I’ve previously posted about an online class I took designed to teach executives how to use LLMs to solve business problems. I was mostly lukewarm on the class because I felt like it was coming in too early in the “revolution” and that a lot more needed to be learned/developed before we could really say what the true use of AI was going to end up being. However, one thing I didn’t mention is the class was taught by a real human who showed up in Slack channels to answer questions and have live dialogue with those in the class. The live Q&A was a result of the premium paid for the class, but having a human talking head is not so rare on other MOOCs. Or wasn’t so rare until LLMs got involved.
While taking a general interest class on Coursera (I take a lot of classes, not all of them are applicable to my job or even my most public hobbies, sometimes I just wanna learn about how magic worked in medieval society, ok?) I got upsold to Coursera Plus which suddenly made all the courses I would have had to pay for free for the next year. Nice. In addition to suddenly getting a bunch of certificates for classes I “audited” that suddenly counted for real, I was free to click on any class I wanted to give it a try. Since most business classes cost moolah, I selected a few that I thought might be interesting (and I could justify doing on my work computer) including topics like Risk Management, Financial Analysis and Human Resources. All of these are topics that I didn’t explore enough in my MBA, but that I have a lot of interest in. But wow, was I disappointed.
With the exception of the HR classes, the mode for these MOOCs seems to be, get AI to write a bunch of bullets, get another AI to make some slides, get another AI to narrate it, get an AI to make some questions, then get an AI to evaluate the answers. I pushed through on one class only to hit a roadblock with a question. It was wrong. I retook the quiz 3 times, I fed the question into every LLM out there to see it was me that was wrong, but they all agreed with me. I couldn’t proceed because the question was never checked by a human for accuracy. I even tried to message the course organizer, but heard nothing back. Enshittification has come for education too.
It’s so disappointing to have this experience, because sudden access to all the world’s information was the most joyful thing about the early days of the internet. Ivy league schools had classes on iTunes U, experts shared their knowledge on YouTube, super nerds became internet celebs on Twitter, and of course MOOCs offered the chance to really put your knowledge to the test and get better at something. Everyone’s inner Lisa Simpson was squealing with joy.
But I have to acknowledge that it’s a lot harder to find that quality information now. The AI summary regurgitation cycle is obscuring the good stuff with generic overviews. My Coursera Plus likely isn’t going to give me any extra benefit after all, because the courses that are offered are just a pale shadow of what used to be.
Maybe I’ll have to migrate to the Harvard Extension School or some other place with a brand to protect if I want to continue to push the bounds of what I can learn online. Like so many things, the free ride appears to be over, and now all the world has to pay for access again.