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Ethan Solomon
It's hard to define "winning" when it comes to online education, even if you break it down by things like quality and prestige (How do you measure educational quality? What exactly does it mean for an educational platform to have prestige?)
That being said, I think we're starting to see an interesting divergence between Coursera and edX.
Quality vs. Quantity
Those numbers say Coursera is winning the popularity contest, but they say nothing about quality. In fact, I'm taking courses on both platforms right now, and I think Coursera has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to the complexity and the rigor of their courses.
Coursera's flagship Machine Learning course, for instance, is mostly a series of video lectures, multiple-choice questions, and short programming assignments with a lot of hand-holding. To be sure, it's actually a great course, and I'm learning a lot, but it doesn't feel much like the courses I took at MIT as an undergrad, and I can imagine Stanford's on-campus version of the course, CS229, is substantially more robust than what Coursera is offering.
edX's 6.00x, in comparison, feels much more like a full-fledged college-level course (granted, it's only been running for 2 weeks, compared to about 2 months for Machine Learning). The video lectures move through concepts quickly, and they're accompanied by a nontrivial number of "finger exercises," or short questions that directly relate to lecture material. The finger exercises often come straight from real, on-campus 6.00 problem sets, as do the 6.00x programming assignments.
edX has also built an online Python interpreter for 6.00x, which is used for submitting some finger exercises or problem sets. The analogue in the edX flagship course, 6.002x, was an online circuit simulator. (A pilot group of about 20 MIT students were given academic credit last term for successfully completing 6.002x, by the way.)
So, to put it very simply, what edX seems to be lacking in quantity, it's making up for in quality. edX seems to have a focus on bringing the more dynamic aspects of learning, like programming and building circuits, to the online platform, while Coursera is (so far) relying mostly on multiple-choice quiz questions or easy-ish programming assignments you do on your own machine. And edX is probably more concerned with maintaining the on-campus standards of rigor than Coursera.
(Side note: I'm sure Coursera is working on stuff like simulated circuit labs and all that jazz, but they don't have it yet. Also, it isn't bad that some Coursera courses are less rigorous than on-campus counterparts -- in fact, that means there's a lower barrier to entry from folks who might not have a huge pile of prerequisites. And I've only dabbled in a few of Coursera's 200 offerings, so maybe some truly are up to snuff with analogous on-campus courses.)
Sustainability and Flexibility
I think it says something about the platforms when edX slowly-but-surely adds big partners who make large financial contributions ($30 million each from Harvard and MIT), compared to the Coursera approach of announcing dozens of new universities at a time, some of which may only have very loose ties or interest in Coursera's mission.
Case-in-point: UC Berkeley was once a partner with Coursera, and they did offer a course, but they jumped ship and joined edX over the summer.
I don't have a lot of evidence yet, but my gut instinct tells me edX asks its university partners to make bigger commitments -- financial or otherwise -- to the edX mission. A university can have a fling with Coursera, maybe offer a few courses, but signing on with edX is a signal that you're serious about online education.
edX also differentiates itself by offering its platform for use by non-university partners. Most recently, 10gen started using the platform to offer courses on MongoDB.(http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N42/edx...) And someday, some version of edX will be open source.
Both platforms, by the way, hope that their sponsoring institutions will deploy versions of online courses for on-campus students to use as part of their residential educations. This is the "flip the classroom" idea -- outsource lectures and assignments to the computer, and bring students to class for close interaction with faculty, team-based learning, projects, research, etc.
The Verdict
There's no clear winner, and maybe there doesn't need to be one. edX is taking its time, but arguably building a more complex and capable online learning platform. Coursera is going full-steam ahead with university partnerships, but the courses might not be able to offer the rigor you'd expect or want from Stanford, Princeton, or UPenn.
At the same time, Coursera can offer a broader range of courses at difficulties well-targeted to people who simply don't have 12+ hours each week to do 6.00x's or 6.002x's problem sets. So there may be a very natural and useful distinction between the two platforms, and they could feasibly coexist.
But both may be converging to a common endpoint: Coursera's technology will surely evolve, as will edX's repertoire of university partners and courses. Will one eventually "win"? Again, really hard to say.
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It's hard to define "winning" when it comes to online education, even if you break it down by things like quality and prestige (How do you measure educational quality? What exactly does it mean for an educational platform to have prestige?)
