have really identified the elephant in the room with online learning (especially the free sites).
Learning is hard work. Period. Granted, its a different kind of work, and can be really enjoyable. As you stated, you need to put in the time and certain topics cannot be "watered down" too much no matter how hard the instructor may try.
The benefit of these sites are that anyone can sample the menu as there is no real downside. If one were to actually pay some fee for the course, the chances of sampling the different courses would really go down.
I don't believe there really is an issue here. Being able to try out different courses and realizing what you like and don't like is so incredibly powerful.
What can be improved on is to identify these types of learners. Coursera could start out right of the bat asking, "How likely are you to finish this course." The metric of completion should not be used to judge a course either.
You are correct. Given the information deluge and the typical tl;dr response, none of this is surprising. The nice thing about Coursera is that there is no downside. Paying close to $50K/year for a first tier university is another matter. Sadly, in that case, too many students take the easy credit and end up with a boat load of debt and no degree.
The only things I'd like from Coursera courses are:
* more that take 8-10 weeks rather than 6 weeks
* if the CS course happens to use a particular language then make it incredibly easy to get setup and provide downloadable structure for any assignments (the scala coursera course has that nailed)
* better estimates for # hours a week
In general thought the synchronous approach works perfectly for me and is the big reason I haven't yet felt the need to do any Udacity courses.
I have finished six coursera/udacity classes so far. The last one felt really hard, not because of the material or the teacher. I wasn't really interested in the subject. It was something that I thought it would be good and useful to learn, but I was not passionate about it. So, last night, I finally finished the course, but it wasn't easy.
So really the questions that I should be asking next time is which class I really feel passionate about, and/or how do I become passionate about the class that I am taking.
That's certainly not true for all Coursera courses. I took one in February - if I go back and look at it now all the material is gone (although the lecturer put the videos on youtube) and there is nothing but a flat description of what the course was. I'm actually signed up for a course now that I found out about half way through and didn't have time to do on the spot, so I'm looking for a way to download all the material because I fully expect it to disappear once the course 'finishes'.
I think you hit it right in the head with the synchronous nature. It's ignoring a great feature of the new medium. Ignoring it would be like putting an encyclopedia online without links.
Strongly agree with all of michaelochurch's points, especially #1. Frankly, it baffles me that "career tracks" weren't (and still aren't) a core component of the MOOC product offering. (I actually applied to YC S13 with a solution to points 1-3.)
Duke researchers who actually taught a course on Coursera put together a comprehensive report on their experiences. In it, they specifically address the drop-out issue. I highly recommend it: http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/...
#1 resonates strongly with me, too, as I've also been thinking about the best way to put MOOCs into tracks/streams that lead to an end goal (e.g. become a data scientist) and engage learners that way.
I'd love to talk to someone who's on the same page, do you think I could pick your brains on this? If so, a contact email is on my profile page :)
I think this is correct, for the most part. Call me a dirty capitalist, but I think that especially for problem no. 1 the solution probably needs to involve--in a significant way--those who have the most incentive to see it solved. Generally, the incentive for students comes from curiosity, desire to learn new things, and maybe the desire to broaden career options, but not really from "profit," at least in the short term.
But, the companies that have immediate need for a data scientist--those are the folks who have a vested interest in the problem being solved. The trick I think will come down to getting companies involved without having them mucking them up like most "corporate training" is these days.
I guess that's a bit of what's missing for many of the online options so far--a direct "if you do this this will happen" value proposition for the students. Right now it's all driven by our curiosity and a desire to learn, which is great and drives many of us to sign up, but sometimes doesn't trump all the "life" that gets in the way after the coursework gets tough.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Have you had any experience with getting companies/employers involved in something like this? I've been thinking about how MOOCs would fit into streams (or tracks as someone else here said) that lead a learner to an end goal e.g. data scientist, and companies are the most qualified to come up with the criteria for meeting such goals.
(1) Editors not google. If we invent the google for L&D all it will do is read the blogs of practioners of the subject, and syllabus writers, then page rank them.
