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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?"
I think the idea of models for education that have been around for a long while apparently arent meeting the peoples needs.. the popularity of khan and mitx is just but one example...
the 'threat' of people learning more stuff only exists if your business relies on selling people an education..
for everyone else its good news!
The most important thing in getting a degree is getting that ticket punched. There are jobs that just won't even talk to a person that doesn't have a degree.
My degree is in music but in interviews I've never been asked what my degree was in. I've often been asked if I have a degree.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
See the subject line. I'm an Eagle Scout and I'll acknowledge that that badge doesn't really account to much in the technical world, but I must protest to the idea that Boy Scout badges are worthless. At least the merit badge booklets can provide a decent crash-course session on many subjects for less than $5.
Being an Eagle Scout got me my first few jobs. The First Aid and knot-tying skills I learned have continued to be useful throughout my adult life. Your "playfull riff" is offensive, sir anonymous reader.
I tentatively agree, but I think the entrance of "big-name" universities into this experiment potentially changes things, if they keep standards up. Anything with the name MIT or Stanford associated with it has some amount of built-in cachet. I think that even if it's not a regular degree, but Stanford-with-an-asterisk, employers, and especially smaller and less rigid employers like we often find in technology, will be willing to consider it if Stanford does a reasonable job with it.
I can especially imagine employers with specific needs taking it seriously, e.g. someone needing a data analyst may consider certification in 2 statistics and 2 machine-learning classes from Stanford good enough for the job.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In tech there seems to still be enough of a shortage of skilled people that people without degrees do get hired regularly, though not as easily as people with degrees. Silicon Valley startups seem to already consider "some cool projects on GitHub" to be the moral equivalent of a bachelor's degree...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
it is helpful to society to have professors in colleges who [...] provide actual interactive discussions, answer questions relevant to the topic at hand from a learned perspective
Can't this be done online with software such as Slash or phpBB?
And if any thing tech / IT needs trade like learning.
As in IT
CS is very top level and has a over load of theory.
Certs are vender based and some are ones that you can cram for and pass with no idea on how to do the real work.
Tech school and trades is the right fit with some real apprenticeships / interns (that are not office boys and ones the get paid and do real work with a learning part to it)
short version for tl;dr:
- let's allow online universities
- so we have fewer lazy students at the universities
- students who actually come to study are served much better, and really have interaction with teachers, who suddenly have more time
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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The problem is that Universities are marketing it as something akin to professional certification (and many businesses are treating it as something akin to professional certification).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Khan Academy isn't one size fits all. They partner with real schools and teachers too. The idea is to get more one on one time for students and teachers by shifting the one size fits all portion that is usually presentation time in a class to at home video homework and interactive adaptive exercises. Then when the student is stuck (and software helps ID this) the teacher has more time for personal interaction because the class time isn't being used for one size fits all presentation. Also Western Governor's University is fully accredited. There's face to face video and live proctoring and so on. Flat rate tuition and you can challenge for credits at any time. So you can study with free online stuff until you are proficient and then challenge for full accreditation at a flat rate. Pretty fuckin' cool, huh?
Two weeks ago it was the iPad, today it's gamification. I wonder what it is going to be tomorrow?
Colleges and Universities have survived and adapted to the introduction of the Guttenberg press, the public library, the personal computer, and even the Internet, but now that the concept of gamification is around -- their days are numbered? This claim doesn't make a lot of sense.
This statement implies that (1) colleges and universities can not copy/adapt the practice themselves, (2) that the online concept of badges can not be cheated or gamed, (3) that the concept of gamification is going to be equally effective in all areas of education and on all web sites, and (4) that gamification is so freaking effective and disruptive -- it's probably even more disruptive than the printing press itself -- it's going to take over the World !!
To all of that, I say BS.
Colleges and universities are indeed in an existential crisis right now (which no doubt will shape them in different ways), but this was the case long before youtube or gamification even came along.
In the mid 90s I worked with several good friends on a research project investigating the sexually based dimorphism of the human corpus collosum. It not only looked at the dimorphism among a large Stanford based MRI baseline data set, but also looked at hundreds of people from around the world, who were gay, lesbian and transgendered to determine if preference and/or gender identity could be fully or partially explained by brain morphology (i.e. brain sexing.) The project was not affiliated with any school or industrial organization. It was a fascinating project.
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