alt Hacker NewsIt’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.
But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.
These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.
Replies
The meaningful competitor wrt. raw educational content is freely available OpenCourseware made available under CC licenses, which prevent any after-the-fact rugpull. Of course online learning also has a big service-provision and perhaps certification component, which is where specialty platforms like Coursera and Udemy may have a real advantage.
The platforms lost because they enshittified and everyone left because of it, not because YouTube existed (it already did when they started). Compare the ancient "legacy" stuff that Coursera had to the stuff it has today. Little wonder nobody actually wants what they're selling.
As another comment here said:
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.
> It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.
I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.
Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar.
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?