Why not cut out the middle man and have academics and practionsers actually recommend the courses, and guide people through. Pretty much the only thing we cannot automate right now is real good editing it is sorely needed in journalism, books, what to watch on tv and education courses.
(2) see editing
On both the above points I get the feeling you worry / hope that we shall need to automate huge swathes of this, but I think education is an intensive production - akin to books or films. And so would be due similar levels of review attention.
(3) I think that's not the needed approach - everyone learns at different paces and gets stuck at different points. With maths one approach is large numbers of gradually changing mini tests - if you keep making the same mistake that area is reviewed and revisited till you get it right. I know an Bristol based company doing this now in schools, the success rate - hard to say but the approach seems solid.
Repitition seems to be the mainstay of human learning.
(4) I don't understand- what is automated expert discovery systems? Study groups are an inherently emergent social phenomena - humans are really good at those, so this would be my least worrisome issue - an online calendar and Skype meetings as an example.
> Why not cut out the middle man and have academics and practionsers actually recommend the courses, and guide people through.
And then we can use an artificial intelligence algorithm to combine the recommendations of all the academics and practitioners, to get an index of recommendations across all fields.
Call it PractictionerRank, or PeerRank, or BookRank, or....
I never understood why Coursera has a schedule. Let people learn at their own pace. Let them start whenever they want. Let them pause whenever they want.
Emulating old abstractions using new tech is a HUGE failure.
I really like your point (1). It actually coincides with the same idea that I have had but you've described in a good way, the "Google for Learning and Development".
I am wondering why this can't be an actual web application? Have different topics, (ie. Learn Web Development, Python, Javascript) and actually have a listing/review of all the credible sources on the internet that one can use to do the learning. It would just be a listing but have others who learned the material, describe how they did it and have them review the resources.
It's come to a point where this is really needed. Just typing "learn javascript" on Google is just not good enough.
I'm a big fan of Codeacademy myself. But, as someone who doesn't come from a technical background, I feel like I'm often completing many of their lessons, but not internalizing the information or actually learning how to code.
I don't plan on giving up, but I'm curious if others have had that experience or if I'm the only person who's figured out how to use Codeacademy without actually learning to code.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadSynchronous learning, IMO, is an anachronism. We have video recording technology, practically infinite bandwidth, and near speed of light communication. The idea of synchronous learning, where you have five thousand teachers teaching the same Calculus I class every year, is predicated on a world where these technologies don't exist.
As an aside, for this reason I think the collegiate model is going to completely change in the near future as people start realizing how absurd it is. The real value professors provide is having someone to answer questions (and in a lot of cases, professors don't even take questions during lecture). And even that functionality can and is (in my experience) mostly replaced by other students in the class or students who have already taken the class.
Put the material up, and let communities form around it. I don't need the professor to answer my questions, all I need is the relevant forum (in the original sense) to ask.
Presumably online videos could let you cut down on some class time, but even 1 hour after watching a video your going to forget some of your questions and much of the context of other questions you remember.
PS: If you took calculus in a setting of 500 people where you could not ask questions you still got ripped off even if there was a teacher in the room.
Is having a professor there that you can ask immediately in the moment (and interrupt the lecture for the other students who understood the material) worth $1000 per credit hour?
Unfortunately, they have much less courses available, and they're all more or less computer science related.
Personally I find the synchronous model helps me complete the course, as it removes the temptation to put things off.
I also find the assignments/exercises on the courses are first class and that's where a lot of the learning comes in especially when backed up by discussion forum activity from other students. Watching the videos on their own doesn't really appeal to me.
There is something dispiriting to me about a synchronous model. Once I can't keep up I tend to drop it as a failure, knowing there's no point in working through something that might be removed at any point. I also think it's the way I respond to the "don't break the chain" apps. Once life gets in the way and I do break the chain, I feel like a failure.
I'm quite happy to motivate myself however, so Udacity's model of giving the student however long they need, works perfectly.
I believe this is due to the constraints of the tradional class format. It is simply impossible to both cover the material and answer very many questions in typical length of a class. This means that if the class has more than a small number of students their questions simply cannot be answered during the lecture.
