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long term impact of MOOCs
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| AnotherWay83 |
what do you think of all the new MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) out there, like coursera, udacity, edX, etc? how do you guys think this will transform global higher education?
i think someday in the future all learning might be done online, with the college campus a thing of the past. i think that would be a loss, tho - no more hedonic dorms crammed with horny co-eds...huge loss for mankind, IMHO.
but on the other hand poor ppl get a great education no matter where they are, so that's pretty awesome.
another possible outcome: professors could end up becoming the modern day rockstars. teaching classes of tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of students worldwide. |
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| Lagrangian |
I love them, I just took Stanford's 'Machine Learning' and 'Cryptography' from Coursera. ML was 'girly', and Crypto was awesome.
I scored on Cryptography 96._ _ _ _ _ _ % (I'll scan the certificate to provide further proof of its validity, to like the seventh decimal place...very p-awesome.)
probably scored higher on ML cus it was all very easy Octave stuff.
The courses are taken right out of the standard four year curricula practiced in the United States.
I'm taking Udacity's 'Parallel Computing' in CUDA and Python, and I'm keen on developing 'something' using PI in the next couple of years or so... |
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| Looney4Clooney |
i think the change is content to context.
You can learn all the content for anything online. Professors are going to realize they are no longer sources of content but just another context of information.
It has been a while since universities have been pretty much considered institutions of vetting by those that understand how they work. An undergrad is a 4 year introduction to things you might want to study further. |
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| Lagrangian |
What happens in the body when a person smokes a cigarette? After several weeks of smoking? When a person takes antidepressant or antipsychotic medication? A drug for pain or migraine? A recreational drug? Neuroscientists are beginning to understand these processes. You’ll learn how drugs enter the brain, how they act on receptors and ion channels, and how “molecular relay races” lead to changes in nerve cells and neural circuits that far outlast the drugs themselves. “Drugs and the Brain” also describes how scientists are gathering the knowledge required for the next steps in preventing or alleviating Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and drug abuse.
https://www.coursera.org/course/drugsandbrain |
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| r5a |
pretty sure you're referring to the scam-like ads on TV I see for "universities" or "colleges" that were meant for people too retarded to handle community college or smart enough to enrol into a proper uni
any person at the other side of the table is going to recognize a reputable (not to mention that won't ever really lose its credibility) university vs some bag course on tv.
ironically after posting this i know a ceo whose only background is going to one of those bag schools. |
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| Lagrangian |
MOOC are free.
Ads on tv? Not Stanford, Princeton, Michingan, Columbia, etc.
Your certificate of completion is credited by the professor's department in that specific institution. They have the school stamp on the PDF and the syllabus goes hand in hand with the four year undergraduate curriculum. In this case, for example, computer science. The ML course is a requirement to graduate from Stanford with a Comp Sci or Comp Eng degree.
What you've mentioned are for profit schools.
Community College sucks. |
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| Alex |
| quote: | | I in ability like your crop on the issue. I now admission a afire assimilation on what this accumulated is all about. Admission you so much. |
- Gaming section bot |
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| Lagrangian |
The Coursera courses can be tougher than their 'real-life' adjoints, the on-line classes are on average 10 weeks long; their counterparts are a semester long, and nests the student in a systematic controlled environment (college).
The problem is, some students don't fit in or cannot afford higher Ed. This is not indicative of their IQ, they are anomalies. The purpose of Coursera is in someways to destroy the current education system; a bit more like Germany's or Sweden, yet the concept is novel...and humble.
An employer with knowledge in their fields will absolutely accept the certificate as proof of the worker's innate talents (In addition to other well recorded merits). |
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| Lagrangian |
What anchors everyone''s opinion on University/College is the touchy feely side of College...'it's who you know', 'network', 'frat/sor', and because our potential is finite, academic merit is not alwys synonymous with meeting society's standards.
Now that is a paradox! |
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| AnotherWay83 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lagrangian
Your certificate of completion is credited by the professor's department in that specific institution. |
they don't do this for every course tho. you have to check the course web page to see if you'll get any sort of documentation/proof that you completed the course. |
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