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Thursday, October 25, 2012

 
Online Education: Comments on an EconTalk between Robert Russ and Arnold Kling

Here is a link to the talk:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/10/kling_on_educat.html


Unfortunately this was a terrible talk and since the subject is close to my heart, I would like to make some comments. I believe this talk clearly demonstrates that when people feel their job security is threatened by a new innovation, they start to discrediting the subject. It also always puzzles me why  economists must express their opinion about anything and everything. I haven't seen people in other fields act in this manner but this seems like a common trend in economics.  

1. Kling claims there are only two groups of people who benefit from online courses and one group is the type of Stanford students who can interact with each other on the subject on campus. I assume he is not aware of or ignores the fact that there are already plenty of active online and offline forums where people who take courses at Udacity, etc. can gather and discuss the course material. Wasn't this worth mentioning?

2. He also mentions a large drop rate in these courses as a sign that they are not useful. Wrong again! He ignores the fact that there is almost no barrier to entry in these courses so it is natural that a lot of people sign up and many later drop out. But the fact remains that even if a mere 10% finish the course (which by the way added up to 20000 people in the Artificial Intelligence course taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig), we have achieved an unimaginable task: teaching a course by the best professors in the world to a large audience. If we assume each AI class at Stanford has 50 students, how long does it take to train so many people in AI?

3. Kling outrageously claims that in this day and time, we don't need courses on programming languages like Python. That's an amazing claim. I suggest he raises this issue within his own university administrators and tell them to stop offering courses on programming because people can use Google!!! I am curious about the reaction he gets. Roberts, instead of disagreeing, makes another interesting claim and declares that macroeconomics is different and we still need to teach that subject in classrooms. Why macro but not python? Nobody knows. Again this is a clear example where people talk aligned with their interests.

4. I agree on one thing with Kling though and that's his comment about Stat One course taught by Andrew Conway on Coursera. I watched most lectures and did the assignments and I agree that the course was not well planned and the materials were not well explained. However, I have a PhD and throughout my years of education, I have sat on many college courses in which the profs were much more disorganized and unprepared but on any day I prefer to take an online mediocre course at my own pace and place than take those college courses.

Surely online education has its own issues including how to deal with experiments and lab assignments, what a university brand mean in this case, how to train instructors. But I totally welcome it in my world.

Comments:
It's impressive that you are getting thoughts from this post as well as from our dialogue made at this place.

My blog; 1
 
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