- Coursera does not offer an intelligent system: The search engine of coursera is not optimized to bring the best experience to the user. For instance, there may be a student that wants to find courses that are more oriented to his learning style. In other words, he cannot filter in that website the learning style he is most interested at. Each individual has a different learning style. I have learned those three different learning styles from my University course when I was studying to be a teacher, but did not become one in the end. However, those three different learning styles really do exist. In other words, yes, that is true, it translates that each individual sees and thinks things differently. In other words, it is not that I or you are different and we can change later on to a different style of learning. These styles are usually permanent and do not change. I believe that is only just a start that what makes a person different. There can be many more and it has been discussed a lot in personality books and courses. For that reason alone, Coursera should have a search engine where user can filter the courses based on his learning style pattern. The three different learning style patterns are: reading, visual/audio, interactivity. If the user has the ability to search based on his learning style, he will have higher chances on understanding or integrating a course in his mind better. Coursera, I hope it is not that difficult. Just make all the courses that are submitted to have a drop down that has just this:
- Main Lecture Primary Learning Instruction Mode
- Reading
- Presentations Slideshows with Audio
- Video Lectures with not a lot of slideshows
- Interactive
- Hybrid (Reading, Video/Audio, Interactive)
- Then the user can just search the courses based on the options mentioned above. It will not only make the life for the user easier, but it will also make Coursera have a better visibility to itself to see what courses are missing. For those courses that are lacking of a particular learning style, Coursera can aggressively more promote the need of those courses that are missing. Thus, it will fulfill better all the needs of all course students learning styles. At this moment of writing, Coursera did not have this feature. As a developer myself, I know from experience this is not very hard to implement, but depending on how complicated the structure the Coursera system is, it may take a long time to implement for the results of this added feature to be stable (in order to not interfere with the other fully functional components that make the whole system of Coursera's website).
- Most of my Coursera experience found that it lacks the learning style I am interested: Like I said before, there are three learning styles: Reading, Video/Audio, Interactive. Mine is reading. I am best at getting information through reading and I am the most inferior when the communication style I receive is in the form of video/audio. People think that if they communicate to me through face to face I will learn more, but I become more critical and think more about things when I receive the context in words instead of voice. In other words, I can have my own train of thought to not only criticize the content in the context of others, but to myself as well. For me, learning should be more of a painful experience, not an enjoying experience, because you have to puzzle things out and integrate them together, something that is more harder when the lecture is done through a stream, such as a formal lecture and face to face communication. For me, I find face to face communication only useful on summarizing things, not to remember, learn, or memorize things. It should be done at the point where I have already enough confidence of the information provided and willing to dive in and see if any corrections of my perceptions of the lecture material should be changed or not, which at that point, I am more willing to do so, as I have exhausted all the information I could think of to extract how things work so far. In addition, I have discussed in my previous blog posts why writing is more important than speaking. For others though, they may feel more comfortable with a lecture that is more visual/auditory or interactive. Most of the majority of people take information that way. Most of the people also hate the way traditional schools teach their lectures (with books). They would say they only learn theory and does not apply to real life. After they graduate and go into the workforce, most of what they learned in school will not be applied in their real life and will perceive it as most or not less, a useless experience in terms of usefulness in the career (maybe not so useless, but they will consider always your experience most as what matters instead of your education or your interest of books and theories). It is really disgusting those people that say theory is not important (even some teachers ironically claim the same when they are forced to teach theories as that is how the educational system is). They really do not understand why the educational system teaches theory and how subconsciously theories affects in life to make generalizations of every thing we see in our life. Theory is so critical that learning a wrong theory can lead us to wrong generalizations. But that is enough of rant and can be discussed on as a different topic ("What are the destructive consequences ignoring theories and why are they blaming those destructive consequences on the wrong sources instead of the lack of implementing correct theories in an organization itself"). However, I cannot disagree with how they prefer to learn things. That is their learning style. Most of the majority are like that. And it seems that Coursera supports most of the majority audience instead of the minority audience. But that is not only Coursera doing this. Many educational products that are promoted, such as "learn a language very fast", are done through visual and audio formats. Why? Because traditional schools do not teach those courses in such way (they really do, they have a lot of interactivity, but a lot of the stuff done is in reading too). And since we know that most of the audience are visual/audio learning types, the entrepreneurs find an opportunity to make a lot of profit out from it (but in a good way, they help those type of people). However, little do you know that what they say is not true if you are a person that likes to read instead of listening stuff. It will probably not be so effective if you try that educational product as they much say. Back to topic. From my experience, as far as I have used Coursera, little did I found material that was in writing. For definite, a lot of the lectures that I have done online in my University, the content of the main lecture was mostly in writing instead of audio and video presentations. Those where the times that I learned the most, had the most fun, and added more value to myself in terms of skills and experience. I guess that was the direction it was on those times because most users broadband internet bandwidth was not high enough to have the flexibility to see lectures online in the audio/video format. Now more and more of those lectures become visual and audio. Are there reading materials? Yes, they are, plenty of them. But most of those material are supplemental readings. I have not found any Coursera course where its main lecture is done in raw writing (maybe I am not so lucky I guess). This could have not happened if their search engine was more "intelligent", in order to provide the learning style need I wanted.
