I believe that in the next few years, we will see many professors bringing their courses online, and this will hopefully result in significant improvement in the way the material is presented. Even dry material can be made substantially more palatable by a gifted lecturer.
I'm disappointed with the current production quality and style of Coursera lectures. Andrew and Daphne should realize that flipping the classroom is not enough. The whole point of flipping the classroom is that most learning happens _outside_ the lecture hall. In an online context, this means that the emphasis must be on creating engaging and useful exercises and a vibrant online community. It also means that lectures have to be _far better_ than those delivered in the classroom. Taking your old powerpoints and inking over them while running screen-capture software just doesn't cut it. Ask Vi Hart.
When Udacity completely separated itself from Stanford a few months back, I thought it was an insane move, and had all my bets on Coursera. Right now, Udacity is producing better content. When we come to a point that it is the quality of education that matters and not the branding, they might have significant advantage.
Comments
I believe that in the next few years, we will see many professors bringing their courses online, and this will hopefully result in significant improvement in the way the material is presented. Even dry material can be made substantially more palatable by a gifted lecturer.
I'm disappointed with the current production quality and style of Coursera lectures. Andrew and Daphne should realize that flipping the classroom is not enough. The whole point of flipping the classroom is that most learning happens _outside_ the lecture hall. In an online context, this means that the emphasis must be on creating engaging and useful exercises and a vibrant online community. It also means that lectures have to be _far better_ than those delivered in the classroom. Taking your old powerpoints and inking over them while running screen-capture software just doesn't cut it. Ask Vi Hart.
When Udacity completely separated itself from Stanford a few months back, I thought it was an insane move, and had all my bets on Coursera. Right now, Udacity is producing better content. When we come to a point that it is the quality of education that matters and not the branding, they might have significant advantage.