Rise of the Online Code Schools 98
Barence writes "When it comes to programming, the classroom is moving online. A new wave of start-ups has burst onto the scene over the last year, bringing interactive lessons and gamification techniques to the subject to make coding trendy again. From Codecademy — and its incredibly successful Code Year initiative — to Khan Academy, Code School and Udacity, online learning is now sophisticated and high-tech — but is it good enough to replace the classroom? 'We are the first five or six chapters in a book,' says Code School's Gregg Pollack in this exploration of online code classes, but with the number of sites and lessons growing by the week that might not be the case for long."
Regular universities don't sell you the knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
They sell you their prestige, their accreditation, their confirmation that you at least showed up to class for four years and jumped through the basic hoops.
These online schools will give you knowledge. But it's always been possible to get that outside of the traditional classroom anyway. There are plenty of self-taught programmers out there (and in plenty of other fields to).
But the thing they're lacking right now is the ability to give you a piece of paper that will get you past HR to a job interview.
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The for-profits are trying to do that, or rather, they're trying to offer placement services, i.e. sell your CV to recruiters. At least the for-profits have every reason to fight for the prestige of their online classes.
Re:Regular universities don't sell you the knowled (Score:5, Insightful)
Regular universities can and do sell you a great deal more than that, including:
- research opportunities
- highly skilled mentors and teachers
- a real-world community of people studying both the same sort of things as you, and wildly different sorts of things
- regular social contact with relatively capable and intelligent people of the appropriate sex (for straight guys, be aware that a significant majority of college students are women, so the odds are very much in your favor)
If your goal in life is to code 8-10 hours a day and use the rest of your time to watch TV, movies, or play video games, then you're right that university is basically useless. If you have any ambitions beyond that, then take the regular university degree if you can at all manage to do that.
Re:Regular universities don't sell you the knowled (Score:4, Insightful)
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What you claim to be anti-education and anti-intellectual are often just anti-classical education.
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Well, people do latch onto them because they're big and famous. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the two biggest and well known examples. And there are probably dozens of others as well in tech, and thousands if you include other fields.
Problem is, the population of the western world is in the hundreds of millions. For every Gates or Zucker
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Exactly this. And what's odd is that these same people would completely tear into their contemporary if he said, "I'm going to play in the NBA". Statistically, that ball-playing kid has a better chance of making it in the NBA, then any of those geeks has a chance of becoming the next Jobs, Woz, Gates or Zuck.
The reality is that a programmer who isn't a genius, but is capable, on time, able to write clear
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You can even calculate the odds of success: There are approximately 1 million professional software developers in the US. Of those, fewer than 10 have become big and famous. And the key decisions you have to make to become one of those 10 guys have more to do with sheer luck than they do with your technical skills.
For instance, one of the graduates of my alma mater went on to graduate school at Stanford, focused heavily on AI research. While there, he had the opportunity to partner with a couple of his clas
Re:Regular universities don't sell you the knowled (Score:4, Funny)
- regular social contact with relatively capable and intelligent people of the appropriate sex (for straight guys, be aware that a significant majority of college students are women, so the odds are very much in your favor)
I sure screwed that one up... I went to a tech-oriented college with a male-to-female ration of something like 6 to 1... I wonder at times if I should've picked a different school... Like maybe that fashion design college in Portland, that might've worked better...
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Better yet, go learn the local language at a fashion college in a foreign country. It doesn't get better than this. I did something similar after I got my engineering degree.
Sure it wasn't you? (Score:2)
While it is true that the ratio of guys to girls at schools like that is 4:1, what you have to factor in is that because it is a tech school, 3.5 out of 4 of those guys are socially dysfunctional, making the eligible male-to-female ratio closer to 1:2.
So, if you did not have much romantic success, you first have to figure out if you were in the 3.5 or the 0.5. If the 3.5, it's unlikely that going to a different school would have helped.
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This only matters if you're going into academia. Research is not something you put on your resume to get a job, if only because HR will think you're "overqualified" for a position with any real work and will leave quickly.
Yes, some people need these, but you will not get them at the university. Professors do not have time for much one-on-one instruction, and while you can show up during their office hours, there is no guarantee that you'll get any
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Research matters for every programmer or engineer who wants to be more than a technician. They all do some research in their jobs, have to deal with the unknown, figure out some solutions, etc. Skipping this is as stupid as skipping classes that provide a breadth of education.
Mentors are not tutors. Not even similar.
