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Big MOOC On Campus: Georgia Tech's $6,600 MS In CS
theodp writes "Next January, writes the NYT's Tamar Lewin, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to partner with Udacity and AT&T to offer a master's degree in CS through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost. Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science in Computer Science can be had for $6,600 — far less than the $45,000 on-campus price. The courses will be online and free for those not seeking a degree; those in the degree program will take proctored exams and have access to tutoring, online office hours and other support. AT&T, which ponied up a $2 million donation, will use the program to train employees and find potential hires. Initial enrollment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates. Zvi Galil, the dean of the university's College of Computing, expects that the program could attract up to 10,000 students annually, many from outside the U.S. 'Online, there's no visa problem,' he said."
Being a decent coder has little to do with CS. It's a very valuable skill in its own right, but quite different.
Somebody please *please* hear this message before it's too late. Too many bright foreign students who get into top notch schools are denied visas. I've seen this happen first hand multiple times at a good school. Politicians can debate visa allocation as much as they want in general. But when MIT (or some other top notch school) accepts someone can you please just give the kid a visa? Oh, and not kick him out when he graduates? Because if not, then your protectionist strategy creates a market for programs such as this one, which is a hundred times worse than the scenario you are trying to prevent.
When you get a masters' degree, you spend a year or more committing yourself 24 hours a day to learning something, and you're in a community of people who are engaged in the same commitment to learning something. Your eating, sleeping, and social life revolves around an intellectual community. You learn a lot through serendipity. A chance meeting in the hall can give you a direction for your career.
When you take a MOOC, you're not giving it the same commitment and you're not among the same community. That's especially true if you take it free.
You could just read the same textbooks that masters' degree students read. But you'd be missing something.
I could read transcripts of the Feynmann lectures. But that wouldn't be the same as going to school and taking lectures with Feynmann.
I get that it's cool to hate the educational establishment and all, but if you're choosing between 20 freshly minted CS master degree holders and 20 hardcore coders, you're not qualified to be hiring anybody. Most likely a mixing of people with education and work experience is going to yield optimal results, not choosing to hire only people with one sort of experience. Especially, if you're wanting to create a product that hasn't been done to death.
There's a shitload of crap code out there written by "hardcore coders", none of which is an example to be emulated. Sure, the masters degree holders might not have experience, but they also don't have much experience writing crappy code. Which, from the comments I see around here from "professional programmers", could very easily justify not hiring people that have decades of wrong experience to retrain.