In my view, MOOCs are really revolutionizing education because they provide options for smart willing people that are locationally or financially disadvantaged to learn from top tier professors/institutions.
Absolutely. Every time the cost of tertiary education comes up on HN (and elsewhere online) a lot of people reccommend doing the first year or two at a community college and then going to a good state college as a transfer.
The problem with that is not everyone has access to a good community college. If your local CCs focus on remedial education for people who are barely ready for 10th grade, let alone college, then the quality of instruction, broadness of course catalog, and peer group will reflect that.
I think one possible future for education in CS might be for people to combine electives, pre-requisites, and any remedial classes at a CC with low-level in-major classes from an MOOC.
That would reserve the expensive on-campus years of a degree for a combination of seminars, small tutorial sessions, and project work.
The most recent article on the list also notes, correctly, that at many less prestigious universities students already spend most of their time in large lectures with little faculty contact. It's not really honest to say that an MOOC can't replace contact with highly qualified faculty when most students in the American system are not getting that contact anyway.
Finally, that same article also covers the fate of people who are culturally rather than financially disadvantaged. Students who don't know how to learn, how to schedule their own time, or how to choose courses. I'm torn on this, on the one hand you could say that this is the fault of poor secondary education and that universities shouldn't have to deal with it at all. The former is certainly true but I think it's a bit of a cop-out for tertiary education to collectively shrug their shoulders and write those students off as not college-ready.
I do think that colleges play a factor in filtering for their students a general idea of what they should know and be able to do before they get a degree. I don't see any reason why there won't be a time in the future when someone puts together a course sequence online that leads to a full degree.
This is right. The best thing MOOCs have going for them are their prices. And it gets more compelling every year as traditional universities continue to price more and more students out of the market.
A lot of people use MOOCs at work. Even though some companies offer tuition reimbursement, it's usually partial and very few companies allot working time for coursework, and most working professionals are more time-poor than cash-poor. With MOOCs, people can usually sneak away 1-2+ hours per day on education and no one needs to know.
The problem with that is not everyone has access to a good community college. If your local CCs focus on remedial education for people who are barely ready for 10th grade, let alone college, then the quality of instruction, broadness of course catalog, and peer group will reflect that.
I think one possible future for education in CS might be for people to combine electives, pre-requisites, and any remedial classes at a CC with low-level in-major classes from an MOOC. That would reserve the expensive on-campus years of a degree for a combination of seminars, small tutorial sessions, and project work.
The most recent article on the list also notes, correctly, that at many less prestigious universities students already spend most of their time in large lectures with little faculty contact. It's not really honest to say that an MOOC can't replace contact with highly qualified faculty when most students in the American system are not getting that contact anyway.
Finally, that same article also covers the fate of people who are culturally rather than financially disadvantaged. Students who don't know how to learn, how to schedule their own time, or how to choose courses. I'm torn on this, on the one hand you could say that this is the fault of poor secondary education and that universities shouldn't have to deal with it at all. The former is certainly true but I think it's a bit of a cop-out for tertiary education to collectively shrug their shoulders and write those students off as not college-ready.
I do think that colleges play a factor in filtering for their students a general idea of what they should know and be able to do before they get a degree. I don't see any reason why there won't be a time in the future when someone puts together a course sequence online that leads to a full degree.