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The $100 Masters Degree From Udacity
mikejuk writes "In an interview with Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun, it was revealed that he hopes to offer a Masters degree for only $100, and is close to offering a full computer science degree. 'There are unfortunately some rough edges between our fundamental class CS101 and the next class up, when this is done I believe we can get an entire computer science education completely online and free and I think this is the first time this has happened in the history of humanity.' The latest course from Udacity is on statistics, and he is hoping to top the 160,000 sign up for his first online class on AI. It is also hoped to be the first class where students can visit a testing center to get their achievments formally certified."
Master of first dupe!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This here is the future of education. Eventually we'll formalize this further by enabling a quick download directly to our brains that brings everyone up to speed fast regarding the facts of science, discipline, critical thinking, analysis.
What education will never be able to teach us is morality. Bertrand Russel, the great philosopher once was asked what he would offer the future generations.
Here is what he had to say about it. He said two things, one intellectual and one moral; when you study any matter, ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out; the moral thing is love is wise, hatred is foolish.
With education like the $100 masters degree, we have the first part down fine. The rest of our development needs to focus on the second.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I am on the fence with this.
The only way you can get $100 for a degree in education is to mass produce it. Pre-Recorded Lectures, Online articles, Mutable choice tests, all done online. Now granted some colleges nearly teach like that, a professor with a well practiced rehearsed lectures, then you do you multiple choice tests, then you got your class credit...
While you may learn, and can get accreditation. It creates a culture of mediocre education. This takes out some of the human elements that are both good and bad. If you are able being able to be noticed by a professor and working with them on his research, having your work properly critiqued.
When I went to college for Computer Science, I came in already knowing how to program, and I was working programming, but I wanted to learn more then just the core requirements, I wanted to learn the nuances. While some students in my class who passed they got the basics, I was able to use education and the work directly with my professors to hone my skills and make me better. I know I used up more then $100 expense on my education.
However I think a hybrid approach would be a good match. There are some classes, that I didn't like spending thousands of dollars on, just because I had to take them, I would much rather pay a lower rate, and take the mediocre online class to get the credit, and save some money. But save the classes I am actually interested in with live people and professors.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's really really unfortunate that you used MBA as an example.
It isn't news that someone "hopes" to do something, and the gap between offering a complete Computer Science Masters Degree and working out the "rough edges between our fundamental class CS101 and the next class up" state they are in now is quite immense.
Decoded: They are having a problem coming up with a second semester CS class.
This works out to about $10/class I figure, maybe less - I fully suspect the degree they will offer is worth every penny, but not a penny more - and you won't "fool" anyone with this Masters degree, this is on the same level as the mail-order priest ordinations that were once offered in the back of magazines like Rolling Stone.
Ken
Especially since here, cheating and getting away with it earns bonus credit!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Is it really necessary to explain that this is the first time anyone has offered a CS degree online in the history of humanity?
We're talking about a course about computing offered entirely over the internet. Surely if it hasn't been done recently we can be pretty sure that the Ancient Greeks didn't beat us to it?
In reality, we have given colleges simply too much power by indoctrinating everyone about the wonders of education and always equating it as going to college. If you think about it, training people has shifted from the burden of a company to the burden and cost of the individual for, imo, no greater gain. Wages and the like have been stagnant or worse since the 1970s. But it's not all roses for the company either, often they have to train the workers anyway after college.
So much of school is just theory when most people simply learn by doing. It's like trying to learning to cook by reading a book and then doing a dish or two at the end of every semester. Just not going to work if you want to be a line cook at a good restaurant.
- how ya gonna stop cheating? With an entirely remote degree course you can't. Therefore, to an employer, it's not worth much.
As opposed to IRL courses? People cheat their way through "valuable" degree programs all the time, and employers do not really care. Those employers who are really concerned with whether their students actually know what their degree asserts they should know give job candidates tests.
Yeah, sure, whatever, start the snark about how degrees aren't worth anything anyway, I disagree
Considering the number of people I have met with a BS in CS who cannot even explain the P vs. NP problem, I think that at least a large number of degrees in CS are poor certifications of knowledge.