If you do not know about computational algorithms, you will be a terrible programmer. I am not kidding here. You can tell good programmers from bad programmers because they have poor unders
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Research opportunities -- maybe at the PhD level, but the private sector doesn't like to hire software PhDs for a good reason.
Highly skilled mentors and teachers -- who are counting on their university pensions instead of learning what's happening in the real world of software development. I don't blame them for seeking safety, but let's not pretend that 90% of professors are "highly skilled mentors and teachers".
Real-world community -- of people who are just as lost. Might as well used Reddit.
Regular socia
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The "Highly skilled mentors and teachers" had this point of view.
20% of the class will pass no matter what, so ignore those students. Do not answer their questions. It is not about improving them or preparing them for employment or future studies. The short tem goal is of getting the most students to pass the coruse. Providing any mentoring to those students who will pass anyways is a waste of time.
Then there are 20% who will fail no matter what. They will not grasp the material in the 10 or 12 weeks they h
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Yes, "triage [wikipedia.org] teaching," which means the the over-achievers are basically wasting their money (especially at the undergrad level).
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You went to the wrong school.
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This may be your particular institution. If is not hard to find professors willing to go the extra distance for the more motivated students. And there's always the opportunity for independent study with a professor or joining a research project (even if not doing research and just coding for it), etc. And most professors do have regularly scheduled office hours where you can ask any questions you like.
I do think what you say is more often true in lower division courses, especially the heavily populated o
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"Software" PhDs? Never heard of them. Or do you mean mathematics, computer science, and computer engineering PhDs? Companies do hire them, but maybe not in the huge numbers that they hire grunt techies. They don't hire PhDs in large numbers because there's a feeling that they cost more, however they also come with a lot of usefulness, the ability to think and reason beyond today's current programming fads, they've proven that they can take on a large and complex project on their own and manage it, etc.
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Regular universities don't sell you the knowledge.....
They sell you there resources, connections,network, and reputation. Very difficult to get your foot in the door for a job if all you have is knowledge and skill.
Why? It takes work for companies to actually spend the time and effort to evaluate each potential candidate for a job and figure out the candidate's actual knowledge and skill set.
The easiest thing for an employer to do to filter out resumes/applicants is to trust the brand name. It is the same thing that people do in a grocery store when the
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The easiest thing for an employer to do to filter out resumes/applicants is to trust the brand name. It is the same thing that people do in a grocery store when they want to choose a product that is produced by many companies. It is a heuristic to conserve mental energy and a way of life.
And to ease their employers lot, , students should expect to go into debt.
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It's nearly impossible to get a good assessment of a younger person from their resume. It's too small. Even in an interview it can be difficult to assess someone accurately for purposes of having a long term hire. Later on it gets easier as the resume has more experience, there are past employers to call and ask questions, etc. So having a degree while it may seem minor does give a lot more confidence to someone doing the hiring compared to the self taught online course taking applicant.
Maybe it's not "
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If these online schools get talented coders past HR - and save mileage and minutes in the process - how is this not a good thing?
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So attend a school within your own state. Or combine the self-taught technical part with a real education in another field (ie, get a degree in math or literature). Employers will respect that much more than someone who took some classes online but has nothing else in the background. Also pad it all with a lot of part time work or internships, employers will respect that as well.
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I know an awful lot of "self taught" programmers who are completely incapable of finding any solution that can't be googled for. They came up in the age of web based everything, self taught on php and javascript, and are used to everything being in a library or on stack overflow. Ask them to leave their narrow little box and they can't do it.
The best coders have formal training and the passion to code outside of their classes as well. Whether they're self taught or not doesn't matter, what matters is the
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I know an awful lot of "self taught" programmers who are completely incapable of finding any solution that can't be googled for.
In my opinion, people in general lack critical thinking skills. I've noticed quite a few people with degrees that display similar symptoms of ignorance.
And dear god was my code completely lacking in any real understanding of what I was doing.
It sounds like your self-teaching was inadequate. Information doesn't just come from universities; if you have the right resources and enough willpower, you can train yourself quite well, and perhaps even more efficiently than a college/university could. Not everyone is capable of educating themselves properly, but there are people who are.
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And here's the problem- without someone teaching you, its pretty impossible to know that your level of skill is adequate or inadequate until looking at it in hindsight. Thus the biggest problem with the straight out of high school crowd- they think they're a lot better than they are.
You can train yourself on your own, but you will NEVER do so more efficiently than under a teacher and program. Its completely impossible, if for no other reason than the program knows what you need to teach yourself next an
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its pretty impossible to know that your level of skill is adequate or inadequate until looking at it in hindsight.