This is why many larger classes are divided into sections with labs run by grad students. These smaller forums are are better for discussion but their quality depends on finding grad students who are good at teaching. This is also fundamentally not scalable.
Online learning has the potential to break thru this limitation. The recent wave of MOOCs are a huge improvement over the online classes of just a few years ago. I believe there is still lots of room for improvement from both tailoring the class to the individual student (e.g fast vs slow pace) and A/B testing which has only just begun to be applied.
Interestingly some of these improvements can be applied to tradional classes some of which are already using online discussion forums and automated grading. A hybrid approach (in person lectures and discussions with full online support) will probably provide the best overall quality but will be more expensive than a pure online approach and not practical for people who can't physically attend classes.
It's not really a retention problem if you offer something for free and tons of people have a look without making much commitment. Having said that, probably the only relevant statistics about these courses are how many people did them and completed the assignments/tests.
I used the database course to supplement a database course that I was taking at the same time, and it was not just a stark difference in quality but also fantastic that I could pick the pieces of material that I needed to learn better and watch those lectures at my speed and how I wanted!
It's important to me that all course materials are available at the start of the course, and until at least a year after I take the course. Otherwise give me an easy way to download the course materials as a bundle to use in the future.
I think the majority of MOOC course developers want to run their online courses as closely to their university versions as possible, since that's what they're used to working with. It also provides a handy way for them to go off-duty, in a sense, if the course has a finite end date. Using their current pacing structure (which is incredibly difficult, as the OP points out, for people that aren't full-time students) allows the teachers to do something other than devote themselves solely to the course, assuming they don't want to just post an archive and leave it alone -- which would meet a lot of people's needs, but misses the whole teacher-student interaction, which is pretty much missing from MOOCs anyway. If they want to provide an environment that's like a classroom, with students interacting with the instructors and with each other, you kind of need everybody at the same pace. It would be nice for us if they could slow that pace down, but that would probably increase the workload for the instructors.
We're still early in this game. I'm glad that so many professors have been willing to invest the time into developing the courses, and I understand why they are currently set up to be conveniently structured for them. I think we'll start to see some improvements if/when the money appears in the MOOC game. Once it's no longer basically charity work for the instructors, there will probably be more efforts to work around student schedules.
In addition to having a normal job, I'm a traditional university student, so any of the online classes I take are simply out of interest in the subject. I dip into the class when I have time, almost like a leisure activity. I just don't currently have the time to fit in more strict course work on top of my already over loaded class schedule and work week.
Unfortunately my free time isn't available in nice predetermined six-week chunks, but even if I am able to catch up three weeks or more in a weekend the courses gave a very negative vibe about continuing to progress as soon as you miss a single one of their deadlines (i.e.- "you missed our deadline for this multiple-choice computer marked test, so your effort no longer counts"). I've 'failed' several coursera sessions in the fourth or fifth week for that reason.
Timetabling seems a very traditional educational view, and it contrasted sharply with codecademy and sites like duolingo where I spent Jan and Feb learning the basics of new languages - computer and human. I finished the courses I took because I did them at my own pace.
I hope there will be more short and tightly focused online courses in the future instead of monolithic traditional-length courses we have today. I think that'd go a long way to improving the apparent retention rate.
Thankfully, we have a data analytics team now (3 out of our 17 engineers), and they are studying our retention statistics and the factors that affect it. They're also running A/B experiments to see what increases it and getting some interesting results.
We do see some big advantages of the timed model for learning, particularly in classes with peer-to-peer grading and evaluations, but there's obviously a big desire for the self-study mode, which is enabled for a few of our classes currently.
We're also introducing things like Signature Track, which some students sign up for just to encourage themselves to make it to the end (and it seems to work for many of them).
We'll keep experimenting to see what makes students both happy and successful. :-)
I do hope that you will open up most (if not all) of your courses for self-study mode. There are a few courses I really wanted to take, but due to the lack of time I really couldn't commit myself at the time they opened (I wanted to do them in the summer instead!).
I also think this guy makes valid points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5469909
I have feedback for you as regards retention of students.
