In other words, in Silicon Valley VC-speak: "what is the value-add 
proposition" of these for-profit companies in creating and distributing 
MOOCs? I don't think they have much to offer, which is why they are likely 
doomed as business ventures.


The Harvard/MIT/Berkeley non-profit EdX is an attempt by these institutions 
to do exactly what you suggest: cut out the middle man and make their own 
damn videos.

-raghu.
--------------

EdX is not free. And they are very cagey about how much. I presume it's for 
registered students...so tutition, and the only break seems to be lower cost 
course fee. In other words a university based racket. And the content? What 
I think of as Technocrapology.

Right now I need a quick overview guide of Aristotle and specific locations 
in the Organon, Physica, Metaphysica for the parts of logic and its uses 
available to Medieval Scholastics.  Why would you want to know that? 
Nevermind.

I just spent about a week tracking down the logic, which is not in one 
location but scattered throughout the same above three collections. There 
was a pay-off for this work. I finally understood what the fuck the 
Scholastics were doing---the same damned work I did of find it, make it 
intelligible, make it cohere. Nothing like re-inventing the wheel for a over 
two thousand years.

So, I've gone through several videos on A and didn't get any of that, 
naturally. This is evidently `specialist' stuff.  Nobody really seems to 
teach him. He's in a some reference section like geometry. You're supposed 
to know Aristotle or geometry somewhere else before you get to wherever you 
are, and they are talking about him.

I found all sorts of stuff in the dustbin.. What Marx and his species being 
is all about. and where the abstract armature of Marx's work came from. Also 
the crude outline of Kant's critiques, Hegel's system in the grand scheme, 
Spinoza and the techincalities of why he was thrown out of Judaism, insights 
into the Cartesian systems.... why the grand reaction of the Catholic Church 
to `modernity' that installed the Jus Codicis 1917 to return to Thomist 
thought back into the catholic college system.

It was just amazing  (to me and probably no one else) what you can turn up 
...

CG






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