| > MOOCs + projects + self-directed learning, even if you are very good, offers you little in terms of career opportunities. That's why they have not been apparently "transformative". I remember on one of the first of these courses (AI in Berkley?), people were incensed that they would not get an official degree/certificate from the university. Some were really mad, as if they had been defrauded or something. Your point about certification is accurate, but I want to add another nuance. Even if you manage to get a degree from a "good"/prestigious place, if you are "the wrong kind of person" that will only be held against you. It's like succeeding at that is a violation of natural law and you need to be punished for the violation. It's almost religious and deeply guttural. Of course that in places like the states, those people usually don't even get the change to graduate from those places since some excuse will be concocted during the application process. MOOCs suffer from the online version of that. However in places where admission is "blind" and the cost free or low this is very common. |
Indian IITs (and other double-I institutions or similar) offer official certificates after MOOCs [0] and they are valued in regular colleges, and engineering students are often mandated to complete a MOOC or two every semester. The difference is that the final test is a proctored, on-site exam. The tests are held in major cities across India, and also outside India in places like UAE, for example.
Most MOOCs in the NPTEL platforms are boring traditional lectures, but some are extraordinarily good and at par with what Andrew Ng, Alfredo Canziani, Karpathy, or Jeremy Howard can offer. For example: Discrete Mathematics from IIT-R [1].
[0]: https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/
[1]: https://nptel.ac.in/courses/106106183