The number one thing is due dates and late penalties. If I sign up for a course and work through the first few weeks and get everything done, and then I miss a deadline because life happens, suddenly I am no longer able to get a 100% in the class. I do not mind getting an A- in a class if it happens naturally because the material is difficult, but losing my A+ or A because I am 12 hours late on an assignment ruins the experience for me. I usually drop a class when this happens and wait for it to come around again.
A counter-example to prove the rule: Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms course. The last time he gave it, he had late penalties and I only had time to get through the first two weeks of the class without getting behind. This time around, there were no late penalties. Being enormously busy with other things, I was not able to keep up with the class as it went along. However, because I lost no credit for doing things late, I was able to complete the entire class in the final 10 days of course and I got an A. I have no problem staying up all night to finish interesting programming assignments and quizzes, but I need to be allowed to do this on my schedule.
I strongly encourage you to encourage your professors to do away with late penalties. It should be up to us as students to determine what our work schedule is. I know for some courses, those that use peer-evaluation, this is impossible, but many more could take this route than currently do.
I agree that Signature Track does have the effect of encouraging one to keep up with the class.
On the other side of the coin though people are relying on the strictness of handin times in order to motivate them to get through the course in a reasonable amount of time.
Timed based on a final date to finish everything is a compromise but wouldn't work for everyone, as some would loose motivation after falling too far behind. So maybe there needs to be a few deadlines throughout the course, but not a weekly one.
The only course I have done I ended up missing a week handin as well, I think most working people would be in the same boat.
I love the fact that there is a due date, it forces me to do it and a certificate is very rewarding too (I tend to give up the courses that give me no "credits")...
I think in general,the schedule are too tight though.
So successfully completion of the course won't require watching the videos.
Having taken online courses from the start my sense is that enrollment/participation is slowing. The bulletin boards of some classes are pretty dead on the first run.
Its not crazy to think that the people most likely to take the classes would participate right away and finding the next batch of students will be harder.
IMO for a class with tens of thousands people signed up, 5% retention rate is not really that bad.
Another idea I had was that students who completed a course, and achieved a certain level of proficiency, would get access to a special forum. This forum could be shared by potential employers.
At kenHub[1], we offer anatomy online training for medical students, physiotherapists etc. Since we are working in a collaboration with the Charité University[2], we offer students at the university the same content other students pay for, completely free. Our statistics shows around a factor of 8x in engagement of paying vs. non-paying students[3].
[1]https://www.kenhub.com [2]http://www.charite.de/en/charite [3]http://imgur.com/5eG3teP
I signed up for the Hinton neural network class when it was almost over, and completed it well after it ended.
Was I "retained"? Did I not count as completing the class?
Just because there's deadlines doesn't mean you have to finish it by the deadline.
For me, the pace of the course is actually a plus. If there were no deadline, I simply would not get around to doing it. I remember when I first found all the MIT courses on-line (several years ago). I really wanted to take some of them, but because there was no schedule and no deadline, I never got around to taking any of them. It's only with Coursera that I have actually taken (and finished) any.
I've written about my experience of all three courses on my blog. The latest was Algorithms: Design and Analysis, part 2 http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...
That said, not all material on Coursera is "amazing". Some of the classes have very high completion rate like Functional Programming with Scala has a 19.2% completion rate [1]. Similarly, the class taken by Andrew Ng on Machine Learning is fantastic. However, many of my peers had bad reviews on Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models class. Last year, I myself registered for one of these MOOC's and found that half of the course was good while the other half was quite bad - both halves had different professors.
At some point of time, universities would have to realize that great researchers do not make great teachers. Some excel in both - researching & teaching while some in just one of those two fields.
PS - Other problems on reengagement do stand though.
[0] https://www.udacity.com/ [1] http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
Codecademy and Udacity allow you to freely dip in and out of lectures and assessments, whereas Coursera courses demand that you deliver quizzes/assignments every week. It's hard to recommend one approach over the other -- with weekly deadlines I find I have more of an incentive to engage in the lectures and course materials, but the added failure conditions can push students to abandon the course.
All three overlap at the same time!! And they don't give assurances of when they will be offered again, or even if. Argh. I've started Scala but doubt I'll be able to continue if it I attempt PGN again. This happened to me last fall and I ended up completing none of the three.
