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MIT To Expand Online Learning and Offer Certificates
mikejuk writes "MIT has announced an online learning initiative that will offer its courses through a new interactive learning platform that will enable students to participate in simulated labs, interact with professors and other students and earn certificates. Is this just a reaction to the Stanford experiment in running courses complete with exams and informal statements of accomplishment? (The first AI course has just finished and the exam results are in.) If so let's hope it spurs other educational establishments to do the same!"
People are always ranting about RIAA/MPAA while what they should really be worrying about is lecture book publishers. Music and movies are just entertainment, but these book publishers are preventing education and others from learning.
Book publishers are going to be crying about online learning and courses if they can't get their books required for them. They are already doing all kinds of shady monopoly deals and trying to hinder reselling of books by updating their course material almost every year, resulting in incompatible books for classes. I'm sure that if they cannot get their books forced in other ways, they're going to be doing some suing or forcing schools to shut down these online learning courses.
I'm not sure why people cry so much about RIAA and MPAA when there is such an assholish industry preventing people from learning. That has real results on whole advancement of humankind.
University of Phoenix has been doing this for years.
Since my day job is CS professor, these kinds of things aren't in my personal interest (unless I land a tenured job at MIT, which is unlikely :P), but I think they have considerable merit. CS, compared to other fields, is already a little bit ambivalent about degrees, and you can get some kinds of jobs by having alternate demonstrations of knowledge, like your Github "resume", or track record of participation in open-source projects. But a lot of companies worry that without a degree you'll lack some theoretical knowledge that will eventually bite you in the ass, because you didn't realize that something was a well-studied problem with an off-the-shelf solution you could've pulled out of one of Knuth's books and implemented, instead of rolling your own buggier, worse one (sometimes this is a founded fear, other times not).
But the bar in many cases is not that high. Even when I've looked for people to work with on, say, a machine-learning project, what I want to know is that they're familiar with the basics of statistics, common techniques and gotchas, correct and incorrect methods of data analysis, etc. This is more likely if they have a degree with some statistics and/or ML courses, but I could see a certificate from a respected course of online instruction being enough to convince me of that, if they keep standards up and it's not easy to cheat.
On the learner's side, it's a really interesting space of possibilities for mixing-and-matching your own education. Since these certificates seem to be much finer granularity than degree programs, if they proliferate and maintain quality, you could more realistically do interdisciplinary programs of study while still being able to prove that you mastered specific things.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Somewhat misquoted
MIT ... will enable students to ... earn certificates.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219
Rather, MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within the Institute that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.
So you'll get a cert from "Internet-U" stating you watched a video.
BTW the OCW calculus video series rocks as a refresher course. HIGHLY recommended. I wish they had video for more than just their 100 level intro courses.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I love it when the words stanford and experiment are used in a sentence, it gets so much better when the word prison is also added.
It's interesting to see how the state of learning has changed in the last 10 years, and the pace of change is accelerating.
Does anyone know why we study the subjects we do in high school? Mostly it's because the subjects are classical - things are studied because it's been that way since ancient times.
Take geometry, for example. It's an important subject, but not nearly as useful to the average person as probability, yet we study one and not the other.
Then there's the mode of teaching, several hundred years old, where the student sits quietly in a seat watching the lecturer write things on a board and explain them.
Newer models have emerged. The Kahn academy still uses the lecturer/blackboard model, but improves it in many ways. The video can be viewed at a time of the student's choosing, parts can be rewound and replayed, and most importantly: the lectures can be improved by redoing them.
The Stanford and MIT online courses are just another example of the changing landscape. The Stanford AI course had lots of technical problems that they were unprepared for - ambiguous English phrasing, uneven level of practice versus test, missing technical explanations, and so on.
Despite the problems, they will get better. Indeed, they will get a lot better even the 2nd time they give the course.
We're apparently watching a competition for "esteem" between the top end universities. The colleges are competing for clarity of presentation, comprehension, and usefulness of the data.
In 10 years or so the traditional university model will be gone. There will be no need to go to college when all the standard subjects can be learned very well online, using methods which have evolved to present the material in the best possible way.
It'll be fun to watch as this evolves over time.
I never attended high-school (I went to vocational school and then started my engineering studies) so I never got to study those interesting-sounding subjects like psychology and philosophy. Now that all the most famous universities have been putting their introductory courses online, I've watched quite a few of them.
When I was watching Introduction to Psychology (Prof. Paul Bloom, Yale, extremely interesting and entertaining way to spend some 20-odd hours) I thought "Hell, I could actually do more than watch these lectures. I think I'll actually buy the book and read the recommended chapters!".
The course book costed something like 150+ dollars, which I thought was astounding but that actually wasn't the showstopper for me (I have a job and am quite prone to buying stuff on a whim in my sleep-deprivation induced mania). What made me pissed off was that they (=every store I could find by googling the book) didn't sell an electronic version of the book. What made me more pissed was that they clearly had electronic version: If I were to buy the physical book, I would get the PDF on CD with the book. There simply was no way of buying just the PDF (I would have been willing to accept DRM, to pay the full price, whatever... I just didn't want to wait a week, spend a phonecall arguing with customs officers, pay another 30 bucks for shipping, another 30 bucks of import taxes, etc. as is usually the case when I order stuff online).
In the end, I was annoyed that the stores selling the book could have made my life easier but had chosen not to, so I didn't buy the book. However, open courses like these cause large amounts of people like me to consider buying books that we never would have otherwise bought. If the industry can implement minor reforms to approach us a bit, I'm sure there's a lot of potential for more profit.
I have hired (and later fired) people with an online education -- I am seriously skeptical of the quality of understanding obtained from taking online classes.
/.'ers), these skills that will be missed; many of these skills are crucial for self-learning, which is required to successfully understand an online class.
While I agree that expanding the access to education is a great idea, there is no substitute for attending a brick-and-mortar university. Online courses and online lectures are a supplement to learning -- in the same sense that a text book and a lecturer is a supplement to learning. There are certain skills that you will only learn by living on your own; such as learning to balance your social life, classes, managing a schedule, and other activities. However, if you sit in your parent's house (or basement, like most
MIT has discovered distance higher education learning? Welcome to 1969! Over here in the UK we've had high quality university level distance education since then and distance learning offered online since the 1980s. Currently it has over 200,000 distance learning students, many of whom use online environments as part of their learning. Perhaps though the concept of distance learning is not as advanced in the USA as in Europe?
Can any US folks comment? what is the perception of distance and online learning in the US? Over here in the UK, and I believe Europe generally, the idea of doing an online degree is considered a valid method for people to undertake higher education if they cannot get to a university campus (work, family commitments, etc). The Open University is considered to be a high quality degree offering institution and regularly comes high in student satisfaction ratings. This institution offers different media for taking courses, but some of them are offered completely online and have done for some years. I"m suprised that "university offers online teaching' makes news.
Curious - though I suppose it is newsworthy as MIT is such an august educational establishment. Interested to hear a US perspective on how distance and online higher education learning is perceived...