In the early days, Coursera was transformative. I took some amazing courses and learned a lot.

...but the vision was always automation and as courses were rerun, the instructors were more likely to be disengaged, and live interaction via the forums fell. Finally when courses went to ongoing enrollment, there were no longer cohorts, and the experience was a correspondence course.

So in the end it was not transformative. It is pretty much just Youtube plus a website plus a payment platform. A less expensive, less interactive, unaccredited version of Phoenix University.

There's nothing wrong with teachers getting paid. It is the standard model. But of course the standard model is the standard model, not transformative.

If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential.

Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition).

From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs:

'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.'

Never happened.

'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”'

Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.

And this is what the early success really was.

It'd be interesting to see if what they "up-skilled" on is now common knowledge in Data Science.

But in both cases, if you learn something from that course or video, and then go off and create something based on that, that something can be something employers care about.

Starting was fun, finishing was another thing. Credentialing another.

They helped get a lot of content out in the open.

The sharing of knowledge is great and should continue, hopefully with more modern digital interactions of 2025.

What hiring companies want is to get good employees who can do the job they are supposed to do, and they want to have as low a false positive rate as possible (hiring someone who can't do the job is very expensive).

I am not a hiring expert, but they probably get a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.

Companies don't really care about false negative rates (not hiring a person who would do the job well) as long as they are still able to hire someone else who can't also do the job well. It sucks for the person who isn't hired, but not for the company.

I remember on one of the first of these courses (AI in Berkley?), people were incensed that they would not get an official degree/certificate from the university.

Some were really mad, as if they had been defrauded or something.

Your point about certification is accurate, but I want to add another nuance.

Even if you manage to get a degree from a "good"/prestigious place, if you are "the wrong kind of person" that will only be held against you.

It's like succeeding at that is a violation of natural law and you need to be punished for the violation. It's almost religious and deeply guttural.

Of course that in places like the states, those people usually don't even get the change to graduate from those places since some excuse will be concocted during the application process.

MOOCs suffer from the online version of that.

However in places where admission is "blind" and the cost free or low this is very common.

They also (at least in my experience) try to force you to watch via the browser. It's far more ergonomic for me to yt-dlp a full playlist and watch it locally.

Luckily MIT OCW exists and an almost unimaginably wide variety of educational material is constantly being dumped on youtube.

> A substantial amount of people have transformed their lives by learning from MOOCs.

MOOCs are great and I agree: A lot of people have benefited.

The only disappointment is relative to the impossible hype cycle that was happening when MOOCs first entered the scene. You couldn’t open a MOOC relayed article or thread without some speculation that this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen, but MOOCs have been quite valuable on their own when well executed.

The primary disappointment I’ve seen is the half-baked courses that have been put out there. The first MOOC I tried was great and well run. The next two or three felt like they assigned some undergrad student a make-work project to put some old course materials on a website but they left out key parts. I remember it almost felt intentional, like someone didn’t want to put too much of the material online or the professor had objected to sharing their materials. They just wanted to say they got in on the MOOC train.

The later generation of courses that were made for the Internet were far better executed, of course, but they weren’t as plentiful and widespread as the hype predicted.

It's true, I took MOOCs because I wanted to learn things, and they were actually good at that. It was actually damn impressive how e.g. Andrew Ng's courses stripped away all difficulty which was not related to the thing you're actually trying to learn. The impact of that when you're self-directed is hard to overstate - nothing kills motivation like getting bogged down in getting software to work or confirming to some professor's favorite citation style.

Yet they seem to not understand that. They're all about my "career goals", they can't seem to comprehend that I would be there for any reason but impressing a fortune 500 company (which, from what I understand, it never does anyway).

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