Plus, it is apparently "known"... somewhere... that certain courses are easier if you take other courses first... but good luck finding that information when you want to refer to it.
But I also wanted to do the Scala course. I didn't start it because I know I'd not be able to keep up with all three when they overlapped for a few weeks. It's a shame, but I had to prioritize.
I want to know as much as I can about different subjects but I want to immerse myself in them to different levels.
Sometimes I am happy just to stick a few videos on in the background while I do something else, so I get the gist of what something is about and know what to focus on later if I need more information.
I don't necessarily care if I could pass an exam or not.
Sigh.
1. Videos are usually too long. There isn't a natural break to stop and try things out. (Udacity does a good job with this one.)
2. Information density isn't constant. With text, this isn't an issue: I naturally adjust my reading speed if I hit a sparse or dense area. With video, I have to either live with it or constantly re-adjust the video speed.
As for courses being too fast: they're college courses. That's a core part of their value proposition. If they were slower, or did not follow a rigid schedule at all (like the "better" examples presented in the article), they would be a fundamentally different product. The author simply doesn't understand the concept behind MOOCs, and probably isn't their intended audience. He would be better served watching lectures on Youtube (I don't mean that sarcastically, there are fantastic courses available there).
Synchronous learning is not, as another poster claims, an anachronism. It simply isn't necessary or valuable for everyone. For some, myself included, it is a significant benefit. That is the market that Coursera and edX are targeting, and one shouldn't criticize a company simply because one isn't a member of their target market.
You're mistaken, actually - in most cases, coursera does not offer taking classes off schedule for no certificate. That's exactly what everyone is asking for.
The only thing I'd like is the more intense 6 week courses split over say 10 weeks. Other than that I think they are taking the right approach.
It's not a "dirty secret", though. One should know and expect that. If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out.
I feel like we have three problems to solve in online education. I'm sure there are plenty more, but 4 stand out right now:
(1) Hidden node discovery. You're 23. You just learned Python. You want to be a Data Scientist in 3 years. How do you get there? "Data Scientist job" is one node, and there are a bunch of prerequisites to those (hidden nodes) and prerequisites to those. How do you navigate this network? The 23-year-old programmer doesn't know where those hidden nodes are. In other words, the Google for Learning and Development.
(2) Forward learning. Recommendations. Things that would be interesting to a person that she doesn't know she wants to know, because she doesn't know that it exists. Since there's a lot of investment here (you're not just buying a book and possibly reading it, but anticipating putting 50+ cognitively intense hours into a course) it would be nice if the service gave indications as to why it was making those rec's.
(3) Interactivity and (buzzword warning) "gameification". When you haul out an 800-word machine learning textbook, you often have to go for a long time (hours) without the "kick". There's a flat array of 50 exercises of which 25 are easy, and 25 are really hard and will take a long time (they might be worth doing, but they aren't quick) and it's hard to pick which ones to focus on. The programming exercises in texts often don't get your creative juices flowing. Not a lot of people can get through long spells without feedback, and the skill of "making your own feedback" seems to be losing ground in our distracted culture.
(4) "Social". Online study groups. This is Big and I don't know how it's going to evolve. How do we keep quality control in place and make sure that our automated expert discovery mechanisms work?
As someone who has personal interaction with the disorder (I'm not officially diagnosed, but probably have it, my son has it, several siblings, nieces and nephews as well), I hate this phrase. Because people use it to mean the exact opposite of what the actual disorder is.
People with ADD or ADHD (different names for pretty much the same thing) do not lack focus. To the contrary, a primary characteristic is extreme focus. Instead we lack the ability to focus on what we are told to focus on.
Society labels this "distractibility" because the person does not focus on what those around would want them to focus on (following instructions, getting dressed, doing homework, etc) but instead goes back to what interests them (bugs, dinosaurs, math, etc). But in terms of ability to get fascinated by something, then follow through on complex tasks, people with ADD or ADHD are significantly more capable than the general public.
