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[quote]
For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the social injustice of college tuition, heres a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.</p>
<p>The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.
<p>Is this news? I mean they’ve been offering access to their online lectures for about 6 or 7 years, no? Or is the news the certificate? </p>
<p>The sad thing is, people (employers, students) seem to care more about ‘the piece of paper’ than actual education and knowledge acquired. So it will all boil down to whether that little ‘official certificate of completion’ has any recognized value in the real world.</p>
<p>It is an interesting step forward. While the lectures have been available online for a long time, just viewing them without the enforced discipline of doing the work that the students in the live class do is somewhat meaningless. I wonder in what kind of form this “mastery” needs to be displayed? If it is exams, someone has to be paid to grade them. I wonder what the financial model to support this initiative will be?</p>
How would you measure how much actual knowledge someone has? If “the piece of paper” comes from an accredited school employers use that as a measure that the knowledge was acquired.</p>
<p>Erin’s dad…as I see it, having taught at a range of universities, from the very top to a strong public… kids are getting the same education in my field at these schools. we faculty use the same textbooks, cases, exams…all that differs is the name on the diploma, yet parents will pay huge extra sums for that. </p>
<p>Or look at kids on CC or elsewhere on the Internet…so many vying for a particular GPA, looking for easy courses, carrying about place where GPA is easiest…add in hand holding, grade inflation, ridiculously easy course (bowling 101?), the fact that the average student now studies very little but the GPA average is 3.25…,</p>
<p>So very much evidence there is too much preoccupation with paper than actual knowledge acquisition in higher education.</p>
<p>There are schools that will give transfer credit to those who earn a certificate for a particular course, I would imagine: Goddard, Union Institute, Lesley Adult Learners, and Charter Oak State, for starters. It would be interesting to ask if more traditional programs would consider these completed online classes for credit at all, for transfers or new students or even current students who set up an agreement with their schools.</p>
<p>Stanford had online courses exactly like this this fall and are developing more. I understand they went well, but have not read any follow up on them lately.</p>
<p>There is a gap in the minds of some between a diploma from a top school and from a state school. But IMO, to most people that gap is tiny compared to the huge gap between having a diploma (an accredited one) vs. no diploma. </p>
<p>The open question for this MIT program will be how this “certificate” is viewed. If it turns out to carry the same weight as a real diploma (from MIT or elsewhere), then this will be quite a popular and successful program.</p>
<p>I am not of the mindset that the MIT certificate will be “better than” any other degree. It is another much needed opportunity. I see this as an opportunity for 3 main reasons. </p>
<ol>
<li>HS students that need/want advanced classes that are not available in thier area.</li>
<li>Additional opportunities for college level students that do not have particular courses available at their university, or to take in the summer instead of enrolling in a home college.</li>
<li>CEU’s that are required for many professions that can be very expensive, and not always useful based on professional needs. </li>
</ol>
<p>I am happy to see these schools doing this.</p>
<p>Stanford is launching a bunch of classes in the Jan/Feb timeframe: Cryptography (crypto-class.org), Natural Language Processing (nlp-class.org), Anatomy (anatomy-class.org), etc… The full list is at the bottom of each of these websites. </p>
<p>Two classes, model thinking and Software as a Service are taught by Michigan and Berkeley professors, respectively.</p>
<p>I took one of the Stanford classes this fall, the Artificial Intelligence class. It was hugely popular. I loved it, and signed up for three more classes starting in January.</p>
<p>It does appear that the certificates are issued on a course basis (although MIT uses the terms “course” and “subject” a bit differently from other schools), rather than a set of specified courses or subjects that a diploma typically indicates completion of.</p>