tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post8089578476781569285..comments2024-03-27T19:58:17.387-05:00Comments on Computational Complexity: MOOCsLance Fortnowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06752030912874378610noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-23128180958915319532012-08-06T23:33:10.210-05:002012-08-06T23:33:10.210-05:00I signed up for some courses but did not complete ...I signed up for some courses but did not complete the course. For the reason was that I didn't need to. And it was not a priority, so when I have higher priority works to do I stop spending time on the courses.<br /><br />Still, there might be also something about the design. For example, having a schedule for assignments can be cause of the problem. Finishing the course is not my job, I follow the course as much as I can in my free time. And availability of free time changes over the the and does not strongly correlate with he course schedule. More fundamentally it can be a result f lack of incentives to finish an online course in the specific time frame.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-13022237499991745422012-08-05T08:15:20.503-05:002012-08-05T08:15:20.503-05:00So there's no sense reflecting upon Stephenson...So there's no sense <i><b><a href="http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starvation" rel="nofollow">reflecting upon Stephenson</a></b></i> … eh, "anonymous"? :)John Sidleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16286860374431298556noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-79755847926213091352012-08-04T16:59:00.491-05:002012-08-04T16:59:00.491-05:00Sidles appears to post random nonsense much of the...Sidles appears to post random nonsense much of the time, often off topic as if he wished he had a blog of his own with an audience but lacking one he tries to hijack this one. Here rather than answer the question he insults the poster and sidesteps any attempt at being on-topic.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-28354209324256191752012-08-04T15:25:51.579-05:002012-08-04T15:25:51.579-05:00"Anonymous", hopefully the complexity th..."Anonymous", hopefully the complexity theory community can conceive more interesting questions than the particular one you asked. After all:<br /><br />--------<br />"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician".<br /><br /> — Hilbert's response upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry.<br />---------<br /><br />Good answers depend upon good questions, that in turn are founded upon good postulates. <br /><br />So would you care to ask a different question, that perhaps is founded upon different postulates? :)John Sidleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16286860374431298556noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-68913149954632668112012-08-04T08:09:59.046-05:002012-08-04T08:09:59.046-05:00Are you seriously proposing that all healthy confe...Are you seriously proposing that all healthy conferences grow exponentially?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-46867027404735034002012-08-03T17:32:57.892-05:002012-08-03T17:32:57.892-05:00Hmmm … and the boiling-frog response of academia ...Hmmm … and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog" rel="nofollow">boiling-frog response</a> of academia to the generational challenge of these now-structural deficits, provides little reason to foresee substantial near-term improvement.John Sidleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16286860374431298556noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-46395233383112053562012-08-02T18:26:04.897-05:002012-08-02T18:26:04.897-05:00Per Lance's figures, CCC attendance has stagna...Per Lance's figures, <a href="http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2008/07/attendence-at-ccc-i-history.html" rel="nofollow">CCC attendance has stagnated</a> for a generation, while the world's population has nearly doubled and its computational capacity has increased ~100X. As Krusty the Clown says: "Uh oh. That's not good."<br /><br />One lesson: whatever the problems that challenge academia may be, we can be reasonably assured they're not new.John Sidleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16286860374431298556noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-18568941407927260522012-08-02T17:22:32.141-05:002012-08-02T17:22:32.141-05:00Cut out the middle-management that does little or ...Cut out the middle-management that does little or nothing or gets in the way and you would save a ton. When the assistant to the associate has their own assistants to answer the phone and act as receptionist to their office while they spend half their time doing water cooler gossip, there's something very wrong.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-23247605397449683092012-08-02T17:13:33.080-05:002012-08-02T17:13:33.080-05:00Who pays for systems like Coursea? Someone has to...Who pays for systems like Coursea? Someone has to pay. Students? <br /><br />How much does a University get paid for offering a course for free to the masses?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-39492242407407680842012-08-02T17:04:42.780-05:002012-08-02T17:04:42.780-05:00of the over 65,000 who signed up for the HCI cours...of the over 65,000 who signed up for the HCI course that was run via Coursea, how many started? how many finished? how much do we know they learned?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-37949883491000802802012-08-02T09:43:52.077-05:002012-08-02T09:43:52.077-05:00The same basic premise of MOOCs has existed foreve...The same basic premise of MOOCs has existed forever: cheap, mass-production-like education. They're called library cards. Knowledge has always existed for free but that hasn't put Universities and colleges out of business because they're not the same thing. MOOCs, traditional lectures, and even smaller online lectures are not at all comparable. <br /><br />And anyone who starts the conversation with criticizing the salaries of faculty is an idiot or a liar or somewhere between that spectrum. It is obvious to anyone without an ideological bent that the cost of higher ed is a failure on the part of state governments to support it and make it affordable for its citizens.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-51494214781905379812012-08-02T09:39:11.182-05:002012-08-02T09:39:11.182-05:00Well the barrier to entry is also much lower. Some...Well the barrier to entry is also much lower. Someone thinks "Quantum Mechanics, awesome! I always wanted to learn that!" Never mind that they've never heard of "eigenvalue" or "conjugate tranpose". I suspect out of the vaunted "100,000 students" a good number fall into this category.rwebahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03128005962472194043noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-1320063742645540232012-08-02T08:33:25.565-05:002012-08-02T08:33:25.565-05:00The only thing I will say about MOOCs is that it i...The only thing I will say about MOOCs is that it is important to consider the number of people who complete the course, rather than the number of people who sign up, as a measure of their success. From my experience, a 10% completion rate would be a generous overestimate for most Stanford-style MOOCs (see my comment on Richard Lipton's post http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/an-education-tsunami/).<br /><br />What this means is that by far the majority of people who complete a course in the subjects offered by these MOOCs are still doing so in a traditional university. In fact, you only need to lump together three or four universities to beet most MOOCs. MOOCs do not yet have the orders of magnitude increase in reach over traditional courses that is sometimes claimed.<br /><br />This does not mean that MOOCs won't become dominant in the future, but we do need to think about the reasons for high dropout rates when we are considering what technologies and approaches to education to adopt in our own universities. If, as I suspect, the lack of personal contact turns out to be a major factor, then adopting them in universities may not be as cost effective as some people seem to think. We may still need the same number of faculty that we have now, but they will have to focus more on interaction with students than with lecturing. It may be a good thing if they are able to do that, but it won't be cheaper.msleiferhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06482653494158110204noreply@blogger.com