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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!"
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
There's plenty of articles about why textbooks are so expensive in the first place, ranging from the obvious (higher quality paper, colored pictures and graphs) to the less obvious (professors pay nothing so they don't care, students will just keep paying and never speak up). I paid a relatively modest $2,438.16 for textbooks over the course of a four year degree, of which I was able to resell most of them for $838.77. I did keep several books that I could have sold for another $150 or so. My first semester cost the most (in spite of having the fewest classes) and I was only able to resell one of the books for less than 10% of the purchase cost in spite of being in like-new condition. This was also the only semester that I bought and sold to/from the campus bookstore. Interestingly, my most expensive books were for accounting, microbiology, human resources, Visual Basic and astronomy. My core IT books were among the least expensive books to buy and yielded the biggest returns relative to purchase price (I resold several for a decent profit). I know my professors also re-used these books the most. And yes, I did keep a nice color-coded spreadsheet of every single book I bough and sold throughout college. For that amount of money, you'd have to be stupid to ignore the overall cost.