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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."
I've been there and done that. The start-up almost surely won't last forever. Even if it does, you won't want to work 55 hours a week while your baby is waking you up at 3AM. At some point, you'll probably want a nice 8-5 with good insurance and time off. When that time comes, you need letters behind your name.
I had all of the other credentials. I have seventeen years of full professional experience. I'm an Apache contributor. At one interview, the interviewer asked me if I had experience with Debian, as that was their preferred distro. I asked if he'd seen that morning's Debian security update. He seen it and applied the update. My name was on that Debian alert, I discovered the security issue all Debian users were alerted to that morning. I didn't get the job. Put letters at the end of your name while you can.
Ok, so data points - at 900k that was a decade ago - say ~'03? (I think @ 300k I joined somewhere in '99?) Maybe we can create a chart, I think it would be interesting... (and I'm sure the /. mods have all that info but am wondering if they would find it as interesting to divulge...)
There are a lot of junk online courses out there. A lot of them are simply videos of lectures, repurposed as "online courses". Stanford does a lot of that. Their original machine learning class was like that, and it is painful. Especially since the instructor's blackboard writing (yes, it's video of a real chalk blackboard) is messy. This in a field which has its own unique (and not very good) notation.
Khan Academy has courses which consist of a color etch-a-sketch display of the instructor's writing plus a voice-over. I viewed the lectures for forces and torques recently. The instructor had clockwise and counterclockwise reversed, used a multiply symbol where he needed an add, and went from talking about a body in free space to one pinned at a pivot point without mentioning that he'd shifted. Not only is the production value very low, nobody is reviewing that stuff, or even proofreading it.
MIT's course on rotating electrical machinery is basically the class notes from a course. There are a few drawings, then endless math derivations. You don't get the labs online.
I've seen some good online courses, but most of this stuff is a low-budget conversion of old lecture and notes.