Palm trees and 8
An education is more than that. It's sitting through hours of lectures where students ask questions and topics are discussed at length, not only with the professor but with other students outside of class. It's submitting work and having it critiqued by an expert. It's discussing why your answers were wrong or incomplete. It's discussing why you have answers your professor never thought of but are still correct or more correct than what he was expecting. It's deciding what out-of-major classes are of interest to you or would further your education in your chosen field. It's telling your not-in-major friends about insights you learned from your classes that are applicable to everybody and listening to the same thing from them. Most of these things simply can't be automated and many of them can't be done as well on line. None of them can be done for $100 a degree.
None of that can be force-fed to you one-way down a wire. Education is interactive.
Real education can be had over the internet, but it's NOT the same and not as valuable as learning in-person, and it will never be cheap (unless somebody else is paying for it) and it will always take as long or nearly as long as the traditional route. It just takes that long to have that experience and absorb and digest that much information.
Sure but if it's all through the computer, how do you know they didn't just get someone else to do it for them, for another hundred bucks?
(yes, I now realise this is not what is proposed in TFA)
I've been a software engineer for 12 years now, and many things I learned for my CD degree at university have benefited my work immensely.
Not that though.
One does not simply get a Master's degree for $100.
And here you highlight the biggest problem with the system. There is absolutely no reason why an education needs to break the bank, or why we can't develop an online method of doing it.
But a formal education isn't really about teaching you things, its about convincing an employer to hire you. You can know more about a subject than anyone else on the planet, but unless the employer sees paperwork to back it up, you won't even get an interview.
How do they plan to convince employers that this isn't just another of those many mail order degree scams?
Computer Science? Snooze. I already do that. I want an online degree program in physics, or geology, or something. I want to study the interesting stuff that I didn't do in school because I sold out and went the path that would make me shitloads of money instead of shitloads on happiness and intellectual fulfillment.
I personally see no value in this kind of master's degree if there is no need to write a thesis/dissertation.
The value for me of a course-based M.S. (dropout from a PhD program) was $6000 per year starting salary. That's a pretty decent bump that I likely kept with me my whole career, as raises tend to be percentage based. So after 11 years it may have been worth at least $66k.
Oh, and also I learned a bunch of stuff in those courses I hadn't yet learned as an undergrad. To my recollection, none of the specific things has been relevant to my job, but it is sometimes hard to tell.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
Then try getting a job without an education.
If it's not accredited. You might as well buy a master degree from on of the other fake uni's online. They sell Masters degrees for less than $100.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For one of my graduate degrees, about half of the classes were on-line (public health, and the on-line classes were largely because all of us were scattered throughout the world working in various relevant capacities). The other half were more or less seminar style classes focusing on discussion of various topics relating to our more narrow focus within public health.
The on-line classes were not bad, and were certainly challenging, especially when we had to collaborate in teams, but there was an interpersonal dimension that wass lacking. I couldn't learn as much from my classmates as I would have in a classroom environment because we didn't have all of those incidental discussions that come about from running into each other outside of class. My in-person classes gave me a richer appreciation of the field and different elements of it, different perspectives on it, because there was so much conversation that wasn't just about coursework and didn't take any real effort to have.
Sme of the best ideas I had - ideas which I have integrated into my current work in the field - came about because I ran into one of my classmates in the university cafeteria and we started taking about how absolutely disgusting some of the food presentation areas must be, given several thousand people per day coming throu there and pawing everything, picking it up and putting it back if they don't want it. That kind of interaction wouldn't have happened online because it actually takes effort to communicate online, you don't randomly bump into each other, and often times there's such a delay between missives that only the essentials are put into it.
Online courses are great for pure data dumps, but I think they are seriously lacking when it comes to inspiring real collaboration.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This is incorrect. A master's degree will, at best, qualify you to lecture basic classes at your local community college. Teaching at a university requires a PhD, almost without exception.