Everyone...let's be honest with ourselves and what we want from these moocs. I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free. Ads are okay and premium features are okay (like live tutoring or a human given lecture). When I say high-quality I want the content to be similar to what you would get from a Harvard, Stanford or other top university in the field in terms of the content. I want to learn the same topics. Don't water it down and make it simple. I want the real deal with the difficulty and all. Once that is accomplished..work on building tools that make these subjects easier to learn.
This is quite a hurdle to build but ultimately this is what we need. We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university. I don't like the watered down MOOCs that udacity, coursera and udemy offer.
I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free
What you want then is EdX. Every course is backed by a real-world institution that people have heard of, and they are free to audit, pay only if you want the certificate and/or to support their nonprofit mission
There are occasional trash courses on EdX though. If I hadn’t already started on LouvainX’s MicroMaster’s in International Law Amnesty International’s course on the law of asylum and refugees would have turned me right off. The intellectual level of that course was round about middle school.
I've had the same issue! People say that EdX is so great and it is equivalent in course quality but it simply isn't. I haven't' seen that. All of the courses are heavily watered down...and I mean significantly watered down like you don't even learn 20% of what you learn from the traditional course in college.
> We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university.
I think this is Khan Academy [0]. It is a great resource that I've been using for quite a while. They even gamify it a little with points and avatars that you can buy. Funny thing is, like a lot of traditional universities, it lags behind on buzz-wordy courses.
Khan Academy is far from a tutorial site. They have entire lesson plans, lectures, reading assignments, tests and a decent and helpful community in the comments. They cover just about all the material from Kindergarten to a Bachelors Degree.
Khan Academy is a better educational environment than I've ever experienced.
I've done the same comparison and there is no real comparison. Khan excels in the k-12 area because most of the schools these days have extremely limited curriculum and generally teach a series of limited topics in each subject they teach. Sure, for that type of stuff Khan is okay. When you get into the university level stuff...it is definitely not what you learn from a BA degree.
Everyone...let's be honest with ourselves and what we want from these moocs. I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free. Ads are okay and premium features are okay (like live tutoring or a human given lecture). When I say high-quality I want the content to be similar to what you would get from a Harvard, Stanford or other top university in the field in terms of the content. I want to learn the same topics. Don't water it down and make it simple. I want the real deal with the difficulty and all. Once that is accomplished..work on building tools that make these subjects easier to learn.
This is quite a hurdle to build but ultimately this is what we need. We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university. I don't like the watered down MOOCs that udacity, coursera and udemy offer.