That being said, I think we're starting to see an interesting divergence between Coursera and edX.
Quality vs. Quantity
- Coursera has 33 partner universities and nearly 200 courses, less than 1 year after launching.
- edX has 3 partner universities (more coming very soon) and 7 courses. Edit: As of Dec 14, the University of Texas School System, Wellesley College, and Georgetown University have joined, though they don't yet have any courses listed on the site.
Those numbers say Coursera is winning the popularity contest, but they say nothing about quality. In fact, I'm taking courses on both platforms right now, and I think Coursera has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to the complexity and the rigor of their courses.
Coursera's flagship Machine Learning course, for instance, is mostly a series of video lectures, multiple-choice questions, and short programming assignments with a lot of hand-holding. To be sure, it's actually a great course, and I'm learning a lot, but it doesn't feel much like the courses I took at MIT as an undergrad, and I can imagine Stanford's on-campus version of the course, CS229, is substantially more robust than what Coursera is offering.
edX's 6.00x, in comparison, feels much more like a full-fledged college-level course (granted, it's only been running for 2 weeks, compared to about 2 months for Machine Learning). The video lectures move through concepts quickly, and they're accompanied by a nontrivial number of "finger exercises," or short questions that directly relate to lecture material. The finger exercises often come straight from real, on-campus 6.00 problem sets, as do the 6.00x programming assignments.
edX has also built an online Python interpreter for 6.00x, which is used for submitting some finger exercises or problem sets. The analogue in the edX flagship course, 6.002x, was an online circuit simulator. (A pilot group of about 20 MIT students were given academic credit last term for successfully completing 6.002x, by the way.)
So, to put it very simply, what edX seems to be lacking in quantity, it's making up for in quality. edX seems to have a focus on bringing the more dynamic aspects of learning, like programming and building circuits, to the online platform, while Coursera is (so far) relying mostly on multiple-choice quiz questions or easy-ish programming assignments you do on your own machine. And edX is probably more concerned with maintaining the on-campus standards of rigor than Coursera.
(Side note: I'm sure Coursera is working on stuff like simulated circuit labs and all that jazz, but they don't have it yet. Also, it isn't bad that some Coursera courses are less rigorous than on-campus counterparts -- in fact, that means there's a lower barrier to entry from folks who might not have a huge pile of prerequisites. And I've only dabbled in a few of Coursera's 200 offerings, so maybe some truly are up to snuff with analogous on-campus courses.)
Sustainability and Flexibility
I think it says something about the platforms when edX slowly-but-surely adds big partners who make large financial contributions ($30 million each from Harvard and MIT), compared to the Coursera approach of announcing dozens of new universities at a time, some of which may only have very loose ties or interest in Coursera's mission.
Case-in-point: UC Berkeley was once a partner with Coursera, and they did offer a course, but they jumped ship and joined edX over the summer.
I don't have a lot of evidence yet, but my gut instinct tells me edX asks its university partners to make bigger commitments -- financial or otherwise -- to the edX mission. A university can have a fling with Coursera, maybe offer a few courses, but signing on with edX is a signal that you're serious about online education.
edX also differentiates itself by offering its platform for use by non-university partners. Most recently, 10gen started using the platform to offer courses on MongoDB.(http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N42/edx...) And someday, some version of edX will be open source.
Both platforms, by the way, hope that their sponsoring institutions will deploy versions of online courses for on-campus students to use as part of their residential educations. This is the "flip the classroom" idea -- outsource lectures and assignments to the computer, and bring students to class for close interaction with faculty, team-based learning, projects, research, etc.
The Verdict
There's no clear winner, and maybe there doesn't need to be one. edX is taking its time, but arguably building a more complex and capable online learning platform. Coursera is going full-steam ahead with university partnerships, but the courses might not be able to offer the rigor you'd expect or want from Stanford, Princeton, or UPenn.
At the same time, Coursera can offer a broader range of courses at difficulties well-targeted to people who simply don't have 12+ hours each week to do 6.00x's or 6.002x's problem sets. So there may be a very natural and useful distinction between the two platforms, and they could feasibly coexist.
But both may be converging to a common endpoint: Coursera's technology will surely evolve, as will edX's repertoire of university partners and courses. Will one eventually "win"? Again, really hard to say.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