Which is pretty much what should be happening to begin with. You will improve over time and then be able to look back at your old work and laugh. Of course, a teacher being there allows that to happen more immediately.
Studying the code of skilled programmers is very helpful, too.
but you will NEVER do so more efficiently than under a teacher and program.
Never? As in, it's 100% impossible for anyone to ever do it? I object to that. Someone who learns at a fast pace may only be held back by having to complete mundane assignments, being told what to do and when to do it, and having to
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You are also describing a rote class. They're not all that way. A teacher does not mean just someone sitting at the front of a class droning on and one. A teacher teaches. If you have a teacher who teaches then you will absolutely to better with that person than alone.
Plus, even with the dumbest teacher and the most boring class you still always have the opportunity to do both, go to the boring class and teach yourself at home or the library.
If you "opt out" of the system you will only hurt yourself in
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You are also describing a rote class.
It doesn't even have to be a rote class.
If you have a teacher who teaches then you will absolutely to better with that person than alone.
Depends on the student. There is no 'one size fits all' solution for education.
Plus, even with the dumbest teacher and the most boring class you still always have the opportunity to do both, go to the boring class and teach yourself at home or the library.
Except that then you'd be wasting your time in the class.
If you "opt out" of the system you will only hurt yourself in the long run
But there are people who do not do as well in the formal education environment for various reasons.
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Formal education environments always allow the student to work on their own in their free time. So "student on their own plus in class" is greater than or equal to "student on their own".
I think that the student who doesn't do well in a formal education environment will have great troubles in a self directed environment, especially an experimental one designed to teach the student a very narrow focus of material. Will that student have the discipline to branch out from the narrow focus (ie, more than web
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Formal education environments always allow the student to work on their own in their free time.
Not without soaking up their time.
I think that the student who doesn't do well in a formal education environment will have great troubles in a self directed environment, especially an experimental one designed to teach the student a very narrow focus of material. Will that student have the discipline to branch out from the narrow focus (ie, more than web building or mobile app building), will that student bother to learn theory, will that student take the time to learn a foreign language or literature?
I don't see why not.
We've always had young people from the beginning of time think they know more than their teachers.
I don't see why you keep mentioning this.
The entire point is that formal education is not a one-size-fits-all solution to everything; there are almost always exceptions.
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I think this is because programming has become a somewhat mass market job these days. People tend to say "coders" instead of "programmers", when in the past a coder was a flunky's job. Companies also want hordes of programmers similar to how companies in the past wanted hordes of factory floor workers. Students go into computers because it's a job not because they think it's a fun thing to do as a life long career or because they are deeply fascinated by how things work. So in the 70'/80's you would see
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While in college I was the only student that learened to code "old school". I have written out a lot of code in the past on paper. Even now, I still doodle out pseudo code on paper and then sometimes refine it into actual code.
We had an intructor at one point asked for a simple 10 line progam be written down on a test. Out of 60 students I am the only one that was able to produce running code. Everyone else was so used to relying on Intelesense that their code was riddled with syntax errors. They were to us
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Everyone else was so used to relying on Intelesense that their code was riddled with syntax errors.
I'd say actually understanding the material is far more important than being able to write down compilable code on a piece of paper. That might be more of a problem is compilation was extremely difficult, but you rarely need to write perfect code on a piece of paper.
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I started out coding as a hobby in my teens. I have something most kids in there mid 20's do not have when they get out of college.
Perspective.
How do I know my code is maintainable? I a have looked at code I have written 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or longer and had to maintain it. I have adjusted my coding paractices accordingly. If something I wrote 5 years ago is broke or needs to be modified and I can't figure out the logic, flow of the program, the data structures, etc by the comments, variable and func
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I dont' know. I don't see that many good "self taught" programmers. I do see a lot of self taught grunt programmers though. Maybe they're good for the current fashion but they have difficulty when adapting to changing fashions, and they have a terrible breadth of knowledge.
Breadth of knowledge is vital. It trains the brain to think. If you can only do one thing in life then you will run into problems often and the brain gets flabby. Breadth of knowledge helps you understand what the code you write is
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I learned enough in college to land a job as a developer and be good at it
How? I'm mostly serious AC not joking around. Show me a curriculum covering at least some systems analysis, any version control and/or other team software at all, any debugging at all, working on problems longer than 200 lines, MODERN development techniques/styles/fads, and enough business knowledge to fit in.