- Coursera does not offer any open official community to discuss such issues on public. So Coursera has a problem and they were not aware of it. Is it like really a shame of them? Well, really, no, I guess it is fine, we all sometimes do mistakes we are not aware with. However, for Coursera to not have an open forum to post these issues, that is a real shame. Their support page is more of frequently asked questions and their suggested answer. You can send a question in private message, but that loses its purpose, as it is the participation of all audience that matters in order for all of us to see the visibility of these issues and apply importance on them. For Coursera to see the issues only from their own side of the view will not impact greatly to add it in their next step of implementation. Most likely they will put it in low priority and set more in priority fixing bugs and whatever it will generate the most profit, even at the cost of ignoring the minority needs (as you see this need is more or less likely to fulfill only the minority of users - the ones that emphasize reading as their learning style). But still, they can add it in an open forum. Why would they not? Which comes to the next topic.
- Coursera tries to protect its brand image by getting only the positive attention from users feedback instead of the negative feedback required to make their website better at a faster pace. Okay, this is arguably an opinion. But it seems like Coursera is very heavy marketed oriented on just bringing a positive image to consumers. And you know, being all positive and positive energy is a fall illusion of being happy. Coursera needs to learn their mistakes. They will never grow in a fast pace if they do not receive any criticism. Instead coursera only cares to put testimonials about the positive feedback of students, not the needs that are lacking. In other words, Coursera does not want to have full transparency of its own self. It wants to be a hypocrite on the public image, trying to hide the negative effects in private and is expectant to provide those implementations either never or at a very slow pace. Look at this link of Coursera: http://blog.coursera.org/student/stories. At this moment of writing, if you see at the image banner, it says a welcoming message with a lot of dozen different happy individual faces in a miniature format. At the footer of that banner it says, "Please share your story so it can inspire others to learn without limits!". So what do you expect the feedback Coursera wants? It looks like they want a positive feedback. I haven't seen testimonials so far where one of them is negative. Testimonials are always the most fake thing in this world. The way the testimonials are structured are always only on one side of the view. If some are negative, they are definitely not published. Compare testimonials of Coursera being bias and testimonials in a court case and you can see the difference in transparency! I would love if Coursera could provide a negative testimonial on their website. I dare them. But I feel so confident that they will not to.
Given that Coursera does not have an option to communicate with them, I tried stack exchange to get an answer for my issue. I wanted to confirm whether Coursera offered courses with main lecture in the form reading as a learning style. I expressed briefly my current sentiments for Coursera and written my request in the most simplest words possible. Given that the link may be deleted (the link is: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19457/coursera-web-courses-that-teach-with-no-media), this is what I wrote:
Coursera web courses that teach with no media
Coursera web courses that teach with no media
I am getting sick of these Coursera courses all being in videos and presentations of slideshows with audio ( they are ok but I prefer to have my own train of thought). So which universities which teachers or how to filter contents on coursera the most effective way or already known trends to get courses where the main lecture is done not through media such as videos or audio but simple raw text.
Okay, like I said in my previous blog posts, most people are emotionally weak and cannot use critical thinking. For that reason, they want most of their discussions to be objectionable as possible. That is fine, as questions and answers websites main purpose works more better if they are more objectionable, so the answer does not go off topic. But given that people are very sensitive to sentiment statements, they can go overboard with it. The first sentence was an expression of sentiment to Coursera. Its main purpose is to provide how important it is to me about the topic of Coursera not providing the learning style I really wanted to experience. Without a sentiment, you cannot tell the individual's priority of how important a topic is to him. The second sentence asks in the most simplest words a request for some specific examples (not absolute answers) to get the learning style I wanted. The response I got was to read a book. Well, book or simple raw text is the same thing, right? I did not know if the one who replied me was really confident that Coursera did not offer material the same as offered as books (but I wanted the main lecture to be in a book format, not about learning a general skill or general material most books offer as). So I replied back to him "I am asking whether coursera offers the similar technology books offer? If you are confident that coursera mostly no offers such technology, I will want to rant some crtiticism of such feature that they felt negligent to be about it.", which I arguably did in the end by writing this post. I am still in doubt whether point 2 is really true or not in regards to Coursera. That is because I did not got any answer without any reason from that individual. In addition, my experience can be a little bias, but I indeed spent enough time on Coursera. In addition, some other individual felt that my writing was unclear because I looked like I was ranting. Do you see here ladies and gentlemen about that? How most people are sensitive to sentiment statements? It is the effects I have discussed in my previous blog posts. Most people try to suppress them cause they cannot tackle them. When you express them, others feel confused or feel the statement is not clear. See the topic again if I do not have included my first sentence:
Coursera web courses that teach with no media
So which universities which teachers or how to filter contents on coursera the most effective way or already known trends to get courses where the main lecture is done not through media such as videos or audio but simple raw text.
