I've touched on it slightly before (mostly in off-the-cuff remarks about how Udacity seems to reorient itself towards professional training); I find it rather fascinating how different “academical” MOOCs feel from “professional” ones.
Let's introduce our terms, first. I'm using “academical” to qualify courses given by a teaching institution, with an outward goal of teaching fundamental concepts and practices, sometimes through the use of a given product. “Professional” courses are provided by companies and aim at giving immediately useable skills focused on a specific product. For instance: “Introduction to Biology, the Secret of Life” from MIT is a academical course; “Introduction to Hadoop and MapReduce” by Cloudera through Udacity is professional training.
Sometimes the distinction is a bit blurry, as some “academical” courses steer very close to “pro” − I'm thinking of UC Berkeley's “Software as a Service” course, which could very well be renamed “Introduction to Ruby on Rails”. That's not a bad thing in itself: I am definitely not arguing that “professional” training is somehow “lesser than” academical courses. Keeping oneself updated on specific products and techniques is very important in intellectual professions.
I am currently following a “professional” course from MongoDB, Inc.: “Advanced deployment and operations”, focused − obviously − on the intricacies of deploying and administering MongoDB instances. This course uses the OpenEdX platform, in a more or less classical way: video lectures, quick questions, then homework. Some of the homework uses locally-installed software that evaluates hands-on manipulations, and that's one of the great things about this course. Overall the course is great, the lectures are clear and detailed, and indeed quite advanced.
And then, there are the discussion forums. To put it bluntly… a lot of “pro” training students are, I don't know, hopeless? How can they hope to complete an advanced course on database operations when they obviously can't be bothered to do more than cut-and-paste commands without trying to understand what they're doing − and then go whine on the forums? This week I've been trying to help out − after all, not everybody who's taking the course is supposed to be proficient at using Linux (which is the platform used for the homework). But I find that a lot of people don't even understand the concepts of host names, TCP ports, or the difference between one and three. (Yes, the numbers.) And then, when things don't work, they post angry comments on the forums following the lines of “the instructions are crappy, I followed them and it gives me an error!”
I really admire the patience of the TAs.
What I find slightly disquieting is that, through help obtained on the forums (it seems the “do not post full answers” / “do not ask for homework answers”), these people will complete the course, and they will get the certificate, and they will be hopeless nonetheless. I guess I should be happy, this means I'll have no problem finding employment fixing the obvious mistakes others have made… but seriously, it means that people will be handed the keys to big databases when they really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a root account.
Anyway. Rant off.
What I find interesting is that, by and large, we don't get the same clueless types in academical MOOCs. Oh, we do get a handful of 15-year-olds with more enthusiasm than understanding of the underlying ideas, and we do get people complaining about homework that's too difficult or “unfair”, but not nearly as many, and they are not nearly so obnoxious. And that, indeed, also applies to borderline courses − I just went back to check the forums for the Berkeley Rails course: the overall level is much higher. The course homework was to be done on a Linux virtual machine: there were overall very few issues with using that.
Now why is that? Why does a course titled “MongoDB advanced deployment and operations”, explicitly aimed at people with significant systems experience, attract so many people who lack the very basics, while a course called “Software as a Service” aimed at undergraduates, mostly gets clued-up students? I'm guessing that, in essence, a “pro training” course, being more concrete, attracts students a priori less at ease with more abstract topics. Also, pro training is more immediately useful, it is something that can be boasted about on a resume. I guess the employment value of “I completed both modules of MongoDB DBA courses” is greater than “I completed UC Berkeley's overview of building software as a service” (although, having done both courses, I'd rank them equally − actually, the Berkeley homework being harder, I'd prefer candidates with that on their CVs. But most employers will not have done all the courses.)
Of course, the a priori less technical MOOCs also get their share of less qualified people. Based on the discussion forums, I'd say a number of students who took the Copenhagen Diabetes course weren't very well armed to deal with that kind of advanced matter − but still, while I didn't use the forums as much, I didn't find them plagued with so many whines and complaints. I guess it's because the people there had a real willingness to learn, as opposed to rack up a certificate to boost up their career prospects.
Or something. I don't know, really.
I'll just avoid the MongoDB course's forums, I guess.
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