I hope you’re right and Khan Academy won’t ever be the same as Coursera, I hope they will remain free and can grow into becoming better than Coursera, perhaps educators on Coursera will start sharing their courses for free on Khan Academy.
There are millions of kids and people of all ages going to extremes to access the internet to learn new stuff.
I met a kid in a remote village who would cycle for miles every weekend they were not working to seat in a public library to learn on the internet, for that kid a course costing 1 penny would be too expensive and no one in the family had a credit card to begin with.
Sal Khan deserves all the praise and more, Khan Academy is now in multiple languages, his videos are literally changing people’s lives.
MIT’s edX used to be free, they are now monetising the courses and will withdraw access after their self imposed artificial course time has run out if you don’t pay them, this also creates a second class of students, the ones with money get special privileges and get graded and the poor ones don’t and offering ‘financial aid’ doesn’t work if you really want to reach far and wide, how many will close the site when they see it costs thousands of dollars for a course? In a sense edX is way more disappointing than Coursera.
But just like I stopped recommending Coursera when they started restricting access to their courses I look forward to shorting their stock when they go public and donating the profits to educational nonprofits.
Coursera's upsell advertising (I'm working through, and recommend, Dan Grossman's Programming Languages right now) seems to have switched away from advertising the vocational benefits of their certificates to making it sound like a charity.
It used to be "get this certificate to get 6x more LinkedIn views". Now, 50% of the ads I get are "support Coursera's mission to bring people education for free".
You will be surprised to find most of what you describe is already in place in many forms.
Reach out to your local political party (hierarchical network designed to raise funds), the one most aligned to your values as that’s were you’ll meet a bunch of people, most over 50s that have been working to solve the exact problems you listed and they will be members of many other local groups with no party links.
They will have working groups and forums that meet regularly with people that have been campaigning and working for the last 20 to 70 years with your local community, on the ground, trying to solve racism, sexism, sustainability, education, local economy, corruption, inequality, poverty, hunger, climate change, civil rights...you name it.
The best part is that you can avoid 100% the politics if you so wish as they are most likely desperate for (younger) people that will actually get any work done, you’ll be so busy solving real world issues or implementing the structural changes you talk about that you won’t have time for politics.
I've been helping family and closest friends to ditch WhatsApp for Signal, without much success, so decided to come up with a deadline, announced to everyone and will be deleting WhatsApp then.
More friends have joined Signal the week I told them I was living by the deadline than in the previous years, where I was mostly ignored.
You did good by publishing this. I've seen that you're updating your blog post based on what people are saying here, you don't have to do that, you don't have to answer to people attacking you on a forum.
What you have exposed has the potential to affect a large number of Google users and unfortunately the community has chosen to attack you over attacking Google.
Which could say a lot about the state of the community. So thanks again for bringing this vulnerability to our attention.
you don't have to answer to people attacking you on a forum
Maybe you don't feel like you have to, but I can tell you from experience, that when an entire community of your peers piles on to you, there is a significant emotional response that you're being rejected. That's just my personal experience, but it seems pretty common to want to respond when those you respect and work with (or might work with) respond negatively to your work.