You may have learned that stuff on your own while attending school, but that's not an achievement of the school. I've never even heard of a school that teaches developer skills. There's thousands o
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Which incidentally taught me knowledge that's a lot harder to pick up than a version control, or modern development fads (woohoo! I'm agile!). I've made plenty of money because of my ability to read assembly output, parse complex things, and understand algorithmic complexity, and that's a lot harder to 'pick up' than git or svn.
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The knowledge I gained about synchronization alone is almost worth the entire degree. Worth much more than any modern development technique. It's so sad to watch other people struggle miserably at it (and even more sad to have to clean up their messes).
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They sell you their prestige, their accreditation, their confirmation that you at least showed up to class for four years and jumped through the basic hoops.
These online schools will give you knowledge. But it's always been possible to get that outside of the traditional classroom anyway. There are plenty of self-taught programmers out there (and in plenty of other fields to).
But the thing they're lacking right now is the ability to give you a piece of paper that will get you past HR to a job interview.
Reread the article, and you'll find that even the people working in the online education sector don't agree with you. (Well, Thrun might do.) Codecademy's Gregg Pollack talks about them giving the basic skills:
“Self-guided learning can only take you so far. At some point you need to be put in an environment where you’re working with somebody on projects and being mentored. There’s certainly a piece of the puzzle there that we’re not dealing with yet, that a lot of these online self-guided tools aren’t dealing with yet.”
Note how quick he is to point out that "we" doesn't just mean Codecademy, but everyone in the online learning space. My experience with online learning is limited, but the Udacity course I took (CS253 Web Development) seemed more like a worked example of a programming project than a genuine universi
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I feel that if a student does not want to attend a traditional education experience that they should be prepared to not join the traditional job market. Yes universities certainly have some problems but you have to put up with it if you want to deal with the real world that wants university degrees. And almost all universities do provide a large amount of freedom for a motivated student to excel, where they tend to fail most are with the unmotivated students.
The biggest problem with online courses and man
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Regular universities don't sell you the knowledge
Wow, I don't know what university you attended, but I learned a LOT at my university.
Could I have learned it elsewhere? Sure, anything can be learned elsewhere, but the university was a convenient place to gain a lot of knowledge. I'm sorry yours was so sucky.
Industry Conspiracy! (Score:1)
This is a conspiracy by the high tech industry to make coding (and computer science too) education easily accessed and free so that poor but smart people in Third World countries can learn this stuff. Then when those people who are capable learn this stuff - all those billions and billions of poor people - the high tech industry will have a virtually endless supply of very cheap workers!
Need a custom CRM system?! NO problem! The sales guy with his expensive suit, Exlax watch, and some over priced and over
Despair... (Score:2)
ANYTHING can be good enough to replace a classroom because the real learning happens in the home's computer, doing the exercises.
The needed knowledge can be reached on books.
A good teacher can help a lot when you are stuck on a problem. But this help can be done using a mailing list.
But the better teacher, using the better books on the most techy classroom of the world is useless if the student don't do the fscking exercises at home, at night. Few hours of algorithm theory in a classroom is just not enough.
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ANYTHING can be good enough to replace a classroom because the real learning happens in the home's computer, doing the exercises.
Your lack of understanding of education is astonishing.
The needed knowledge can be reached on books.
I hope the irony of you using "on" in error, when you meant "in" is not lost on you. Whether English is your primary or secondary language, why are you making that mistake? Shouldn't your use of "doing" and books have corrected it by now?
Do you still maintain that classrooms are use
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I hope the irony of you using "on" in error, when you meant "in" is not lost on you. Whether English is your primary or secondary language, why are you making that mistake? Shouldn't your use of "doing" and books have corrected it by now?
Unsurprisingly, I see people who have degrees making the same mistakes, but I still would not claim that that alone means that formal education is doomed to fail.
Do you still maintain that classrooms are useless?
I don't think I see anything in your comment that would change anyone's mind.
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Learn by doing (Score:2)
Classes are great- they give you the deadlines and some basic knowledge, but like any other skill, it must be practiced to be fully developed. Programming can mesh well with online learning- the physical requirements (equipment) are pretty easily available. A class is great, it is only a complement to actually doing something, and that requires commitment from the student.
However, I think "programming" is just way too generic a designator. Knowing how to program is mostly about knowing syntax- it doesn't r
Good Teachers are needed... (Score:2)
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a confused student can go unnoticed in the traditional classroom if he or she doesn't give those visual queues and doesn't ask for assistance. Then the test comes by and it is too late for the student.
