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Do Online Educational Badges Threaten Conventional Education Models?
An anonymous reader writes "Educational badges, which seem like a playful riff on Boy Scout skill patches, pose an existential crisis for colleges and universities. If students can collect credentials from MITx and Khan Academy and other free Web sites, why go to a campus?"
Is the only badge relevant for self teaching.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
The usual purpose of attending college isn't to learn the material, so much as being adequately credentialed for consideration for employment. So the question is, will the people doing the hiring consider them as sufficient alternatives to a traditional degree.
I suspect they'll stay slightly less influential than industry certifications, which stand well below degrees from accredited universities.
... from someone who says, "I don't actually have an MD, but I do have a 'Great Listener' badge!"?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Published, peer-reviewed papers generally result from some sort of experiment. But I'm under the impression that some subjects are so tightly regulated that just doing experiments by themselves is illegal without a license. Only people who already have a degree from an incumbent accredited institution can get a license to supervise experiments in person. Case in point: the decline of chemistry sets after the strengthening of toy safety standards and the public awareness of the illicit manufacture of stimulant drugs.
The professions typically have a couple of years of professional qualifications to pass before going into practice. This is over and above a good education.
Education is not and should never be, professional qualification. They are entirely different things.
The problem seems to be that many professions, and HR "professionals" don't seem to realise they should be providing "badges and certificates" for professional qualifications.
A degree is not a professional qualification, it is and should be for education. MIT Online and Khan Academy are educational tools, again, not professional qualifications.
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There is no substitute for classroom discussion refereed by a Professor of Philosophy when you're learning how to construct an argument.
There is no substitute for classroom discussion about history and literature, or any other subject where the course is about forming and expressing opinions, not learning what the "right" answer is.
As those two items are the most critical things I felt I got out of my 4 year BScAdv in Computer Science, I definitely do not feel online education is a threat to the universities, though it is a game-changing supplement to the traditional university or college environment.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you haven't taken a class where you are learning Russian History in a class of 8 from a PhD in Russian literature who is "published" as a translator of 10 or so historical non-fiction works from Russian to English (and in the class, it is so informal and discussion-oriented that everyone calls everyone else by their first name), then you didn't get an education, you got a degree. And yes, that was at a university where I was also in a Chem 101 (literally) with 500+ students and IDs were checked at all test days because there's no way the lecturer would ever notice a cheater without papers checked. You just have to sometimes look hard for the actually educational classes.
Learn to love Alaska
Colleges and Universities (at least in the US) exist to support colleges, universities and professors. And I have heard former professors say the same thing, not just people like me.
The university system does not prepare students for work in the real world, it simply teaches them some basic theory. It isn't until a person gets out of school and goes into an apprenticeship model (depending on the career path) that students learn anything useful. The college system did a great job convincing HR managers that they should require college degrees when many times it isn't needed. All the degree shows is the candidate is willing to waste 4-5 years in a classroom.
I hit a glass ceiling 10 years ago, the company I worked at (where I was considered one of, if not the top, technical leader) said I could not get promoted without a degree, so I went and got a BS in Compute Science. I took classes with graduate students who (literally) did not know how to open a file stream in C++ and read individual words out of the file. I had to show them during labs. And these were the same people that would apply for jobs I had posted claiming they had Master Degrees and were deserving of higher salaries. The head of the Computer Science department asked if I would consider coming back and teaching after I graduated.
What we need in this country is to go back to the guild/apprenticeship model for people that plan to work. If you want to teach, want to do research, then let the universities focus on that. But if a person wants to implement, let OJT be the way to go. Stop requiring 4 year college degrees and stop penalizing highly skilled practitioners who learned their trade instead of sitting in classroom.