Is it more simpler? Is it more clear to understand? What is the difference? Nothing. The only thing I removed was a sentiment. How disgusting that individuals cannot express themselves when society will tell them they are unclear. And if you feel this is still unclear, let me tell you this: Do you wanted to be in a form of a question instead of request? They both in some form are almost the same. It is an inquiry. It needs an answer. So it can be regarded as a question. I do not have question marks in my sentences, but its a request, and I think its valid as a question. In addition, I used the most simplest words, such as "media", "video", "audio", "raw text", and hints such as "teachers", "universities". If you do not understand this, then you are fooling yourself in some way or another. I just avoided to iterate. If I wanted to iterate, I would have written it in such way:
Which universities or teachers offer Coursera web courses with no media? How to filter contents on coursera the most effective way to get only the courses with no media? Are there any know trends for finding courses in Coursera with no media?
I provided several hints for the title of my question without wanting myself to iterate myself too much. I guess people could not grasp that connection and got confused too much. It is disappointing from their effort. And it is not like they could not connect things, because at least they tried, that they thought I was ranting. In addition, maybe the simple words, such as "media" did not work for them to understand what I was saying about. So I replied back to them and said "Yes if it was if I was looking for alternatives. So please do not go off topic and provide alternatives as that is what it will lead to. Is it me better to do this or that? I never asked which is better. Answer the question directly. Does coursera offer technology of books? Yes or No. If yes how to get the most out of it? thank you for your understanding ". I hoped that in the end they would not connect it as a rant. In the end they put my post in hold, and I guess many took it in the wrong direction with the flow of comments directing that way. So in the end, I replied "Please close this post. I do not want comments that ramble off topic due to some sentiment I said that made people be confused and got all unclear. I created a new question that will avoid ensuing this type of comments.
"
And so I did. I ventured again and entered a new question on stack exchange. This time, I tried to use more complicated theoretical words the academia knows very well, such as "learning styles", "reading", "visual/audial", "interactive". It seems that using these words made it more clear. In addition, I did not provide any hints what I was looking for. Instead, I added my interests, as someone in the comments suggested. Someone in the comments told me that it was off topic, as "Stack Exchange Academia beta" does not support questions that are related to MOOC (Massive Open Online Course, and yes, Coursera is one of them). I do not understand the reason why not as there is a high relevance between MOOC and traditional universities. A lot of teachers in traditional universities also contribute lectures in MOOC services, such as Coursera. In addition, that stack exchange is in beta state, so I do not know if that speculation in the end will be formed in the end true or not. From the people that moderate that stack exchange, it looks like it is, and I got word there is no area on the stack exchange variety forums so far to fit my question in which I think is very important as many users use Coursera so much often. Shame on you stack exchange for not having a solution of providing an area for people to ask questions in relation to Coursera, when the negligent Coursera does not offer an open forum to provide a place to ask such questions. It is not your responsiblity stack exchange, but it would be good given you are open to other topics you can openly answer. It seems stack exchange only tries to aggregate questions and answers that were already answered before on other websites or that are very easy to answer from users. The reason to do that is so the user can find the answer as fast as possible instead of scrolling pages on a forum to find the real answer. However, on the other hand, stack exchange limits the questions to only the ones that they can answer, as guess what, I guess that is their main goal (just my speculation): Stack exchange supports questions that are easy or already answered and to be collected in the stack exchange "exchange". It will not support to answer difficult questions or questions that have no answer and require research. They will use excuses as defense mechanisms. Again, stack exchange format is in the form of "Gamification" (earning points and achievements), making users only intention to win as much points as possible. To win the most points you have to strive to the main or important goals stack exchange has (=to make most revenue and usefulness out of it). In some sense, stack exchange helps a lot for most users, but loses its touch when they take everything as a game. In any case, this is the question I asked which was commented as off topic (here is the link, but it may become dead later: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19474/how-to-find-coursera-courses-for-people-with-learning-style-as-reading) :
Does coursera offer main lecture in the learning style of reading instead of audial/visual, interactive? Yes or No. If yes how to find most of those courses in coursera where main lecture style is reading? Please be as much objectionable to this question. User who answers must have experience of the coursera courses offers. I do not have time to do research of what coursera offers extensively so if anybody has done in that type of research, please respond. thank you!interests -machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering, best practices within a cultural organization and software development life cycle, the study of behavior, courses that talk about personality, courses with projects that contain milestones for developing any real life applications, such as web, windows application, games.In conclusion: Coursera is not the best service experience for all users as it ignores the minority and is not helping the best in providing a hand to be better at its own faults. In addition, we seen that the stack exchange environment makes people write effectively objectionably, but are too critical over emotional pressure, making them oversensitive and not good candidates to communicate effectively all around (especially for problems that you must face emotional pressure). We are all sensitive to emotional pressure due to the society we live every day being all non personal so I do not feel it is their fault for being that way. Last but not least, stack exchange Gamification system is not a system that can support answering all questions. It only answers the easy ones or already answered ones, only the ones that will drive the most traffic in from workers searching non-personal information (and hey I believe it works splendidly well for what it does, but I need to express its limitations too!).