Isn't that a LONG TERM extremely positive outcome? Everybody's gotta learn the lesson that they're responsible to further their own education, and in the long term it seems a heck of a lot less painful to fail a high school test than to get fired from a job a decade later. Learning you'll fail unless you communicate is frankly better learned as a kid in your classroom than as an adult worker in the cube next to me, however infuriating it might be to you at that time. Technological crutch might exist in y
Gamification...? (Score:2)
These students are wonderful for online classrooms as they tend to be the type of students who "step up" to a challenge and try to figure things out in order to learn. A lot of students in the classroom today just want me to tell them what the answers are. These students will not grow in their education on their own. Gamifying a curriculum can help some of these students.
Funny word that, gamification. I remember when it was a new word, there was an article about it on one of the big sites (Gamasutra, IIRC). One of the more intellectually inclined devs interviewed pointed out that the whole idea of gamification was kind of arse-over-tit, because the whole idea of "fun" in a game comes from the fact that you are constantly learning and applying knowledge to solve problems. Gamification tends to add the accoutrements of gaming -- high score tables, achievements etc -- but i
sophisticated and high-tech? (Score:3)
learning is now sophisticated and high-tech
How so?
In the 80s I watched videos delivered over cable, and they still are... Of course the deeply underlying protocols that the endusers have no interaction with have changed from FDM NTSC of educational PBS broadcasts to weird internet codecs over a docsis modem, but whatever its not like the end users will tell any difference... 75 ohm coax goes here, video comes out there...
Interactive gamification was done by my kindergarten teacher, its nothing new.
We are the first five or six chapters in a book
My experience in taking some classes is its more like the first five or six classes in a thirty two class undergrad curriculum. Everybody wants to offer freshman classes like intro to programming 101 and first semester calculus, no one wants to offer what I would actually be interested in, like upper level undergrad or grad school classes.
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A great time to be an aspiring engineer! (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been in the game development industry for 18 years now having had the honor of being a major part of great projects like League of Legends and Ultima Online. My original training from the university was COBOL on big iron mainframes but as soon as I started coding professional, I knew I wanted to be a game developer. The public Internet was only accessible if you knew a local ISP and could get your Trumpet Winsock or equivalent configured correctly, Linux was just a quirky, novel whisper, Windows was still 3.11 and a TERRIBLE gaming platform, game publishers controlled the funding (and thus controlled the developers) and games were, for the most part, sold in boxes at brick and mortar store.
Despite having only had one semester of C in college (and never even heard of C++), I would rush home each night to hack away learning game programming from Andre Lamothe's Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus on my Gateway P90 (The Cow!) and landed my first job pretending to know C++ with a crappy demo I created for the interview.
Fast forward 18 years. Nearly unlimited bandwidth and online distribution capabilities, cheap hosting, many open platforms (from the point of view you don't have to get Publisher buy-in or permission) like Windows, Mac, Linux, Facebook, Android, iPhone for which to develop and run games. High quality game engines, tools and backends are available (Unity, Allegro, SDL, Apache, Glassfish, JBoss, MySQL, Flash, CSS/Javascript, etc). Even funding is now democratic and open with Kickstarter and YCombinator and not gated by publishers. The only limitation is one's ability to inspire people with a great idea. And for those wanting to delve further into hardware, we even have Arduino.
For me personally... I'm on the verge of launching my own personal cross-platform MMO built from the ground up that will run on just about any and every possible comuting platform on the planet and have the potential to reach anyone and everyone around the globe. I never would have dreamed that was possible 18 years ago! It's breathtaking...
Truly an amazing time to be an aspiring engineer!
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As a follow-up...
I remember doing some proof-of-concept testing on a new exotic piece of hardware for running Ultima Online servers in 1999. It was an 8 CPU (the idea of "cores" wasn't a common notion then) machine costing close to $100,000. We decided to stick with our existing configuration of using four quad-CPU machines which were far cheaper comparatively speaking.
Today, I can easily purchase and build my own 24+ core server machine at a fraction of that price and that's assuming I don't simply just
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Actually, when I was in school we did many of our projects in C however we never once had a "C course" or a "semester in C". All of this was self taught! I only had 3 classes where programming languages were taught: the freshman intro to programming class (Pascal), the later assembly language class, and an elective about comparison of programming languages (Prolog, Lisp, Ada, etc). In absolutely all other classes there was little time spent teaching programming and it was expected that the student put in
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My "semester of C" was actually a "Data Structures and Algorithms" class that happened to be taught in C whereas every other class I took was related to COBOL, JCL, CICS on the mainframe (also with a semester in IBM 360 Assembly which was pretty cool!).