You make a really strong point. Going back and changing it.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/nerd_sniping.png
People with ADHD or ADD don't have executive control of what they will focus on. Inability to focus on what you're told to focus on is noticed in most environments as not listening to instructions, inability to stay on assigned task, poor attention to detail if you do stay on assigned task, etc. Everything in that link you posted is covered. In most environments your excellent focus on things you're NOT "supposed" to be doing is not likely to be noticed. Or if it is noticed, it likely increases frustration over the inability to pay attention to assigned tasks.
Speaking personally, I was very confused when screening for ADHD was recommended for my son. He seemed to have excellent focus - at 3 he would often get involved in a detailed task for half an hour or more, at 5 he would sit quietly through a full length documentary, then demonstrate how much he had learned for days afterwards. It was not until my sister explained from her experience that this was, in fact, characteristic that I became less resistant to having him screened.
I was also resistant to medicating him because I'd absorbed all of the usual biases about how overmedicating leads to drug abuse. However after being pointed to the statistics for ADHD, medication became a no-brainer. Children with ADHD do not become addicted to their medication, and have the same risks of drug abuse as the general population. By contrast ADHD people who are not treated are at massively increased risk for all kinds of drug abuse, including both prescription drug abuse and cocaine. (Cocaine is an interesting one since it actually is an effective ADHD medication! Though inconvenient, illegal, and subject to abuse.)
Therefore popular wisdom is exactly backwards - appropriate medication for ADHD reduces the odds of drug abuse later in life.
I believe our education system is harmful and hostile to boys in general and especially ones who have "ADD." There is Khan Academy and there is your boys curiosity and then there is your own creativity. Between those three things I am sure you can arrange an alternate (better!) way of facilitating your sons education. I know this may sound like a radical idea, but felt it my duty to submit it for your consideration.
I myself did well in school, but was bored and demoralized. I would have been farther ahead in life if I could just explore on my own and educate myself on the "need or want to learn" basis. I.E. whenever I was fascinated with a subject or needed to know something to complete a project, I'd learn it.
P.S. I can relate I think I have mild ADD as well. I just don't think it's a disorder or is harmful in life.
I have a child with a diagnosis that significantly increases the risk of his failing to graduate, using drugs, becoming a convicted felon, suffering accidental death, and being unable to hold down a regular job. There is a safe medication that addresses all of those risks, with reasonably moderate side effects.
If some day you have a child in the same situation, you'll be free to try whatever unproven experimental course of action you want. But I see no point in taking such risks with my child's future.
Here are various narratives I've had for myself:
1) Child prodigy
2) Failed child prodigy
3) Something's not right about work / study. I know what to do, but in the moment I do the wrong thing or procrastinate egregiously.
4) ADHD (medicated)
5) ADHD (stopped medication due to side-effects and depression)
6) Square peg / round hole. Make (startup) or find square hole.
7) Found square hole. First non-founder programmer at regional success story mobile games company. Crucial to the company, recognized / compensated as such. In demand.
Guess what hasn't changed all that much through all of these narratives? Me. I've just become ... optimized. I'm still terrible at time-sheets and coming in before 11. I would be a failure in a place that expected that.
P.S. Check for sleep issues (e.g. sleep apnea). As a society, I think we encourage and tolerate sleep deprivation to an absurd degree. From what I've seen, chronic sleep deprivation is indistinguishable from ADHD.
So I reduce distractions and work in a black box. With only one task in front of you, you get it done.
I simply cannot work if I am not in a quiet environment.
For those of us who find the synchronous style to be a sufficient motivator, it's a great benefit. For people who fall behind but want to cover the material, they're welcome to do so. The grades don't actually matter, remember? Coursera is already "gamified." It's just that the game is done so well that most of the time we're not aware of it.
The author said he really "intended" to take the class, but did he? Or did he just like the idea of it?
Learning is hard work. Learning difficult subjects is harder still, and it's very demanding of your time. There's really no way around that fact.
Let's be honest here, a lot of subjects sound interesting, but are you really willing to put in the time and effort to learn about them? It's never going to be painless.
I'm pretty much constantly in a Coursera course, but I drop half of them. I'm over feeling bad about it. Turns out I wasn't as interested in the topic as I thought. For other courses I am, and I do the work.
