> First one to award real degree credit per course wins
This is a complex issue. Real degree means ID checks, accreditation costs, and testing in person. That costs money. As Sebastian Thrum pointed out recently, those things would prevent most people in the world from taking these classes, and is why he chose not to go that route. For his first AI class he had 160,000 students which spanned every single country on earth except North Korea. In one quarter, he may have taught AI principles to more students than all previous professors in history combined, certainly more than anyone at his university had. He also gave the exact same tests and assignments to students at Stanford for real credit and they did no better than random people in far away lands who were struggling with issues of finding electricity and an internet connection. Forcing to a credit model locks those people from outside the first world out of the system.
What does credit mean? I have taught high school and college classes, and elementary school students. Now I do software and hardware design, and I hire developers. A candidate having a degree has proven to mean absolutely nothing at all as far as technical capabilities go, nor do their grades! About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, and people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform.
So I have to check people's body of work, their projects and interests, and we do proactive recruitment as well. This results in finding talented people. Not "resources" but people.
Someone who has taken a full set of courses at Coursera and Udacity is going to know just as much as someone with a "legit" credential from the university. So what is that legit credential worth? Nothing! Rather than promote more useless credentials, it would be more useful and productive to promote fewer. We should even consider getting rid of degree credentials all together since they don't prove anyone knows anything at all. Whether someone can perform is not correlated to whether they have a degree.
> About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform.
Yet this statement completely undermines your point. I graduated from community college instead of going to high school, and now wherever I go I get dirty looks for having some random "fake" school next to a top-ranked one. I've been flat out rejected by people who stated that "[they] know what community college portfolios look like", without knowing the whole story.
As much as I wish credits and degrees didn't matter, this is not universally true in application. In fact the less they matter on their own, the more accessible they should become! It doesn't force anyone to lower their standards. That is why sooner or later, the credits will matter.
He didn't add in community college with for-profit fake college ("people who can be relied on not to know enough to perform"), he just said that students from Stanford and MIT are generally more capable.
You went to community college, like I did (for the entire first half of my university career - Oakton Community College represent!), so you can't think that's a completely unreasonable statement. OCC certainly wasn't MIT, but it was a place where you could learn a lot of your undergrad math.
Not to say that you won't find people that will dismiss you out of hand, but you'll find that if you're black, or from out of state, or went to Yale instead of Harvard or Harvard instead of Yale - depending on the person you're talking to. Some people have really horrible quality heuristics:) But he's not doing it.
It could be 100% accurate but I still don't think it does anything to help the argument that a degree/credits shouldn't matter. I've gotten used to people requiring an explanation for a degree from TXCC, but frankly some of those top-school grads could probably do some explaining too after seeing some of the portfolios that come in...
I wish I could compare to MIT but since I have no acquaintances there, I can only draw comparisons between a few programs in art and design (philosophy might be another story). --This is the fourth time I've tried to rewrite what I want to say before hitting reply and it just isn't working out. It's a long topic, and abbreviating it simply turns it into a rant. If you really believe that degrees/credits don't matter, then you should be careful when and where you stray from that principle. If the choice is between two people with no experience, no portfolio, but a degree and maybe an interview, then it's virtually unavoidable. But, if they have work to back themselves up then why even look at their degree? Even if you have certain feelings about certain places (like UPhoenix), you're better off getting what you need to know from an interview since you never know the circumstances that led people there anyway (and there are many... visa requirements, money combined with being ill-informed about other options, etc).
I'd say that if you're thinking about doing Phoenix, save the money and just learn from all of the random resources online - and whether you went the autodidact route instead of Phoenix or after learning nothing at Phoenix, you had better lead with your portfolio.
Probably better to just leave out Phoenix altogether from your resume as an expensive mistake. And, if people won't look at you even though you can show them a pile of good work that you've done - that probably wouldn't be the greatest place to work anyway.
Phoenix is no better than no credential at all, and also implies a general ignorance of the tech industry. In addition it costs twice as much per year as state school did per degree, and dozens of times as much as the internet and old editions of books from http://used.addall.com :)
I think you misunderstood his point. He's saying that for Coursera, Udacity, and edX, they need to make a choice of making their courses available, or getting them accredited, but not both. Clearly they have made their choice.
I am addressing the second part only so far as it affects his observations. Otherwise I agree with his post (especially the complex issue part, heh).
But in response to your paraphrase, my hope is that they don't end up locked in to that duality. A degree may be an ideal endgame, but the next best thing would be to bypass the accreditation steps and work on a sort of transfer credit treaty. It's in between accredited course and CLEP subject test.
The quality of the Coursera material is much higher than the quality of The Open University.
I've earnt 150/330 points at L1/L2 towards a Bachelor's around Software Engineering with the Open University UK. I pretty much just took took exams and wrote the required essays in order to pass.
NOTE: the level 3 courses have programming projects connected to them.
Right now I'm following Compilers and Finite Automata with Coursera. I've learnt more in a week than I've learnt so far with The Open University.
With Coursera, I actually have to work to pass the class.
So yeah, I hope that Coursera have a plan to turn credits into real degrees. They can charge real money for it.
The one thing I see standing in the way of Coursera et al is identity verification: the OU require you to physically sit exams and provide proof of IT. I can't see how Coursera can get past that.