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Uvlad Brolaf?! lol j/k :-)
There's definitely things I'd like to go back and do better on every project I've been on (UO, TR, SWG, DDO, LoTRO, LoL).
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
When I learned C we had a prof stand at the front of the room and ramble twice a week for 2 hours, I came out of that class knowing 0% of the C language. I didn't start learning it until I sat down and started to program. Think about trying to teach a student about embedded programming without having them sit down and write embedded style C. I would be surprised if many / any students get there first, second or even third project to work out of the gate. Now instead take the same student, give them an Arduino and tell them to make a motor run, in the same amount of time that you will teach them on the board, they can have a little motor running and they will have acquired a million times as much knowledge.
Would you teach a chef to cook by having them sit in a classroom and never touch an oven? Would you have a firefighter learn to put a fire out by never having them hold a hose? It's pretty clear and obvious that learning by doing is a far more effective method of learning then the old outdated method of sitting there where your talked to.
Rote lecturing is dead (Score:3)
Rote lecturing as the primary education tool is hopefully on the way out. Teachers in the form of Coaches and Mentors are needed more than ever to help guide and inspire the future generations. I agree with you, this should be a hands-on, two-way interaction and for engineering, can definitely be that way even regardless of geography.
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I didn't find leaning C the same, the teacher taught the theory during the morning (which I somehow learnt even though I slept half the time - too easy) and we did the practical in the afternoon, I guess he was a good teacher because the practical seemed like a formality.
A good teacher makes a huge difference, I'm currently teaching myself Java by watching youtube tutorials, there's too much type this code and not enough explanations of the fundamentals, such as explaining what different syntax does.
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That doesn't sound like a teacher though. It's just a bad class.
Cooking schools actually do have lectures! But they also have the students practice, they have small groups working together, some classes are small, some are larger, lots of individual assignments and homework, etc. This is very much like many universities actually! The difference may be that a lot of universities are much more regimented, but they certainly had homework, they certainly required you to go home and learn what was taught in
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It should be a mix I think, there are some concepts hard to teach by just doing and you need to explain and show what's going on. Ie, recursion, theory, algorithms, data structures, programming, etc. Most lab classes I've been in either included a lecture component or were paired with a different class anyway. I can think of only one class that was a standalone lab. The intro class I took was self-study with a lab but also regular lectures as well (not required).
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The gig is almost up for Universities (Score:1)
The problem for universities is the employers aren't hiring or scaling pay the way they used to, and relative to the return, for the average student, the value proposition is not as good.
Once someone of note starts offering real paper for online classes, or employers start accepting it - something, I think, that is already happening - the ivory tower of cards is going to fall very fast and very hard.
WebPlatform (Score:4, Informative)
It was only just recently created (October 8th), so it's pretty rudimentary at this point. They characterize it as being in alpha. But have a look-see. If you code or want to code for the web, it's well worth bookmarking and checking back from time to time. And if you really know the subject matter, it's a good place to contribute.
if you can only code you will have a hard time (Score:2)
Online doesn't work for average students (so far) (Score:4, Insightful)
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One of the biggest issues for current MOOCs is the large attrition rate (in the 90% range). Assuming that people signing up are at least average intelligence (on average of course), this suggests that average students are unable, for whatever reasons, to complete these courses. Part of it is that the instructors come from elite universities, are used to teaching elite students, and approach the MOOC in the same way, leaving the average student in the dust. Another part is that average students lack the motivation, discipline, as well as the smarts to learn complex concepts without a real-life instruction.
New Years Resolutions also have a high failure rate too, are people too dumb to lose weight? The bottom line is that people change their minds, lose focus, are lazy, have ADD, don't get that job, adjust career goals, on and on and on. You being an elitist, attribute the attrition rate to ignorant peasants attempting to learn the skills of the gods, while the truth is that life happens and people saw something shiny and they signed up ... then forgot about it
Re: (Score:2)
Tech / IT needs to more trades like at least in th (Score:2)
Tech / IT needs to more trades like at least in the learning / classes part.
The old colleges are still suck in the past in some ways.
Like fixed long time tables.
More theory's based then hands on
Lot's of filler and fluff classes.
Stuff padded out to fill credit hours as well things slimmed down to fit in.