Learning is hard work. Period. Granted, its a different kind of work, and can be really enjoyable. As you stated, you need to put in the time and certain topics cannot be "watered down" too much no matter how hard the instructor may try.
The benefit of these sites are that anyone can sample the menu as there is no real downside. If one were to actually pay some fee for the course, the chances of sampling the different courses would really go down.
I don't believe there really is an issue here. Being able to try out different courses and realizing what you like and don't like is so incredibly powerful.
What can be improved on is to identify these types of learners. Coursera could start out right of the bat asking, "How likely are you to finish this course." The metric of completion should not be used to judge a course either.
The only things I'd like from Coursera courses are:
* more that take 8-10 weeks rather than 6 weeks
* if the CS course happens to use a particular language then make it incredibly easy to get setup and provide downloadable structure for any assignments (the scala coursera course has that nailed)
* better estimates for # hours a week
In general thought the synchronous approach works perfectly for me and is the big reason I haven't yet felt the need to do any Udacity courses.
I have finished six coursera/udacity classes so far. The last one felt really hard, not because of the material or the teacher. I wasn't really interested in the subject. It was something that I thought it would be good and useful to learn, but I was not passionate about it. So, last night, I finally finished the course, but it wasn't easy.
So really the questions that I should be asking next time is which class I really feel passionate about, and/or how do I become passionate about the class that I am taking.
https://github.com/jplehmann/coursera/
MOOC have organized material and information in classes, but now it needs to also curate "tracks".
This. You need gumption to succeed in a traditional university course so surely the same will apply to a MOOC with adequately difficult content?
I wish the author would have discussed Udacity.
Duke researchers who actually taught a course on Coursera put together a comprehensive report on their experiences. In it, they specifically address the drop-out issue. I highly recommend it: http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/...
I'd love to talk to someone who's on the same page, do you think I could pick your brains on this? If so, a contact email is on my profile page :)
But, the companies that have immediate need for a data scientist--those are the folks who have a vested interest in the problem being solved. The trick I think will come down to getting companies involved without having them mucking them up like most "corporate training" is these days.
I guess that's a bit of what's missing for many of the online options so far--a direct "if you do this this will happen" value proposition for the students. Right now it's all driven by our curiosity and a desire to learn, which is great and drives many of us to sign up, but sometimes doesn't trump all the "life" that gets in the way after the coursework gets tough.
Why not cut out the middle man and have academics and practionsers actually recommend the courses, and guide people through. Pretty much the only thing we cannot automate right now is real good editing it is sorely needed in journalism, books, what to watch on tv and education courses.
(2) see editing
On both the above points I get the feeling you worry / hope that we shall need to automate huge swathes of this, but I think education is an intensive production - akin to books or films. And so would be due similar levels of review attention.
(3) I think that's not the needed approach - everyone learns at different paces and gets stuck at different points. With maths one approach is large numbers of gradually changing mini tests - if you keep making the same mistake that area is reviewed and revisited till you get it right. I know an Bristol based company doing this now in schools, the success rate - hard to say but the approach seems solid.
Repitition seems to be the mainstay of human learning.
(4) I don't understand- what is automated expert discovery systems? Study groups are an inherently emergent social phenomena - humans are really good at those, so this would be my least worrisome issue - an online calendar and Skype meetings as an example.
And then we can use an artificial intelligence algorithm to combine the recommendations of all the academics and practitioners, to get an index of recommendations across all fields.
Call it PractictionerRank, or PeerRank, or BookRank, or....
Emulating old abstractions using new tech is a HUGE failure.
I am wondering why this can't be an actual web application? Have different topics, (ie. Learn Web Development, Python, Javascript) and actually have a listing/review of all the credible sources on the internet that one can use to do the learning. It would just be a listing but have others who learned the material, describe how they did it and have them review the resources.
It's come to a point where this is really needed. Just typing "learn javascript" on Google is just not good enough.
Is there something like this out there already?
I don't plan on giving up, but I'm curious if others have had that experience or if I'm the only person who's figured out how to use Codeacademy without actually learning to code.