If you get bored of The Open University courses, I've been enjoying to Oxford Software Engineering MSc (which doesn't require an undergrad degree)... For the Compiler course on Coursera (which I'm also doing), I found
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/subjects/SEM.html (which you can do just by itself if you like) invaluable
Possibly. The cache of Harvard/MIT definitely puts it in good shape to be the victor.
But, increasingly, and especially in technical fields, degrees are being supplanted by other talent or qualification indicators. Open source work is a great example. There are significant numbers of folks without CS degrees (or even degrees at all) who have found gainful employment as coders based on their open source work alone. Whether it will be accepted by the Fortune 500 crowd remains to be seen though, and certainly the "show me what you can do" idea doesn't really work for non-technical jobs.
At least in the short term offering a degree for these online courses might help.
I wonder if for the non-technical crowd who can't show what they've learned an online degree will be thought of in the same light as a traditional brick and mortar one. It isn't so far, but that will almost certainly change if that degree comes from some place like MIT or Harvard.
Just like real world universities, there may be no "victor." but rather many groups catering to individual needs. If it was a mere matter of location, we'd only have one University per city.
For that matter, Western Governors University is still quite large. They could pivot much more easily than Harvard and integrate this into their current system, and they have the advantage of accrediation.
EDx is clearly planning to compete on quality. I expect them to be pretty resistant to watering down their course challenge level.
Coursera is likely to head mostly the same way.
Udacity, though, looks like they might lean more towards reducing the challenge to increase the audience. That feels a little dangerous as they're then open to considerably more competition from other schools. The floodgates are about to open.
What Udacity has in the short run to mitigate that possibility is a start-up agility mindset. But they'll calcify in the long run, everyone does, and then what?
What will interest me most is to see how many people can take on the challenge level of EDx. I suspect it will be many more than anyone would have thought.
The people in real trouble are those offering mediocre education for high prices. 5-10 years from now those people will be in a new line of work.
> First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect
With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.
Then the whole cycle is complete. You have a place to learn, and means to show what you've learned to get yourself employed. What else do you need?
(well, maybe the social part of universities is missing, but that can be fixed with hackatons I guess)
> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.
Github and a degree show different things.
Github shows that the person can write code. It doesn't show that he knows how to decide what code to write. Did he consider alternative algorithms? Did he chose based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms? If you see an O(N^2) algorithm used somewhere instead of an O(N log N) algorithm, is it because he didn't know better, or is it because he determined that for the inputs in this particular project the O(N^2) is actually faster?
A degree in the appropriate field from a good school goes a long way toward showing that the person can do that kind of analysis.
I'd say for most developers a degree shows that you can stick with something, and that you were at least smart enough to get through a CS program.
However, most of the people I know have forgotten just about everything but the very basics from their algorithms class within a few years.
When I was teaching myself to program, I knew 3 guys who were seniors in CS at Georgia Tech. With only about 3 years experience myself, I could code circles around all of them.
At the time they may have had more theoretical knowledge than I did (definitely not true now though since I've caught up on the theoretical side), but I would have been a much better hire for 95% of programming jobs.
Not because I was some kind of rockstar, but because I'd had more practical experience actually writing real programs. Sure if I was working at Facebook, or trying to scale something truly massive (or working with resource limited embedded systems), they would have had an edge on me, but the vast majority of programming that happens each day doesn't require that level of computer science chops.
There are definitely jobs that require a "Computer Scientist", and if you want to work on interesting problems a CS degree is extremely beneficial. However, a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for most programming jobs.
(That being said, I'm currently in the process of finishing a math degree.)
> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree?
I can't speak to the effectiveness of github and stackoverflow as signals of programmer ability, but I know most other disciplines do not have such services, nor will they anytime soon.
Even if you can demonstrate your skills to an employer, what are your chances of an admissions committee even being willing to click the link? I have an A.S. in graphic design, a few years into a B.Arch, and am finishing my B.A. in Philosophy, Art History within the next two semesters. Unless there's some sort of scheduling miracle, I won't even be able to get minor credit towards mathematics or engineering– outside of architecture and philosophy, graduate schools wouldn't want to touch me with a ten foot pole.
My primary goal over the next semester is to compile all of my notes and certificates from these courses and scrap with hell to get credit for them. Otherwise I'll be 21 with three degrees and still need to go back to school for two years, just to get my engineering degree so I can go to graduate school for CS/eng.
--typed quickly from my ipod so apologies if my argument got funky and rushed
I would argue that the focus on certificates, degrees, and grades are a competitive disadvantage. Rather than providing useful analytics, they introduce friction in the learning process and a reduced user experience.
An educational system that finds alternatives to these artifacts will have an advantage over those that rely on them.
I realize I represent only one of several types of students, but I couldn't care less about degree credit. I've got a BS in CS, and that's enough degree credit for me.
But I would happily do all the coursework equivalent to a degree in math for my own education. I just don't care if anyone recognizes it as a degree or not. I'm not willing to pay degree prices for it, but I'd pay some token amount.
Since it's possible to earn a degree online today, I'm not sure this is the case. Top-tier universities are faced with a significant innovator's dilemma problem here: they want to enforce their duopoly on the granting of degrees and they don't want online programs (which can deliver comparable content to students in a more scalable way at a fraction of the cost) to cut into their tuition revenue.
First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect. The Open University already offers this, so it can be done.